By Bruce Finley
The Denver Post
DENVER — Federal officials will deploy a new system in Colorado designed to accelerate the deportation of illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
Colorado police chiefs and sheriffs on Tuesday welcomed the system, which will give them near-instant access to federal immigration records. But pro-immigrant advocates warned that the system could be exploited to harass.
The system gives local arresting officers rapid access, via fingerprints, to federal records as detailed as remarks an immigrant might have made to a visa officer at an embassy abroad.
This “accelerates the whole removal process. Our goal is to remove individuals as quickly as possible without sacrificing any of the due process that is afforded to them,” said David Venturella, director of the “secure communities” initiative of the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Our old model was to catch people while they were incarcerated or coming out of prisons. (Now) we will catch them at the earliest point in the process so we can save resources - not only law enforcement resources but judge time.”
Venturella revealed the timing for deploying the system in an interview before a closed meeting Tuesday with about 40 sheriffs, police chiefs, state Attorney General John Suthers, prosecutors and staffers for Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter. Colorado is one of just a handful of states that will get the system next month.
Deportations of immigrants - criminal and noncriminal - already have doubled since 2005. While authorities say they are targeting immigrants convicted of crimes, the latest federal data show the share of deportees with criminal convictions has decreased.
The new system reflects congressional efforts to enlist local police as helpers. Not everyone is a fan.
“The problem is that if everybody the police encounter gets finger-
printed, then immigrants are going to avoid the police - and we have all the problems that come with that,” said Crystal Williams, a program director for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
The new system will be useful for targeting criminals, but local police also will have the ability to arrest immigrants “selectively because of how they look,” said Doris Meissner, former chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, now an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute think tank.
“The most important thing with local law enforcement where immigration is concerned is that they are arresting people on suspicion of having committed a crime and then finding out who the person is, rather than the other way around,” Meissner said.
Federal agents initially will focus solely on deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes, Venturella said. Homeland Security calculates that 350,000 to 400,000 immigrants a year are convicted of crimes and that 10,000 of those are violent felonies.
Local police are encouraged to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement for help deporting those “level 1" criminals first. Plans call for an eventual expansion to target immigrants convicted of lesser crimes, including auto theft and burglary.
And federal authorities are promising to make available 750 new ICE agents nationwide, and bedspace in detention centers, to support an expected surge in deportation activity.
Police around Colorado increasingly notify federal agents when they detect illegal immigrants. Some find ICE agents overwhelmed and unresponsive.
The promised increase in ICE manpower would be helpful, said Randy Ford, town marshal of Green Mountain Falls, a town on the northwestern edge of Colorado Springs.
But the new identity-checking capability for arresting officers won’t help police patrolling streets, Ford said. “We can’t detain (immigrants) long enough to determine if they are illegal or not,” he said.
“Every little bit helps. But it still doesn’t come back and fix the basic problem we are having with contact with people on the street. I’m all for being able to further investigate them once they are transported to the jail. But it doesn’t fix the problem. We’ve got no teeth.”
Copyright 2009 Denver Post