Local law enforcement's immigration inquiries way up

The immigration reform bill has failed, and a judge has placed a temporary halt on DHS’s tighter Social Security Number no-match rule, but still: Local law enforcement agencies in Kansas and across the nation have dramatically stepped up their checks on the immigration status of suspects this past year, statistics show. The Wichita Eagle reports that records at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Law Enforcement Support Center in Vermont showed a 20 percent increase in the number of inquiries about immigration status coming from Kansas law enforcement officers for the fiscal year ending 30 September. Kansas officers asked for the status on suspects in 3,315 cases, up from 2,759 immigration checks the prior year, ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said. Nationwide this year, the center received 728,243 immigration status inquiries — up 10 percent from the 661,448 it had received a year earlier. Rusnok attributed the increase to the public and law enforcement being more aware of immigration issues. “We work cooperatively with law enforcement organizations on a daily basis,” he said. “We all have a common goal in mind: to help remove criminal aliens from the street and make communities safer.”

The Kansas State Highway Patrol, for example, runs an identification check on everybody its troopers stop. In cases in which suspects do not have identification papers, troopers run a check on their immigration status, Trooper Edna Buttler said. “The response from immigration is slow, and sometimes they don’t respond at all…. Most of the time they won’t even come and get them,” Buttler said. Unless troopers have at least ten illegal immigrants in custody at a stop, she said, ICE agents do not respond because their resources are limited. Rusnok said ICE has to prioritize its operations, and the agency’s biggest priority is going after illegal immigrants who commit crimes.

Kansas is not an exception. A growing number of local law enforcement agencies across the nation have started shouldering more of the burden of federal immigration enforcement by taking advantage of a cross-training program which certifies them to enforce immigration laws. The program is authorized under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Since it was instituted in 2002, some 597 officers in 33 local law enforcement agencies across the nation have received the certification, Rusnok said, and have entered information-sharing agreements with ICE. Most of the local agencies that have already entered such agreements with ICE have been in states with large immigrant populations — among them California, Arizona, North Carolina, and Colorado.