Sheriff, jail seek immigration law powers - Training, technology would aid detention and deportation

Beaufort County Sheriff's Office deputies and Detention Center officers could become the first local law enforcement agents in the state able to identify illegal immigrants and put them on a path to deportation.

Under a decade-old provision in federal immigration law, state and local law enforcement agencies

can volunteer to take on some of the powers typically restricted to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner said his office and the jail could begin fulfilling the prerequisites for obtaining that authority as early as January.

The move could save taxpayers money by relieving crowding at the county jail, Tanner said, where officials have said suspected illegal immigrants are flooding the system. It costs about $60 a day to house one inmate at the jail. Deportation hearings and criminal sentences can run concurrently, said ICE spokesman Michael Gilhooly, and the county can release someone serving a criminal sentence to federal custody.

On Thursday, jail Director Philip Foot said he had 285 inmates and suspects 25 are illegal immigrants based on what the inmates themselves said or a lack of identification. The jail was designed to house 255 inmates.

The particulars of the immigration authority extended to local law enforcement and detention officers would be worked out in a written agreement.

Only seven law enforcement agencies in the nation -- three county sheriff's offices in California, the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office in North Carolina, the Arizona Department of Corrections, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Alabama Department of Public Safety, -- have active agreements of this sort, said Gilhooly, who is based in Vermont. Additionally, Orange County, Calif., recently signed an agreement and is in training. Gilhooly's office is working with 30 other local agencies on their requests.

Typically local law enforcement officers are not authorized to identify someone as an illegal immigrant and must refer immigration status inquiries to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But after a five-week training and certification process, local law enforcement officers could ID illegal immigrants with federal databases, enter information in those databases and charge immigrants with violations of immigration law, which can lead to deportation.

These officers' ICE duties would be secondary to their normal law enforcement duties, Tanner and Gilhooly said, meaning a separate criminal act would trigger immigration-related action -- the officers would not be proactively seeking illegal immigrants.

"It's a foot in the door. You don't have both feet in the door, and the door's not wide open, but there's an opportunity there to be a little more efficient and more proactive," Tanner said. "It's not a cure-all, but it's a start."

Ten deputies and two supervising sergeants carved out of the existing force of the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office, which unlike Beaufort County has direct oversight of its jail system, have been certified with ICE since February. Since then, the office has had a running tally of how many people have been charged with violations of immigration law and put in deportation proceedings, said spokeswoman Julia Rush. The figure stood at 969 as of Wednesday.

"Immigration on a routine basis comes and takes a busload out," Rush said.

The specially trained officers work exclusively on immigration issues through the county jail system and are "quite busy," Rush said. The officers ask every arrestee what country they were born in and of what country they are a citizen. If they respond to either question with anything other than the United States, the officers use special technology and federal databases to check the arrestee's immigration status.

The questionnaire and database checks can be completed in "a matter of minutes," said Sgt. Daniel Stitt, one of the supervisory officers with the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office, though further along in the process, there is a "tremendous amount of paperwork."

The measure could raise flags in the Hispanic community. Eric Esquivel, the publisher and president of La Isla magazine based on Hilton Head Island, feared it could lead to racial discrimination.

"What if a massive number of Latinos are being arrested for crimes that others are not being arrested for?" he said. "I think it could lead to a lot of trouble as far as the Constitution and civil rights are concerned."

Esquivel was a vocal opponent of a separate measure, a proposed county ordinance that targets businesses employing illegal immigrants.

Stitt said deportation hearings can lead to barring a person from the U.S. for at least five years, depending on the crime. Mecklenburg arrestees are flagged through the program "every day" for crimes ranging from spitting on the sidewalk to driving while intoxicated or without a license to violent crimes, Stitt said.

Solicitor Duffie Stone, who heads state prosecuting attorneys in the 14th Judicial Circuit, which includes Allendale, Hampton, Colleton, Jasper and Beaufort counties, said he doesn't anticipate racial discrimination to be an issue.

"I haven't found anybody in the 14th Circuit that would do any kind of profiling," said Stone, who's been in Beaufort County since 1996. "I am not concerned with having any problems with this. I don't see the Sheriff's Office or any law enforcement doing any type of profiling. If they were doing profiling that would be wrong regardless of this federal initiative."

Even if racially tinged citizen complaints drove up calls for police service, that doesn't mandate arrests, Stone said.

Tanner envisions using the same technology the Mecklenburg deputies use, the Department of Homeland Security's Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT. It checks non-U.S. born arrestees' fingerprint scans and photos against the same federal database the U.S. Border Patrol uses. The equipment would cost $25,000, Tanner estimated.

Tanner said as many as 12 detention officers from the county jail and four of his deputies could begin training in January, but cautioned that the plan is still in "draft form."

Rather than sending county officers to a center in Georgia for the training, Tanner hopes to negotiate with ICE to bring a trainer to the county, which would save travel and lodging expenses. Tanner did not have cost estimates for the training, but said it may be covered by existing budgets. If necessary, Tanner and Foot said they could ask the County Council for additional money.

Tanner was scheduled to speak about the plan at the Beaufort County Council's Nov. 27 meeting, but said he chose not to in order to keep it separate in the public's mind from the controversial Lawful Employment Ordinance. That ordinance aims to eliminate illegal immigrants' job opportunities in the county by using business license suspensions as a penalty for businesses discovered with illegal employees.