Deporting Illegals
Alienating the Immigrant Community
By Daniel Muniz

One valid concern many local law enforcement agencies have with turning in illegal aliens to federal authorities is that they will alienate a large portion of an immigrant community. So how should police departments balance the need of cooperation from a particular community with our immigration laws?

The brutal reality is that there is no balancing act.

That’s because the truth of the matter is that there is absolutely no ambiguity with what an “illegal alien” is because he or she is already breaking the law by being here in this country. So that means if someone ought to be deported because of violating our federal laws, then that fate is an inescapable outcome. There should absolutely be no misinterpretation of what will happen to any illegal immigrant who is arrested.

The real problem is that most local law enforcement agencies across the country have either been ignoring the laws or worse, they have been directed by their municipalities not to enforce them. For political reasons, some municipalities forbid their police departments from having anything to do with enforcing immigration laws. And then other local agencies were a bit more pragmatic in their refusals because their police officers have never been properly trained or funded to handle what is really supposed to be a federal issue.

However, training is available to all police departments at any level.

Section "287g" of a 1996 federal immigration law allows the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide a five week training course that is available to all municipal, county, and state law enforcement officers. After the training is completed, the officers are then “certified” as deputized immigration agents.

Unfortunately, only a miniscule number of police departments in this nation have taken up ICE’s offer. That is slowly changing as local and state officials realized that Congress is never going to solve our illegal immigration problem. As a result, more law enforcement agencies are sending their officers to this training.

But in all truthfulness, it is purely a political decision to why a police department anywhere does not have their officers “certified” as deputized immigration agents because it can certainly be done.

However, there is still the thorny issue of alienating an immigrant community.

One example is that of Danny Sigui. Siqui is an illegal alien from Guatemala living in Rhode Island who witnessed a murder. He provided police with the information they needed to make an arrest and he eventually became a star witness for the prosecution during the subsequent trial that eventually convicted the murderer.

However, prosecutors contacted federal authorities and informed them about Siqui’s illegal immigration status, which is what they were required to do by law. So two days after the trial was over, he was arrested and soon deported. Right before he was sent back to his native Guatemala, Siqui told the press that he regretted ever doing this “good deed” even though it helped put a violent thug behind bars.

That is a very genuine fear that law enforcement has if so many illegal aliens get rounded up. The cops need information and witnesses to crimes but they won’t get it if an immigrant community feels that they will be arrested and deported.

Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of permissiveness that has created much bigger problems in our nation.

By allowing illegal immigrants to flout our laws, unintended consequences were the result.

For example, too many local law enforcement agencies and local courts have given illegal aliens perverse privileges in that the crimes they commit, their charges are routinely dismissed solely because of their immigration status. It is outrageous that a citizen has to go to jail but an illegal immigrant is then let off the hook for the same offense and he or she is not even deported.

The worst message to send to criminals is not to punish them because that emboldens them to continue their crime sprees. Sadly, lots of communities have paid a heavy price when district attorneys refused to prosecute an illegal alien which encourages the desire to commit even more serious crimes.

However, the real issue is that any and every illegal alien is already breaking the law.

If all local cops were deputized as immigration agents and their departments cooperated more fully with ICE, then there wouldn’t be a problem with alienating an immigrant community because it would be filled with people who are lawfully allowed to be in this country. So in other words, this problem wouldn’t exist if law enforcement from the top all the way down to the bottom did their job properly.

The bottom line is that people who are here in this country illegally need to feel unwelcome and they should always harbor the fear that they will be arrested. That is just the price people should pay for breaking the law. And that is something that an immigrant community should already know. If someone plays by the rules and follows the law, then they ought to enjoy the fruits of citizenship. For everyone else, they need to be deported.

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