Don't break the law and there's nothing to fear.
That was the assurance Knox County Sheriff Jimmy "J.J." Jones offered to more than 100 people who turned out at a public meeting Tuesday night to speak against the controversial 287(g) Immigration and Customs Enforcement program.
The meeting came after 14 months of requests and public demonstrations by immigration reform advocates eager to discuss Jones' application to the initiative, which trains and authorizes local police to enforce federal immigration laws.
The program is intended to catch and deport felony offenders who are illegally in the U.S.
Critics, however, argue that it more often leads to racial profiling, ensnaring undocumented immigrants for minor offenses, such as driving without a license. The effect, they contend, separates families and furthers immigrant communities' distrust of law enforcement.
"There's already a climate of fear -- you don't see, but I see," said Lourdes Garza, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Knoxville's director of Hispanic Ministry.
Children of foreign-born parents all too often must be warned that their mother or father might be gone when they come home from school, and with no assurance of when they might be back, Garza told the sheriff.
She asked Jones why he continues to move forward with plans for the program amid a new, comprehensive immigration reform bill approved by the U.S. Senate.
"The reforms are coming," Garza said. "Why do we need to do something else locally?"
Jones countered it isn't fair that parents tell their children such things, and that people are not deported without good reason.
"The only reason they wouldn't be there is because they broke the law," the sheriff said.
And yet misdemeanor arrests accounted for some 80 percent of those processed through Davidson County's 287(g) program, according to a December 2012 report by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The report also found that the county's arrests of foreign-born people for minor offenses increased 15 percent, while felony arrests dropped 21 percent.
"You are arresting people who are, in every other way, law-abiding citizens," said Maya Sheppard, with the Knox County Public Defender's Office, citing the report's findings.
Jones argued that being processed through the program for an immigration status review doesn't always result in deportation. And if someone is arrested for a simple misdemeanor, he added, deportation may follow only if the person is found to have outstanding warrants for more serious offenses.
Jones added that he had yet to see any hard statistics on the program's supposed drawbacks, and assured that racial profiling would not be tolerated in his office.
"This is a chance to get it right," the sheriff said.
After initially applying to the program in 2010, Jones said he now expects to finalize a memorandum of understanding with ICE within the next few weeks.
Copyright 2013 - The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Tenn.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
