Sanctuary cities' bill troubles law enforcers

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Sanctuary cities' bill troubles law enforcers
They say cops being asked to do feds' job.
A day before the Texas House is set to vote on a bill that would ban so-called “sanctuary cities,” law enforcement officials from across the state lined up Thursday to oppose the legislation.
In a conference call with reporters, officials from El Paso, McAllen and Arlington said the bill amounted to legislators telling police how to do their jobs, that securing the border is a federal issue that shouldn't be funded solely by Texas taxpayers, and that if police are viewed as immigration officials, they'll be less effective at community outreach.
“We have to really concentrate our efforts here in El Paso on the criminal element ... so that we can try our best to prevent an escalation of violence like you do see in Juárez,” said El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, whose jurisdiction is just across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez, where more than 3,000 people were killed last year in cartel violence.
“If we're being pulled away from that to address an economic immigrant ... that's another agency's responsibility,” Wiles said. “And they already have plenty of agents, let me tell you. The Border Patrol in this county has much more resources than I'll ever have.”
The Texas Municipal Police Association, which in January came out strongly in favor of the sanctuary cities ban, has changed its position. On Thursday, Lon Craft, the association's director of legislative affairs, said its members were split on whether to support or oppose the ban and it is no longer taking a position.
Gov. Rick Perry, who declared the issue an emergency item this legislative session, has said he wants officers to have discretion to ask about a subject's immigration status.
“My response is that they, I hope, were paying attention on the second day of November 2010 when the people of the state of Texas said pretty clearly that they wanted to have a sanctuary city prohibition in our statute,” Perry said Thursday, referring to the law enforcement officials that oppose the legislation. “I talked about it a lot during the campaign. It was one of the major issues during the campaign. Now, chiefs may not get elected, but their city councils and their mayors do, so I'd have them check back maybe with the people that appoint them before I got crossways with the electorate.”
The legislation, House Bill 12, would deny state funds to entities that don't comply. Its author, Carrollton Republican Burt Solomons, did not respond to a request for comment.
But it's not clear what effect the law would have. It declares government bodies and law enforcement agencies can't prevent officers from “inquiring into the immigration status of a person lawfully detained or arrested.”
Houston is Texas' only major city that prevents officers on the street from inquiring about subjects' immigration status, but the city works with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine immigration status after a person has been arrested.
San Antonio may run afoul of another provision of the law, which says the city can't stop officers from “assisting or cooperating with a federal immigration officer as reasonable and necessary, including providing enforcement assistance” and “permitting a federal immigration officer to enter and conduct enforcement activities at a municipal or county jail to enforce federal immigration laws.”
Speaking at an April 27 meeting of the City Council's Public Safety Committee, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said his department works with ICE on smuggling cases, but doesn't go any further.
“If ICE called us up and said, ‘We need some backup because we're going down here on Laredo Street to the produce market, we're going to round up some illegal immigrants, we need some backup' ... we're not going,” McManus said.
Diverting resources to immigration enforcement would make the rest of the community less safe, he said.
The city has also refused ICE's request to have a 24-hour presence at the municipal court's detention center. ICE agents are allowed to enter the detention center in the morning to question people who have been arrested about their immigration status. Two years ago, the city denied ICE's request to have a 24-hour presence in the facility.
Chief City Marshal Rumaldo Abonce said the facility doesn't have space to accommodate ICE 24/7 or to detain people on immigration holds.

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