The police chief of Arizona’s largest city said on Friday the state’s controversial new crackdown on illegal immigrants would likely create more problems than it solved for local law enforcement.
The remarks by Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris came as US Senate Democrats vowed to push ahead with their uphill bid to pass legislation this year overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, saying the furor in Arizona has given them a lift despite a lack of support from Republicans.
Arizona’s week-old law calls for state and local police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the US illegally. It has outraged Latinos, civil rights activists and organized labor.
With polls showing the crackdown has broad public support in Arizona and nationwide, Harris said at a news conference he understood peoples’ frustration.
But he criticized the new law as unlikely to solve problems caused by any of the estimated 10.8 million people who are in the US illegally.
“I don’t really believe that this law is going to do what the vast majority of Americans and Arizonans want, and that is to fix the immigration problem,” he said. “This law adds new problems for local law enforcement.”
Harris said asking officers to determine immigration status during an investigation would interfere with their primary job and “instead tells us to become immigration officers and enforce routine immigration laws that I don’t believe we have the authority to enforce.”
The chief said his force already had 10 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in its violent crime unit and that the law provided no new enforcement tools.
“We have the tools that we need to enforce the laws in this state, to reduce property crime and reduce violent crime,” Harris said.
Republican backers say the law is needed to curb crime in the desert state, which is home to some 460,000 illegal immigrants and is a furiously trafficked corridor for drug and migrant smugglers from Mexico.
Phoenix, the state capital and a clearing house for unauthorized immigrants and drugs headed to cities across the US, has recently averaged one drug-related kidnapping nearly every day.
Revealing stark divisions among police in the Phoenix valley over immigration, an Arizona sheriff known for cracking down hard on undocumented migrants continued a two-day immigration and crime sweep on Friday afternoon.
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “crime suppression” drives have led to allegations of racial profiling. Deputies stopped and arrested at least 63 people for minor offenses who could not prove they were in Arizona legally since the operation began on Thursday.
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