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Town hall meeting hits on 287(g) program
Published September 3, 2009
During Albertville’s town hall meeting Monday night, the mayor and City Council hit on issues about how the 287(g) program would be implemented and paid for, but after the meeting some in the Hispanic community still had concerns.
Mayor Lindsey Lyons and Councilman Chuck Ellis voiced their support for the 287(g) program.
The 287(g) program would allow local police officers to act as Immigration and Custom Enforcement Agents.
“287(g) is government terminology, much like 401(k), like some of those other things we talk about. It’s just a paragraph in a section of a code that goes with this, this, and this, and I’m sure that there are a lot of lawyers here who can explain it much better than I can,” Ellis said. “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a politician, but I do care,”
“The most important thing that you see when you see somebody implement the powers that 287(g) has given them is that fact that they are doing something or taking care of something or somebody that really needs to be taken care of,” Ellis said.
The mayor also said that the program would not be used like people see it used by Maricopa Sheriff’s Department, which has been criticized for abusing the powers granted in the program.
“Yes, we are pursuing the federal training for a portion of our police department … No. 2, no we are not going to use this as an avenue to target any immigrant because of your skin color, or what country you came from or anything of that nature,” Lyons said.
“It will be used as a law enforcement tool and I would think that we would all agree here tonight: No. 1, in all of our cultures, all of us, we have the criminal element. There is no doubt about it,” the mayor said.
“But, I think we can all agree that we don’t want the criminal element here,” Lyons said.
One of the concerns members of the Hispanic population has is the 287(g) training will be used to target every Hispanic.
Gloria Giles, who sometimes works as an interpreter, told a story to Ellis and Lyons after the meeting about a man who was arrested in Oneonta because of a traffic ticket and then deported.
“He was in a roadblock and he did have a warrant for his arrest because he didn’t pay a ticket,” Giles said. “He was taken to jail and he did not know about (the ticket).”
The family of the man asked for Giles help and they went to try to get him released on bond, but when the family was ready to pay the bond, the man was held on a Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detainer, and deported shortly after.
“I knew the family. I knew the man. He was a working man,” Giles said. “He was just a common man that came here and worked and went to church. He was not the type of person that was going to go out and make trouble,” she said.
It is situations like the one in Oneonta that have many in the Hispanic community worried.
Albertville police Chief Benny Womack said he couldn’t guarantee that an undocumented immigrant who has never committed a serious crime is never going to be held on an ICE detainer, but he did say it would be the intent of his department to try to target illegal immigrants who commit more serious crimes.
“You can’t draw a line like that,” Womack said. “If you have arrest powers to do something then you are constitutionally obligated to do it,” he said.
“But, with the traffic safety checkpoints, we target areas that have a lot of the criminal element in them, and I’m not talking about any racial component. You get people on arrest warrants, drug cases, because we almost always have a canine there to detect drugs, that’s what it’s there for,” Womack said.
Womack also said that because there would only be six to eight officers trained and all of those would not be patrol officers, there would not always be a guarantee that a 287(g) trained officer would be working one of the checkpoints.
Lyons said the training for the program is free, but the city would have to pay for the officer’s salary while they were being trained.
The mayor also mentioned there are some other communities in North Alabama who are also pursuing the program, but he would not specifically mention them.
“At this time we have had one contact from one of these other cities here in North Alabama and the bottom line there is we have an ally in a major city in North Alabama,” Lyons said.
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