The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is seeking to join a federal program that would allow county jail deputies to identify immigration violators and initiate deportation proceedings.
The department recently applied for a so-called 287(g) partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a pact that empowers local officers to do some forms of immigration policing.
Currently, local police lack a reliable system for tracking illegal immigrants housed at the Clark County Detention Center. They simply don't know how many there are.
If the department's application is accepted, eight deputies at the county jail will effectively become deputized immigration officers. They will gain access to a federal database of known immigration violators and be in charge of managing a list of foreign-born inmates.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie said the partnership would be limited to the jail and would not affect a long-standing department policy that prevents local police on the street from asking potential immigration violators about their legal status.
"I want to make it very clear that this won't change my position about police officers at Metro stopping people or going into businesses strictly because what is looked upon as illegal status," Gillespie said in a phone interview. "We'll be dealing with these people after they're arrested and booked into the Clark County Detention Center."
Local police began discussing in earnest whether to create a partnership with ICE after the Review-Journal asked the department this past summer why it lacked one. ICE officials have told the newspaper enforcement efforts are more effective in areas with such agreements.
ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said her agency doesn't comment on pending partnerships with local police. She said it can take up to several months for requests to be processed. Las Vegas police got word last month that its application is being considered.
The department declined to release a copy of the application.
Tom Townsend, a member of Las Vegas-based Americans4America, an anti-immigration group, applauded the step taken by Gillespie's department.
"I'm glad the police department was persuaded to apply for a 287(g) partnership," Townsend said. "It's a good start toward getting this problem under control."
Vicenta Montoya, a local immigration attorney, said a partnership at the jail is good in theory.
"It makes more sense than police officers trying to act as immigration agents out in the field when they encounter someone at a traffic stop," she said. "It will all depend on how the process is implemented."
Gillespie said he consulted with members of the local Hispanic community before submitting the 287(g) application.
Leticia Saucedo, co-director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said even a limited partnership between local and federal police might have a chilling effect on immigrants.
"The biggest concern is that they will view this with fear and not cooperate as fully with Metro on investigations of criminal activity in the immigrant community," she said. "The more limited the agreement is, the more outreach we can do in the immigrant community to allay those fears."
Nationally, 34 local and state police groups have immigration partnerships, including three agencies in Arizona and four in California. Another 80 requests for membership in the federally funded program are pending, Kice said.
Half of all existing 287(g) programs focus on enforcement at jails, where deputies must complete a four-week training program before becoming part of ICE's chain of command.
Other police agencies have more far-reaching agreements with the federal government.
In Alabama, for example, ICE has trained state troopers to check the immigration status of all foreign nationals who apply for driver's licenses.
A local-federal partnership in Las Vegas would give police the ability to quantify the number of illegal immigrants whose cases go through the justice system. Jail officials could put immigration detainers on certain inmates, allowing ICE to step in upon resolution of criminal cases.
This hasn't been happening in any systematic way.
A Review-Journal series on immigration in July highlighted a lack of communication between Las Vegas police and federal authorities. The situation became so bad that jail officials stopped sending ICE a list of foreign-born inmates in 2005.
As a result, only a fraction of illegal immigrant inmates were turned over to ICE. This past year, ICE took 466 illegal immigrants from the detention center, less than 1 percent of the 70,000 inmates who were in the jail at some point during the year.
In most cases, illegal immigrants haven't been identified until they enter state prisons, where the Nevada Department of Corrections estimates more than 12 percent of inmates are foreign-born.
Police departments with 287(g) agreements have been successful in tracking illegal immigrant populations at jails, ICE officials say.
In Mecklenburg County, N.C., where the inmate population is far smaller than Clark County's, jail deputies put 853 illegal immigrants into deportation proceedings in the first nine months after establishing a 287(g) partnership.
"It makes a lot of sense to try to intercept these people at the jail where they're literally a captive audience," Kice said.
Nevada is estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to have up to 240,000 illegal immigrants, the 10th largest population in the country. But the number of full-time ICE employees in the state recently ranked 30th.
In August, however, the local ICE office added a permanent team of agents to conduct daily roundups of foreign nationals who have ignored deportation orders. The agency is expected to announce today an increase in the arrests of these immigration fugitives.
Contact reporter Alan Maimon at amaimon@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0404.
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