Not all police departments are happy with how the federal government responds to their pleas for help on immigration cases.
Several small police agencies said they have gotten little cooperation from officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on people they stop for minor offenses and suspect are in the U.S. illegally.
Randy Ford, town marshal of Green Mountain Falls, a town of 797 people northwest of Colorado Springs, said it’s frustrating when ICE doesn’t respond.
“We had several situations that we were relatively certain they were undocumented, but we weren’t able to hold them long enough to be able to determine their status,” Ford said.
Ford said in one case, an officer stopped several men with Mexican driver’s licenses and no other identification outside a suspected drug house. The names were submitted through the ICE website, but Ford said he never heard from the agency.
“We had to kick them loose,” he said.
Lakeside police submitted 39 names, or the equivalent of two for every one of the town’s 19 residents, to ICE last year and got no response on any of them that didn’t wind up in the county jail, said police Cmdr. David Bell.
“It’s been that way for years and years,” Bell said. “They don’t have the manpower resources to come out on incidences of contacting one person.”
Bell said his department refers to ICE foreign nationals it stops for traffic offenses who don’t have identification or car insurance. In several cases, they admitted they were not in the U.S. legally, he said. Nothing was done.
