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Federal officials, including Rep. Mark Souder, R-3rd, met with area law enforcement Friday afternoon to hear their concerns about illegal immigrants and the local criminal justice system.
The Immigration Law Enforcement Cooperation Roundtable featured a presentation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, about their ACCESS program, which provides local law enforcement agencies an opportunity to work with ICE on specific community challenges.
Local agencies attending the meeting included area sheriffs, jail officials and prosecutors.
Souder said the federal government has been stepping up efforts to deport illegal immigrants arrested for various crimes since the summer, but there is still a question of how to best balance the resources available to various agencies.
Communities in northern Indiana deal with different illegal immigrant populations, and each can bring different issues and concerns.
For example, Allen County law enforcement sees illegal immigrants from Asia, Europe, Africa and South America. Other communities, such as Elkhart, Noble and Kosciusko counties, see illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, while Steuben County authorities often catch illegal immigrants, many of Middle Eastern descent, on the Indiana Toll Road coming from the Detroit area, Souder said.
The official public policy is to deport those arrested, Souder said, but in practical terms that can be much more difficult because of the numbers of illegal immigrants encountering law enforcement for everything from traffic stops to domestic battery to more serious crimes such as drug trafficking or murder.
“What is the most effective use of resources,” he said. “We don’t want to have all the detention facilities tied up with (individuals arrested for) misdemeanors. … I don’t want ICE running around chasing every illegal immigrant.”
At the very least, when illegal immigrants are arrested, fingerprinted and photographed, Souder said, that information can be put into a database to share with federal authorities such as ICE, Souder said.
The priorities for ICE and federal authorities locally are to deal with those illegal immigrants convicted of felonies, particularly violent crimes, and then deal with issues such as document fraud and the smugglers who bring the illegal immigrants into the area in the first place, Souder said.
rgreen@jg.net
