So when will the apparatus be turned on you, American?
"US extends immigrant database to police; Anticrime alliance drawing praise and opposition" by Maria Sacchetti/Boston Globe December 12, 2007
Federal immigration agents are forging new alliances with local law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts in an effort to crack down on hard-core criminals, spurring anxiety and applause within immigrant communities.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has been taking its message on the road from Concord to Cape Cod, offering so-called ICE 101 presentations to the state's district attorneys, probation officers, and, most recently, large police departments, including those in Lowell and Lynn.
Some departments have eagerly signed on. In recent months, federal agents have trained select Framingham police, Barnstable County sheriffs, and state correction officers to detect and detain illegal immigrants for possible deportation. And, with immigration officials' encouragement, police and other agencies across the state are making thousands of calls to a federal clearinghouse in Vermont to check the status and identity of immigrants.
In some cases, the alliance is initiated by the municipalities. In other instances, it involves encouragement from the immigration agency to take advantage of its expertise. In almost all cases, the fledgling partnerships have stirred controversy about their impact on Massachusetts' rapidly growing immigrant populations at a time when illegal immigration is a key issue in the presidential campaign.
Bruce Foucart, the special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's office of investigations in Boston, which covers New England:
"It's not like we're forcing anything on them. If we can establish a rapport with the police, district attorneys, and the communities, it's only going to benefit public safety as a whole. We've established some pretty good relationships, officer to officer, agent to agent."
Immigration authorities say the partnerships are helping cities and towns pluck criminals from their streets, and some local immigrant advocates agree. But statewide immigration advocates fear the push is opening a new front in immigration enforcement and deterring immigrants from reporting crimes.
On a recent night, their differing views played out in a first-floor auditorium in the Framingham Police Department, as part of a weekly seminar on a variety of issues, including the town's gang problem. Police dimmed the lights and flashed photographs on a movie screen of tattooed gang members. Police said the suspects may be involved in everything from home invasions to bloody brawls at the local McDonald's, and called the federal database a tool that can help them catch criminals.
Several advocates for immigrants whistled and applauded the department's efforts to work with the federal agency and detain the suspects.
Carlos A. F. Da Silva, a community liaison:
"We are good people. It's very important to us to get these thugs out of the streets. They've been robbing people. We need to stop that."
But the pro-illegals, lefty-globalist crowd tells us that's NOT TRUE, NOT TRUE!!!
But other community leaders shook their heads, saying the plan to work with immigration authorities made them uneasy. They are concerned that immigrants whose only violation is being in the United States illegally, a civil offense, will be swept up in the effort.
Fausto da Rocha, executive director of the Brazilian Immigrant Center, who said police loosely define gangs as two or more people conspiring to commit crime:
"I just feel the Police Department puts our community in threat. They've trained two officers to go against our people."
WAKE UP, America, WILL YA?
Sergeant Richard Pomales, one of the Framingham's two officers trained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the criticism is frustrating when police are trying to reduce crime and protect all residents.
Pomales asked the attendees:
"Are you telling us to look the other way? You are their first victims."
Pomales said he is haunted by news reports in August that an illegal immigrant in Newark was arrested in the fatal shootings of three college students. The man had been out on bail for another crime when he could have been held because of his immigration status.
Framingham is the only local police department in Massachusetts that has obtained authority to arrest illegal immigrants under a 1996 law designed to expand the federal agency's reach by deputizing state and local officials to help. Nationally, about 80 law enforcement agencies have applied for the authority. Before he left office as governor, Mitt Romney authorized State Police to enforce federal immigration laws, but Governor Deval Patrick overturned the decision in January, preferring to let corrections officers handle it instead.
Framingham's police chief, Steven Carl, said he asked to join the program because the federal immigration agency's database contains information that is not always available in state government databases, including whether a person overstayed a visa or was caught sneaking into the country.
Carl emphasized that he targets crime, especially gangs, guns, drugs, and document fraud:
"When you're an undocumented immigrant it's very difficult, because we have to find out who you are to get you. You're a ghost."
In recent months, Barnstable County sheriffs and Department of Correction officials have also had Immigration and Customs Enforcement train some of their employees. Now, local and state correction officers can screen inmates and turn them over to federal agents for deportation once their time is served.
Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings:
"I did it because I didn't want people who were committing crimes here and who were illegal to just be released back into the street because people didn't know what to do with them. If they have to finish serving time here, fine, but then send them back to where they came from."
Why not just ship them back right away and save the US taxpayer all the prison costs of housing, etc?
Unless you PROFIT from PRISONS, right?
Framingham, Barnstable County, and the state have formal agreements to work with the federal immigration agency, but that isn't necessary for authorities to collaborate in other ways.
What OTHER WAYS?
Any law enforcement agency statewide can check detained immigrants' identities over the telephone through the Law Enforcement Support Center, which was created in 1996 and launched in Massachusetts two years later. From October 2006 to September, Massachusetts law enforcement officers checked nearly 14,700 immigrants, up from 10,093 during the same period in 2003-04.
As a result of this center alone, federal authorities detained 599 immigrants in Massachusetts last fiscal year, five times as many as in 2005, according to ICE.
Nationally, calls to the center soared from a mere 4,000 in fiscal 1996 to more than 728,000 in fiscal 2007. The center logged its highest number of detainees last year - 20,339 people. The center is open 24 hours, 365 days a year.
Everett police said they have used the center for the past two years to identify people, such as someone who is stopped for a traffic issue but lacks identification.
Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said he opposes the collaboration on concerns that individual officers could target immigrants through racial profiling - and that immigrants will become afraid to work with police.
Noorani supports having local and federal authorities cooperate to deport violent criminals:
"The line is getting very, very blurry between local law enforcement and immigration enforcement, and if it is up to the individual officer of when he or she can or cannot call ICE, the opportunities for abuse and profiling are extreme."
That's what happens when a society DESCENDS INTO TOTALITARIANISM!!!!!
