Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I am mainly baffled by this amendment. What on Earth could it mean to contravene 287(g)? Nobody wants to contravene any Federal statute. That's what this amendment says. If the offering of his amendment is an occasion to gloss over the problems with 287(g) and tout its virtues, I will simply very briefly go back to the debate earlier today when I think this was pretty thoroughly discussed. We have in 287(g) an effort to bring local officials into the business of immigration enforcement. In some communities that has worked reasonably well. And I must say, in my experience where it has worked reasonably well is where those local authorities focused on the jails and on the prison population and the people who, in fact, had committed serious crimes. And in that sense, it is a parallel effort with the Secure Communities effort. I know of other instances, though--and I think the Department has verified that there are other instances--where that line between Federal and local authority has gotten very seriously blurred, where there have been instances of profiling and other abuses. In fact, there have been so many abuses that I concluded some time ago that 287(g) was prone to abuse, that there were too many problems with the way that program was set up for it to really be our long-term effort to involve local officials in immigration matters. I believe it's very important that 287(g) be phased into the Secure Communities effort.…”