Ahearn: Hispanics fear profiling as ICE plans roadblocks
It’s meant as a catchy statewide campaign to remind drivers of the .08 blood alcohol limit for DWI: Friday-night sobriety checkpoints timed to coincide with today’s date, 8/8/08.
But for members of the Hispanic community, already on edge amid claims of overzealous immigration enforcement by the Alamance County Sheriff’s Department, the prospect of 8/8/08 has turned into the civil liberties equivalent of Friday the 13th.
“If this had been a Sunday, I’d have canceled Mass,” said Father Bob Stone of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Greensboro, a parish with a large Hispanic membership. “People are just panicky.”
“I’ve never seen so much fear so evident,” agreed Javier Garcia of FaithAction, a Greensboro immigrant service agency. “Nobody wants to go out. They’re scared to death.”
The purpose of the series of roadblocks across the state announced by Gov. Mike Easley this week is to catch drunken drivers. Still, after increasing claims that Alamance deputies use minor traffic offenses to jail Latinos and check their citizenship status, advocates planned to watch the program results closely.
“A DUI checkpoint in itself is certainly valid, and we support public safety,” said Rebecca Headen of the state ACLU’s Racial Justice Project. “But at the same time, the potential for racial profiling is there. We have to be realistic about it.”
Though the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office planned to run its checkpoint Thursday night, most participating law enforcement agencies will stage the roadblocks as part of tonight’s “Booze It & Lose It” blitz, according to a spokesman for the Governor’s Highway Safety Program.
Among the locations for blood alcohol checkpoints is Alamance County, where Sheriff Terry Johnson this week clashed with the chairman of the Alamance County commissioners over immigration enforcement.
Alamance is one of eight jurisdictions in North Carolina to have signed cooperative agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The 287(g) agreements give cross-sworn deputies federal immigration enforcement authority. In return, county jails in Alamance, Wake and Mecklenburg, to name a few, hold ICE detainees.
At the commissioners’ meeting this week, Chairman Larry Sharpe criticized the Alamance 287(g) program as “out of control,” and accused the sheriff’s department of “targeting people for minor violations” in order to check their immigration status.
Sheriff Johnson denied racial profiling and said his department was being subjected to unfair media coverage. For weeks leading up to the meeting, Alamance made headlines across the state for two unrelated arrests of Latina women.
The first, in June, was a Honduran motorist a deputy stopped along I-85 at 2 a.m. for an improper license tag. Though the driver spoke no English and had three children with her, the deputy took her to jail. The children were left with a male passenger, who was not a relative and later fled, leaving the children alone all night alongside I-85.
The second incident was the July arrest at the Graham Public Library of a Hispanic circulation clerk on suspicion of misusing a Social Security card and falsifying a job form.
That arrest came out of a probe of health department clients that Sharpe termed “way out of bounds.” Commissioner Tim Sutton, the key proponent of Alamance’s tough immigration stance, said Hispanics are treated the same as any motorist lacking a valid ID.
“What are we supposed to do?” he asked. “Write them a ticket and hope they show up for court?”
In Guilford, Sheriff BJ Barnes said having no license in itself wouldn’t typically result in a driver being taken to jail. But when there are multiple irregularities, he said, this would be at the discretion of the officer.
Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com
