San Diego to Stop Holding Suspected Illegal Aliens

Breaking ties with the U.S. Border Patrol, San Diego Police Chief Bill Kolender on Friday announced that his officers will no longer detain suspected illegal aliens to help federal immigration officials control the border.

“Due to economic conditions in Mexico and Central America and the lack of an effective federal immigration policy, San Diego has been taking the brunt of a problem which we are unable to impact,” Kolender said in a prepared statement. “Our policy has been and remains that we are not in the immigration business and we are not immigration officers.”

The announcement rescinds the San Diego officers’ decades-old practice of holding some people involved in a crime--some as minor as jaywalking--for 20 minutes to allow the Border Patrol time to determine whether the suspect is an illegal alien. San Diego officers held people who had no U.S. address, did not speak English or admitted under questioning to being in the country illegally; others were let go.

It will not affect the operation of the Border Crime Prevention unit, a special team of six San Diego officers and six Border Patrol agents that monitors the canyons along the international border for crime, much of it against illegal aliens entering the country.

El Paso Still Detains

The move makes San Diego among the last U.S. border city police forces to drop the policy of detaining illegal aliens for the Border Patrol, said San Diego Deputy Police Chief Manuel Guaderrama. Only El Paso still detains illegal aliens.

In recent years, Anaheim, Santa Ana, San Jose, San Antonio and Phoenix also have dropped such policies, he said.

In Los Angeles, police have, since the 1970s, notified the Immigration and Naturalization Services of suspected illegal aliens only when investigating and prosecuting serious misdemeanors or felonies, an LAPD spokesman said. Los Angeles police do not hand over released suspects or minor offenders to the INS, he said.

Friday’s announcement by the San Diego police drew comment from a Border Patrol official.

“We’re disappointed, of course, but they have their job to do and we have ours,” said Mike Williams, deputy Border Patrol chief in San Diego. “I don’t think that their (San Diego police) participation was that significant in terms of sheer numbers, but by removing a number of illegal aliens involved in crime they were able to assist us.”

Border Patrol Blast

Last week, Border Patrol Chief Alan Eliason anticipated the department’s decision by lambasting the department for what he called a “head-in-the-sand attitude” about illegal immigration. He threatened to pull out of San Diego a special INS force of 15 to 20 agents that patrol public transportation routes to arrest suspected illegal aliens.

Bob Burgreen, assistant San Diego police chief, said a recent four-day survey in two patrol areas showed that officers detained 107 suspected illegal aliens and spent 32 hours on immigration matters.