Seminar
The federal government has invited local police departments to partner with them in enforcing federal immigration laws. The process of devolution began in 1996, through Congressional legislation; since then, the Justice Department has elaborated and expanded this invitation to engage local police more actively in removing people who have entered the country without legal permission to do so. At the same time, many citizens are pressing for a more effective approach to unauthorized immigration, including deployment of local police as a “force multiplier” in removing unauthorized immigrants. Yet not all the signals coming from the public are pro-enforcement. Police are also influenced by their own professional goals, most significantly in this context, commitment to community policing. The term “community policing” is constantly evolving, but at its base is the belief that policing can only be effective with the cooperation and support of local communities in all their diversity. The necessary trust must be nurtured through the active efforts of police to be visible, responsive, and ready to engage with a wide array of community organizations. A related professional commitment, memorialized in departmental policies across the United States, is to avoid racial profiling. Trying to identify unauthorized immigrants in the course of ordinary law enforcement puts this commitment at risk. My presentation, relying upon data from a recent NSF-supported national survey of police executives, describes how local police departments are responding to the opportunity to participate in the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Is this response an example of “marble-cake federalism” in which the layers of the system are using their varied capacities to create a coherent response to a policy issue? Or is the push to link federal immigration-enforcement goals with local policing beginning to create a patchwork of memberships that threatens public safety and democratic values?