Governor rescinds immigration order
Frees State Police from arrest pact
Governor Deval Patrick announced a plan yesterday to train a dozen correction officers in two state prisons to enforce immigration laws and rescinded a controversial agreement between Governor Mitt Romney and federal authorities that allowed State Police to arrest illegal immigrants.
Patrick said he has told his public safety secretary, Kevin M. Burke, to negotiate an agreement with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would allow six correction officers at MCI-Concord and six at MCI-Framingham to undergo four weeks of training to perform "limited immigration law enforcement" duties.
The specially trained correction officers would have the power to initiate deportation proceedings against convicted criminals whom they identify as illegal immigrants after being processed at the two prisons. The officers would also notify federal authorities. The state processes all male prisoners at Concord and all females at Framingham.
"It has worked in other states," Patrick said. He added that his actions "balance our responsibility to ensure public safety and to address illegal immigration." Other jurisdictions where correction officers have such power include the Arizona prison system and several county jails in California.
Following through on a recent promise, Patrick said he had scrapped a pact that Romney signed with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to train 30 troopers to arrest suspected illegal immigrants. That plan, Patrick said, would have taken troopers from their core duties, including combating violence, drug abuse, and gun trafficking.
About 700 of the 10,800 inmates in the state prison system are believed to be illegal immigrants, according to Burke, who flanked Patrick at a State House news conference. He acknowledged that criminal defendants are routinely warned at sentencing that they can be deported if they are in the United States illegally. But, he said, incarcerated illegal immigrants sometimes escape notice because federal authorities lack the resources to check on the immigration status of inmates.
Both Burke and Patrick said it made more sense to give correction officers the power to crack down on illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, rather than empowering the State Police to arrest suspected violators of immigration law.
Kathleen M. Dennehy, commissioner of the Department of Correction, said through a spokeswoman that she looked forward to working with Burke and ICE on an agreement but had no further comment.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Romney, said, "Governor Patrick has his own views, and, as the state's chief executive, he's entitled to make policy changes that reflect those views." Patrick's announcement drew praise from the State Police superintendent, Colonel Mark F. Delaney, and from other police officials, as well as advocates for immigrants, and civil libertarians.
But it also attracted criticism from a Washington-based think tank that studies the impact of immigration on the United States.
Delaney said Romney's plan to deputize troopers as immigration officers would have made it hard for them to win the trust of local residents, including illegal immigrants who sometimes provide vital information concerning violent crimes and drug trafficking.
Romney wanted to train officers from five elite units that capture violent fugitives, investigate organized crime, and perform other critical tasks.
Delaney said Romney never consulted him directly about the plan, although he would have carried it out because "we are the governor's police force."
Delaney also said he considered it inappropriate for the State Police to take on immigration enforcement.
"That's not our core mission; that's the core mission of the federal government," he said.
Boston's new police commissioner, Edward F. Davis III , who had decried Romney's pact in one of his first official acts, also praised Patrick's announcement. He said Romney's plan would have strained relations between his officers and residents.
Ali Noorani , executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said immigrants, legal and illegal, had feared that they would not be able to go to the police if they were victims of crimes because of the possibility that authorities would seek to arrest them for violations of immigration law. Such immigrants were relieved yesterday, he said.
"The bottom line is that the immigrant community once again feels protected by local and state law enforcement and, more importantly, can trust law enforcement to serve their communities," he said.
Anjali Waikar , a legal fellow at the ACLU of Massachusetts, sounded a similar theme, saying her group feared that the Romney pact would have led to racial and ethnic profiling.
A spokeswoman for the ICE office in Boston issued a brief statement saying the agency looked forward to negotiating an agreement to deputize correction officers.
The federal government has reached similar pacts with the Arizona Department of Corrections and five county sheriff's departments nationwide, the spokeswoman said.
But Steven A. Camarota , director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, said that Romney's approach was better than Patrick's because Massachusetts police officers have few options if they come across individuals they believe may be illegal immigrants.
"If you're only letting correction officers do [immigration enforcement], then you're only doing it after someone's been incarcerated, not when someone is on the street," he said. "It's a very poor substitute for what Romney had proposed."
Romney signed a 15-page agreement with ICE on Dec. 13 that would have assigned 30 troopers to five weeks of training, which was set to begin this month. But Burke said the training never started, and Patrick said last month that he was against the idea. During his campaign, he called the idea a "gimmick."
Several police agencies in other states have signed similar pacts. In the 3 1/2 years since state troopers in Alabama were empowered to enforce federal immigration laws, they have arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants, mostly people they encountered during routine traffic stops for other offenses, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety said recently.
Andrea Estes of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com. 