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Immigration Enforcement Abuses
From a Feb. 5th New York Times editorial:
“It has come to this: In Phoenix on Wednesday, more than 200 men in shackles and prison stripes were marched under armed guard past a gantlet of TV cameras to a tent prison encircled by an electric fence. They were inmates being sent to await deportation in a new immigrant detention camp minutes from the center of America’s fifth-largest city . . .
The immigration enforcement regime left by the Bush Administration is out of control. It is up to President Obama and the new secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, to rein it in and clean it up. This applies not just to off-the-rails deputies like Sheriff Arpaio, but to the federal enforcement agencies themselves.”
Appleseed could not agree more with the Times. As documented in our report “Forcing Our Blues into Gray Areas,” legal and political efforts to involve local police in federal immigration enforcement can only produce cartoonish, “out of control” spectacles like Sheriff Arpaio’s chain gangs. Appleseed agrees that President Obama should call a moratorium on agreements that empower officials to degrade immigrants and flout an orderly legal process. We likewise agree that Janet Napolitano should undertake a thoroughgoing review and reform of the misguided 287g program.
Asking state and local law officers to don a second hat as immigration enforcers is poor public policy. Not only does this system warp and subvert responsible enforcement techniques, it diverts focus from the true objective of local police: to defend its community from actual criminal threats.
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