Meck Sheriff’s Immigration Enforcement Program On The Chopping Block
A decision by the Obama Administration to eliminate funding for programs that train and authorize local law enforcement officers to act as immigration agents could jeopardize the status of the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office 287(g) program.
Under the program, which Mecklenburg has had in place since 2006, the federal Immigration Customs Enforcement agency provides local law officers with the training and authorization to identify, process and detain illegal immigrant offenders who are encountered during regular law-enforcement activity. If inmates are illegal immigrants, after they have served time for the local offense they committed, they are turned over to ICE for deportation.
“We’re not out looking for anybody, but if you commit a crime in Mecklenburg County we’re going to know who you are when you come into our jail,” said Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Julia Rush
How much longer the Sheriff’s Office will have that ability, however, is uncertain. As part of the Obama Administration’s proposed budget, the Department of Homeland Security won’t authorize new contracts with local law enforcement agencies to cover 287(g) officers and will begin terminating existing contracts set to expire. Mecklenburg’s contract, Rush said, is up for renewal in October.
While the Sheriff’s Office hasn’t received confirmation that its program would be shuttered, officials are aware of the DHS budget plan and are preparing for the possibility of a 287(g) shutdown.
Losing the immigration enforcement program, Rush said, “would be a detriment to the community.”
Since the program’s launch in 2006, the Sheriff’s Office has used it to identify 18,572 individuals not born in the US or in the country illegally. Of that number, 11,494 were placed in removal proceedings. Nationwide 287(g) programs have helped local law enforcement authorities identify nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants in their custody.
Mecklenburg Commissioners Vice Chairman Jim Pendergraph was sheriff when the county implemented its 287(g) program, one of the first of its kind in the nation and which grew to be a model for others implemented across the country.
“Everyone is concerned and rightfully so,” Pendergraph said of the looming shutdown of the program. “This has been a highly successful and effective initiative since its implementation, but the Obama Administration doesn’t like any kind of effective immigration enforcement.”
Pendergraph, who is running for the 9th Congressional District seat being vacated by Republican Sue Myrick, spent a stint with ICE in 2007 as the agency’s executive director of state and local operations, where he helped grow the 287(g) program to include 80 sheriff’s offices across the country. The program, he says, became a victim of its own success.
“Democrats and liberals didn’t like the results the program was producing and wanted to gut its funding,” Pendergraph said. He balked at that strategy and left his federal post after a year at the helm.
“The money was available to continue funding at appropriate levels, and to tell local law enforcement otherwise was plain wrong,” Pendergraph said. “I wasn’t willing to go along with that.”
The DHS budget proposal claims to save $17 million by eliminating 287(g) programs, part of a push to phase out the initiative in favor of a nationwide expansion of the Secure Communities program, which administration officials say is more cost efficient but critics contend isn’t nearly as operationally effective.
Secure Communities can be used to identify illegal immigrants, but it only flags fingerprint matches for those who are already in the federal immigration database or who have had previous contact with ICE. Follow-up work on those cases is handled by ICE agents, not local law enforcement. Critics of the program contend scores of illegal immigrants could continue to game the system if local law enforcement authorities are required to rely solely on the Secure Communities database and aren’t permitted to ask questions and perform interviews allowed under the 287(g) program.
The Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office currently has a Secure Communities program, but Rush said it doesn’t get a lot of use.
“The 287(g) program gives us a much better picture of who is entering our jail than the Secure Communities program,” Rush said.
Congressional committees are currently ramping up the process of holding hearings on the Obama Administration’s budget proposal, and over the next few months will decide which portions and programs – including 287(g) – to adopt or reject through the passage of appropriations bills.
“We’re keeping an eye on the process,” Rush said, “and making preparations to deal with whatever outcome it produces.”
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