In the race for the Gwinnett County Commission, illegal immigration is the topic of the day.

Shirley Lasseter, the former mayor of Duluth now running for the District 1 seat, came out last week with a proposal to build a new federal detention center for illegal immigrants in metro Atlanta.

Nick Arroyo/AJC (ENLARGE)

Mayor Shirley Fanning Lasseter holds up one of won two awards from the Design Build Institute of America given for The Public Safety Building during the presentation of the 'State of the City' address last year.

Nick Arroyo/AJC (ENLARGE)

Gwinnett County Commissioner Lorraine Green (District 1) at Gwinnett Justice and Adminstration Center in 2006.

File photo (ENLARGE)

Commission Chairman Charles Bannister.

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"It would take the burden off the local taxpayer and put it on the federal government, which is exactly where it needs to be," Lasseter said. She added that Georgia was one of the largest states that doesn't have such a detention center.

Lasseter said she didn't have details about how much such a center would cost, or just how much it could save Gwinnett taxpayers.

But by making her first major policy proposal on the topic, she joins Commission Chairman Charles Bannister and his challenger Commissioner Lorraine Green in making illegal immigration a major part of their campaigns.

Lasseter is facing Duluth businessman Bruce LeVell and former Suwanee councilwoman Carol Hassell for the District 1 seat, now held by Green. Buford electrical contractor Glenn Pirkle is the third candidate vying for chairman.

On Monday, Green's campaign called for Bannister to "end his continual roadblocks to the implementation of the 287(g) illegal immigration enforcement program" or "place these decisions in someone else's hands."

Passed in 1996, 287(g) is a federal act that allows local law enforcement authorities to determine whether inmates are here legally, no matter what offense they're picked up for, and to forward illegal immigrants for deportation to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

One thing the county could do now, Green's statement said, is cancel contracts with the State Department of Corrections to house state inmates. Doing so, she said, would "free up approximately 126 jail beds and return almost $2 million to the Sheriff's Department."

Bannister's unwillingness to do so, Green charged, is impeding the sheriff's department's implementation of 287(g).

Bannister said the county's been talking about building another jailhouse for a couple of years, so he's not opposed to Lasseter's idea.

Bannister said he wasn't sure it would be legally possible to separate inmates by ethnicity, but if it is, he'd "have no problem" with it.

Along the same lines, Bannister said, the county now earns $1 million from the state contract. Before he would consider cancelling it, he'd like to know "how we're going to replace it."

He said the county has done all it can to speed 287(g), including granting the sheriff's $1.5 million request to pay for 18 new deputies. At this point, Bannister said, it's in the sheriff's hands.

Sheriff Butch Conway said he hopes to have all those positions filled by July and to begin the new enforcement program by the fall. But first, Conway said, he's got to solve the overcrowding at the jail, where the population usually hovers around 2,600. Until they're "hired up" and staffing the new units, Gwinnett can't qualify for the 287 (g) program.

A quick way to start, Conway said, would be to restore those 126 beds to county control.

"The state pays the county $20 dollars a day to keep state inmates under that contract," Conway said. "My hard cost is about $44 a day to keep an inmate. So it's costing us over a million dollars not to have those beds."

Of the 13,000 foreign nationals who were brought into custody last year, Conway said, 360 were deported. Once the county becomes part of the 287 (g) program, he said, that number will rise to 4,000-6,000 a year.

The Latin American Association's incoming board chair, attorney Mark J. Newman, said remaining focused on deportation rather than integration is spending taxpayer resources on local, state and federal levels.

"Those resources are being misplaced on enforcement rather than integration of these immigrants into our community, where they are overall a positive contribution to the local economy, to the local culture and to the local society," Newman said. " Further, the idea of spending more taxpayer money on building more prisons for individuals who are not criminals is bad public policy."

Adam Stone, an associate professor of political science at Georgia Perimeter College, said the question of illegal immigration poses distinctive problems for local communities.

In a county where, say, a sheriff is cracking down on minor infractions in hopes of catching and deporting immigrants here illegally, city and county police officers may feel a backlash at the patrol level, he said.

"Immigration is difficult," Stone said. "We think of it primarily as a federal question and expect federal action. But the enforcement activity falls to the state and local level. And the whole thing about enforcement is Georgia is not a state that borders on another country. You have a lot more federal enforcement in border states, which leaves state and local governments to enforce immigration with insufficient federal support."