We should be deporting criminals

It is easy to understand why Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran wants the federal OK to allow his officers the authority to process illegal immigrants for deportation. Many of these illegal immigrants have committed serious crimes. And the federal government has had, at best, limited success in deporting individuals who pose a genuine threat to public safety.

Curran joins officials in Waukegan and Carpentersville in saying his office would use deportation certification only in an effort to "get violent criminals, child molesters and drug dealers out of a country they have no right to be in. No one who is not charged with a serious offense will be affected."

But the news this week also makes it easy to understand why such moves by law enforcement are met with suspicion by immigrant rights activists. They fear law enforcement will use deportation powers to conduct broad sweeps, arresting immigrants, they say, whose "only crime is working."

Those fears seem to be well founded because on Tuesday, federal officials went to great lengths to publicize that they'd doubled from last year the number of "fugitive" immigrants they'd arrested in the area. But at the same time, they acknowledged that out of the 1,043 illegal immigrants they'd arrested in 2007 who had previously been slated for deportation, only 166 of them had criminal records.

And so it goes. Surely neither side in this issue will be satisfied and the debate will rage on.

Curran says he needs the deportation authority because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is undermanned. That federal officials arrested only 1,043 illegal immigrants who were supposed to be deported in a six-state area that includes Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin would seem to underscore the understaffing point.

And, as we have said in this space before, no matter what your perspective on the illegal immigration debate, there should be agreement that every effort be made by law enforcement at all levels to deport illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes.

Yet enforcement of immigration laws is not ideally handled locally. Indeed, the local police mission should be to seek out and arrest all criminals without regard to their citizenship status. And taking on deportation proceedings should not interfere with or dilute traditional local law enforcement duties.

But pressure for local assistance in enforcing immigration laws will nonetheless build in some communities as long as Congress fails to act on substantial immigration reform. This includes a move toward tightening borders and cracking down on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. A reasonable path toward citizenship should be created that also requires those who would be permitted to stay in the U.S. to contribute money needed to cover additional costs created by their presence.

Frustration over immigration at the local level will only grow in the continued absence of leadership in Washington.