Playground Fight

My most recent post on immigration, from Sunday, the 18th, seemed to have elicited a response back channel from my brother, who pointed me to an article in the June/July 2010 issue of The Catholic Worker.  (I am the one who sent him the subscription, so I am happy he is reading it.  I have also introduced him to First Things and The New Oxford Review, with mixed results.)  In fact he anticipated that article because the EMail DTG was from Saturday.

Since The Catholic Worker doesn't have its own website, I looked for the article in question on line and found it at The Louisiana Justice Institute.

The thrust of Mr Bill Quigley—Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans—is that while Arizona is picking up illegals in Arizona, ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of Homeland Security, is making agreements with other state governments to do the same kind of thing.

Professor Quigley disapproves of the new Arizona law, but sees the same thing going on in Maryland under a program called "Secure Communities", funded by the US Congress in 2008.  But, it isn't just Maryland.

This ICE program is now operating in 165 jurisdictions in 20 states and aims to be in partnership with every local law enforcement office in the country in a few years.  ICE admits that in its first one year period almost one million people were fingerprinted under this program.  About one percent, or 11,000 people, were identified as immigrants arrested – arrested not convicted - for major crimes.  Most of the people deported by ICE were picked up for minor or traffic charges and not violent crimes.  As the Washington Post revealed in March, ICE has explicit internal goals to remove 150,000 immigrants through the “criminal alien removals” and to deport 250,000 others this year.

My question is, why is the US Department of Justice suing Arizona, wasting millions of dollars to fight something that the Federal Government is partnering with other states to execute?

This makes the DOJ suit look like a playground fight over who is taller.

I hadn't gotten to this article and thus I thank my Brother Lance for pointing this out to me.

Regards  —  Cliff