Proper local role in immigration law enforcement

The Phoenix Police Department has adopted a new immigration enforcement policy that is taking torpedoes from those who think it goes too far and from those who insist it doesn't go far enough. That's our first clue that the folks in the Valley of the Sun might have found the sweet spot.

The policy change allows officers to question anyone suspected of a crime about their immigration status and gives officers the discretion about whether to notify federal immigration officials. But it prohibits officers from posing such questions to crime victims, witnesses or anyone stopped for civil violations such as speeding.

Immigrant-rights activists, Latino lawyer associations and civil libertarians condemn the policy change, calling it a sop to xenophobia. They worry about racial profiling and prefer the previous policy which barred officers from asking about immigration status in most cases. The Phoenix police union denounces the new policy as "smoke and mirrors."

The city is right and the critics are wrong.

I've long been opposed to local police officers playing Border Patrol agents. The best argument is the one advanced by the hundreds of police chiefs who have resisted having their officers commandeered into the enforcement of immigration law -- that, by making people afraid to go to the cops for help, you create ready-made victims to be preyed upon by bad guys and actually increase crime instead of curbing it. But that doesn't mean local police should never cooperate with immigration authorities.

The point of demarcation is whether the illegal immigrant in question is accused of committing an additional crime aside from the civil offense of coming into the country unlawfully. Once they're in the criminal justice system, all bets are off. That's not a case of local cops working as immigration officers. It's a case of local officers working with immigration. Big difference.

What concerns me is a scenario where local police officers tell themselves they're Wyatt Earp and try to clean up Anytown USA by removing illegal immigrants or anyone they think is an illegal immigrant. Before long, you've got U.S.-born Hispanics caught up in that dragnet. In July 1997, the Chandler Police Department allowed its officers to pair up with Border Patrol agents to conduct a citywide roundup of suspected illegal immigrants. They caught about 400 of them, but not without also harassing and apprehending a number of U.S.-born Hispanics. The result was condemnation by the state attorney general's office, a series of lawsuits and a stain on the city's reputation.

At the time, I was a reporter for The Arizona Republic. The attorney general was Grant Woods, one of the former prosecutors who wrote the new policy for the Phoenix Police Department. In Woods' report on the incident, a Chandler police officer was asked what he was thinking as he was pulling over Hispanic motorists and asking for papers. He replied that there were various ways to detect if someone was in the country illegally, including not just physical appearance and English-language ability but also a "smell" common to illegal immigrants.

There are those who say we have to evict illegal immigrants to preserve our civilization. But there's nothing civilized about comments like those.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group