Lawsuit aimed at ending local immigration enforcement

By Andria Simmons

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A lawsuit filed this month in federal court on behalf of three Cobb County residents seeks to end a controversial program that grants certain immigration powers to local law enforcement officers.

However, immigration law experts say the lawsuit has little chance of succeeding.

The lawsuit claims that the program, known as 287(g), is unconstitutional because it denied Corina Garcia Albarran, Luis Magana and Maria Lourdes Segobiano-De Soto their right to due process. Albarran and Segobiano are both Mexican natives living in Cobb County.

Both were flagged as illegal immigrants after being booked into the Cobb County jail, Albarran on a shoplifting charge and Segobiano on a charge of driving without a license. Neither of the women have been convicted and their criminal cases are still pending. However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has initiated removal proceedings against them.

The third plaintiff, Magana, is in the country legally under "temporary protected status" and is from El Salvador. Cobb County police arrested Magana on a first-degree forgery charge for allegedly presenting a false immigration document to renew his Georgia driver's license. However, Magana says the document -- his work permit -- was valid and was inappropriately confiscated by the state Department of Driver Services, according to the lawsuit.

Erik Meder, the Marietta attorney who filed the suit, is asking a judge to grant class-action status so he can represent "all Hispanic persons who have been or will be restrained and interrogated in Georgia" because of 287(g). The program is a local-federal partnership that trains local law enforcement officers to identify illegal immigrants who are arrested and hand them over to ICE. As of late September, the program had been used to identify 14,692 illegal immigrants in Georgia for deportation.

The Cobb County Sheriff's Office became the first local law enforcement agency in Georgia to partner with ICE. In recent years, the Georgia Department of Public Safety and Whitfield, Hall and Gwinnett counties have inked similar agreements.

"I don't think this program can be in operation and constitutional," Meder said.

The lawsuit filed Oct. 8 in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Georgia names the directors and agency heads of ICE, the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Georgia Department of Public Safety and the Georgia Department of Driver Services, as well as Cobb County Commission Chairman Tim Lee and Cobb County Sheriff Neil Warren.

A spokesman for Cobb County said he had not reviewed the lawsuit and could not comment on it. ICE spokesman Ivan Ortiz-Delgado also declined to discuss the pending litigation.

Maj. Don Bartlett of the Cobb County Sheriff's Department said Friday that the department hasn't been served with the lawsuit. However, he said "287(g) has been a really good program for us and we have no intention of discarding it."

Charles H. Kuck has been an immigration attorney for more than two decades and is past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He said Congress gave ICE the authority to delegate powers to local law enforcement agencies when it passed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996.

"This law is 14 years old," Kuck said. "Don't you think somebody would've brought a lawsuit like this some time ago if there was any chance this lawsuit was unconstitutional? It doesn't mean it's not good to bring this issue to the forefront, because the law is a bad law and it's a bad policy, but that doesn't make it unconstitutional."

Meder disagreed, saying "the desire of Congress is not the measure of constitutionality, thank God."