Mayors condemn part of Pawlenty’s immigration plan

01/06/2006

Coleman, Rybak and police chiefs defend laws limiting ‘status’ checks

BY TIM NELSON
Pioneer Press

The mayors and police chiefs of St. Paul and Minneapolis have come out staunchly against a plan announced by Gov. Tim Pawlenty to roll back “sanctuary laws” that restrict immigration enforcement by local police.

St. Paul passed such an ordinance in May 2004, and Pawlenty suggested Tuesday that the state scrap such policies as part of an initiative to crack down on illegal immigration and immigrants.

“This is redbaiting, except … it’s ‘brownbaiting’ this time,” said St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, who took office Tuesday. “If there is a legitimate law enforcement issue, like … a counterfeit document production center somewhere in the state of Minnesota, then let’s go after that. … But when the governor stands up at a press conference and then flies around the state of Minnesota, in an election year, he’s using fear to try and get re-elected.”

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak also ascribed political motives to the proposal.

“I feel strongly about protecting people’s rights and safety, but so far my experience over the past few years is this is only discussed when there’s an election around the corner,” Rybak said.
The governor, however, called his proposals “reasonable.”

“I think that if you went to most Minnesotans and said, ‘We have cities that are prohibiting their police officers from asking about immigration status, not requiring it but having the discretion to ask,’ most Minnesotans would agree with my perspective that law enforcement should at least be given the option to inquire about immigration status,” Pawlenty said in response.

Police in the state’s two largest cities aren’t prohibited from investigating immigration issues as part of other criminal investigations, but they aren’t supposed to routinely question people about their status.
Coleman went so far as to say the St. Paul Police Department would not start doing so, regardless of what the Legislature or the governor did.

“I don’t think the governor has the authority to tell me how to run the police department, and this is bad public safety policy that he’s talking about,” Coleman said. “When you start using your police department to carry out this kind of political agenda, it interferes with legitimate law enforcement.”

The two mayors joined St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington and Minneapolis Police Chief William McManus in elaborating on that point in a joint statement Thursday. They said routine immigration status checks would interfere with efforts to establish trust among immigrants and refugees, trust that might prove fruitful for investigating everything from domestic assaults to terrorism.

Harrington suggested that it would be difficult to add immigration enforcement to his department’s priorities, regardless of who wanted to do so.

“To think that we have some free time, some discretionary time, that we’re not already running call to call, to do immigration enforcement that’s not related to serious criminal activity in the city is just ludicrous,” Harrington said in an interview. “My cops right now are … stacking calls; they’re having a hard time giving the kind of attention that we want them to give to serious violent crimes in the city right now. So to add an additional burden on top of that is just not practical.”

John Keller, acting executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, suggested immigration enforcement might undercut efforts to fight other crime.

“The governor’s statements scare the heck out of people, and it’s sending real hard-earned efforts to gain trust in the wrong direction,” Keller said. “You have to be able to trust the police to protect you.”

In many cases, he said, immigrants come from countries where the police are feared, Keller said. Where there’s mistrust, victims don’t get help and witnesses don’t come forward, he added.

Dan Hoxworth, director of Neighborhood House, a St. Paul social service agency that often serves Latino and other immigrants, even expressed reservations about plans for his building to host a police substation for the city’s West Side if officers were going to check citizenship papers.

But there’s a fair amount of uneasiness, as well, about illegal immigration in the United States.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week found that 80 percent of Americans believe government isn’t doing enough to stem illegal immigration. The poll also found that a majority, 56 percent, believe that illegal immigrants have done more to hurt the country than to help it.