Fed up with the federal government’s co-opting of police and sheriffs, 578 non-profit organizations called upon President Barack Obama to stop the Department of Homeland Security’s continuing use of local and state law enforcement to go after illegal immigrants.

 

The groups, which expressed their joint position in a letter to the White House, said the habit of federal authorities to rely on police and sheriffs’ departments to arrest, detain and help deport immigrants puts too much stress on the criminal justice system.

 

Representing religion, law, labor, immigration, human rights, education and law enforcement, the coalition wrote: “The merger of immigration enforcement and local criminal justice agencies is not only bad public policy, it also sabotages local law enforcement agencies’ core mission of protecting public safety by undermining the trust of the communities they serve. It discourages people from turning to the police when they need to, even to report crimes. It undermines public safety by diverting scarce resources away from local policing and focuses them on false threats from people who look or sound foreign.”

 

In a 2009 report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered that more than half of the police departments surveyed expressed concerns that enforcing immigration policy has damaged the trust relationship between the police department and its community, making their jobs harder.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

NGOs Condemn Merger of Immigration and Criminal Justice (by William Fisher, Inter Press Service)

Letter to President Obama (pdf)

Are Local Police Wasting Resources Enforcing Immigration Laws? (by Tyler Schenk-Wasson, AllGov)