See No Illegal, Speak No Illegal

It takes some big cojones, or perhaps the wisdom of a wise monkey, for a police chief to announce that he’s ignoring certain laws. Not those funny ones, like ordinances governing marijuana smoking in nightclubs or sexual abuse of animals, but a vast set of very fearsome federal statutes.

“It takes a lot of hard work on our part, going out there, going on television, going on Spanish radio and Spanish television, going out in the public, going to the communities, letting them know, ‘Trust us, you’ve got to trust us, we are not interested in enforcing these immigration laws,’” Miami police chief John Timoney told Helen Ferre, the host of Issues on WPBT-Channel 2 over the summer. “It makes our life just that much more difficult.” Difficult, because people without proper immigration papers often refrain from reporting crimes, fearing cops will end up reporting them for not having proper immigration papers.

Timoney and 60 other members of the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association are politely telling Congress that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s 287(g) program is dumb. Under the program, approximately 60 police and sheriff departments across the country have joined ICE’s hunts for undocumented immigrants. Nine of the ICE-deputized departments are in Virginia, eight in North Carolina; Florida is tied for third with Arizona, each of which has five. (In the Sunshine State, they include sheriff’s offices in Jacksonville, and in Bay, Brevard, Collier, and Manatee counties.)

The program has expanded under President Obama, who recently received a letter of protest signed by some 500 groups, including the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Episcopal and United Methodist churches, and Miami’s own Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, all of which see no good in 287(g). Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate, however, want to force all police agencies to participate in such roundups. Joe Arpaio, the elected Republican sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, is their leading poster cop. His operations in Mesa and other Latino neighborhoods in greater Phoenix have resulted in the transfer of more than 28,000 undocumented immigrants to federal immigration authorities.

But 287(g) “undermines trust and cooperation with immigrant communities,” the Major Cities Chiefs explain in a position paper. It could even foster crimes against immigrants, creating “a class of silent victims” and eliminating their “potential assistance in solving crimes and preventing terrorist attacks.”

The program also invites civil liberties lawsuits against police departments, the chiefs say, and Timoney doesn’t need any more of those. He’s still facing several that are pending from the November 2003 anti-FTAA protests, when officers fired rubber bullets and beanbag projectiles at the heads of anti-FTAA protesters, in apparent violation of their right to demonstrate and peaceably assemble. This past February a U.S. appeals court found Timoney’s department guilty of “police conduct knowingly designed to utterly eviscerate fundamental expressive freedoms” when his officers preempted an Amnesty International protest during the FTAA summit.

In contrast, Timoney’s Operation Miami Shield, designed to protect soft targets from terrorist attacks, has avoided the constitutional headaches, such as unwarranted searches and seizures, that civil liberties guardians feared it could trigger. Lately, his worst whacks have come from the police union, which alleges he pressured officers to understate crime statistics. State investigators exonerated Timoney, but found that Miami cops miscategorized about a fourth of their reports, and the chief’s unpopularity among his rank and file swelled.

His stance on 287(g), however, should boost his popularity inside and outside the department. Miami cops have enough dolores de cabeza from data entry without adding reams of ICE forms to their chores. Moreover, launch a saturation patrol for illegals in Miami and you’re likely to have an FTAA-type situation on your hands. Like the Three Wise Monkeys, Miamians are good at seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil. That’s not always wise policy, but Timoney knows that with respect to immigration papers it is.