County May Resume Immigration Training for Jailers

A controversial program to train Los Angeles County jailers to check the immigration status of inmates, which stalled when federal officials balked at allowing immigration-rights advocates to sit in on the sessions, could restart within weeks, officials said Monday.

In April, the Sheriff’s Department decided to suspend the four-week instruction program just a day after it began, rather than bar representatives from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund from observing the training by federal agents.

Federal officials have said that immigration-rights advocates are welcome to watch much of the training, but drew a line at sessions where sheriff’s employees would be taught “law enforcement sensitive information.”

That training includes instruction on detecting forged immigration papers and using federal immigration databases, said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

Both Kice and Sheriff’s Chief Marc Klugman said they believe a tentative compromise will revive the program. Under the proposal, Klugman said, federal agents will meet with immigration-rights groups and explain what their training involves without giving away what they consider sensitive information.

“I think we’ll be able to do the training and involve the community at an appropriate level,” said Klugman, who heads the department’s correctional services division. He said he hopes the training will resume in four to six weeks.

The plan to use county jailers to check the immigration status of inmates has drawn intense criticism from immigration-rights groups, including MALDEF, which argues that immigration enforcement should be left to the federal government.

Ann Marie Tallman, the group’s president, said she wanted to review the training to ensure that jailers would enforce immigration law without violating immigrants’ civil rights and exposing the county to legal liability.

She said she had not yet heard details about the proposed compromise but believed the federal government should allow her group access to all of the training.

“I think the federal government should be more open to public input, to public participation, and ensure transparency whenever any program has the potential of eroding public confidence,” Tallman said.

Klugman said he is mindful of such concerns and believes the department can find a way to allow concerned groups to see how jailers will operate without compromising confidential law enforcement information.

“We are not operating in a secret environment,” he said. “What we do needs to be transparent to engender trust and faith.”

The training is part of an agreement between the Sheriff’s Department and federal authorities that a divided Board of Supervisors approved in January.

Federal agents are expected to train seven county jailers to interview convicted inmates on their immigration status for possible deportation.

Currently, two federal immigration agents at Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles interview as many as 20 convicted foreign-born inmates daily.