Police stay hands-off on arrests of illegal immigrants

Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005

It has become routine.

The group of 35 men gathered in the parking lot next to Grace United Methodist Church Monday morning — some as early as 6 a.m. — has dwindled to a dozen by 9:30 a.m., either picked up for work or having lost hope for the day.

Right on schedule, a city police officer pulls into the lot and, without getting out of his car, motions with his hand, telling the men in broken but effective Spanish, ‘‘Your time is up.” Then in English, ‘‘Thank you.”

The day laborers oblige, scattering out onto Route 355.

Some are illegal immigrants. The police don’t ask. The day laborers don’t tell.

As the illegal immigrant population swells around the country — Maryland estimates stretch to 200,000 — the Gaithersburg parking lot has been become the latest ground zero in the debate over using taxpayer money to support those who sneak into the country in search of a better life.

Local police do not enforce federal immigration laws, saying it falls outside their authority.

Federal agencies say they can spare their resources only for the most serious threats to public safety.

There is no indication this will change in the coming months as Gaithersburg weighs the option of allowing the county to open an employment center for the day laborers within its city limits.

‘‘We don’t specifically check on somebody’s immigration status. We’re not interested. It’s not a part of what we do,” said Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger. ‘‘Those are not laws we’re responsible for enforcing, so if we’re approaching someone on the street, we’re not going to ask them, ‘What’s your immigration status?’”

Manger, who met last week with Gazette editors and reporters, said county police will continue to enforce laws such as public drunkenness and urination, complaints that have surfaced from neighbors around the church where laborers congregate.

There have been at least eight arrests at the parking lot for these nuisance crimes since March, a modest number considering the size of the group, said William White, community services officer for Gaithersburg City Police.

It has been some 10 years since White arrested a suspected rapist who turned out to be an illegal immigrant. Agents from the federal agency that handles illegal immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, came to pick that offender up, he said, but beyond a handful of similar experiences from fellow officers, such exchanges with federal agents are exceedingly rare.

ICE says it encourages local law enforcement to contact its 24-hour-a-day national center, which issues the order to hold an illegal immigrant for ICE agents to retrieve.

But ICE’s network of 4,000 detention and removal officers cannot handle the total load of all the nation’s illegal immigrants. Instead, the focus falls on serious felons.

‘‘We certainly do have to prioritize,” explained ICE spokesman Ernestine Fobbs, noting that ICE deported 160,200 illegal immigrants between Oct. 1, 2003 and Sept. 30, 2004 — a record number 10 percent higher than the previous year.

‘‘They’re not avoiding work, they’re not trying to get out of anything,” Gaithersburg’s White said. ‘‘It seems to be a very practical matter where they simply don’t have the manpower to deal with the number of people that we run across that don’t have proper documentation.”

Like some who have criticized support for illegal immigrants, Brad Botwin fumes at that response.

Botwin, of Derwood, has followed the Gaithersburg day laborer situation, speaking adamantly at a public forum at Grace church last month, and he does not buy into the official line where local law enforcement passes the buck and federal agencies decry a lack of resources.

‘‘That’s a poor excuse. It’s a cop out. It makes a mockery of the whole system,” he said.

He does not place blame on police officers individually — many he has spoken to, he said, complain of their hands being tied. Nor does he blame the illegal immigrants themselves, though he is leery of churches’ exuberance in giving them shelter.

Rather, the blame goes much higher up the chain of command, he said: through the county executive, through Congress, through ICE, through President Bush and even eventually to the presidents of the Central and South American countries from which illegal immigrants emigrate.

Botwin is hopeful that a bill proposed to the U.S. Senate last week — which would require employers to verify a worker’s eligibility, punish those who hire illegal workers and build a fence the entire length of the border with Mexico — is not more of the same ‘‘lip service” he said politicians have been giving the issue for years.

In the meantime, the local solution, he said, is for city and county police to enroll in a five-week, ICE-funded program that trains and authorizes law enforcement to process illegal immigrants.

Though interest in the program remains small — only the Arizona Department of Corrections, Florida state police, Alabama state police, and two county sheriff’s departments in California are participating — it’s an interest that is growing, Fobbs said.

Montgomery County police do not share that interest. Nor do Gaithersburg police: none of its 48 officers have been to the training, said White.

‘‘If you throw this added responsibility in there and multiply it by the number of people that may be illegally coming into this city, what is that going to do to our police strength? We’d have to increase the size of our department, we’d have to do overtime, we’d have to make a major change in order to do that if this was fixed and we could make those arrests starting tomorrow,” White said.

It’s a status quo that some of the most-impacted communities are determined to reverse, said Rick Oltman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national non-profit that seeks to bolster border security, stop illegal immigration, and slow the rate of legal immigration.

‘‘It’s a federal responsibility, but it’s a local problem,” he said. ‘‘What it’s leading to around the country is that local jurisdictions are deciding, ‘We cannot rely on the federal government, so we’ll handle this on their own.’”