Prince William County is encouraging other Virginia communities to enact the kind of tough immigration policies it has adopted even though a new report says the lessons from the Prince William case should be applied with “great caution” to other locations. County supervisors recently sent that recommendation to the Virginia General Assembly as part of its 2011 legislative package, saying the county supports “implementation of similar sound policies by all law enforcement agencies within the commonwealth.”
The county policy, passed in October 2007 and revised in 2008, requires local police to check the immigration status of anyone they arrest.
Board Chairman Corey Stewart, R-at large, said he believes Del. Jackson Miller, R-Prince William, will introduce a bill to “essentially replicate the Prince William County policy statewide. I think that’s the core of what we need to do on illegal immigration in Virginia.”
Miller could not be reached for comment.
The county’s policy, however, delivered mixed results, according to the recently unveiled three-year study from the University of Virginia’s Center for Survey Research.
After the policy was enacted, the attitude of the county’s Hispanic population toward the police cooled and the county’s jail became overcrowded because federal officials couldn’t remove immigrant inmates fast enough, the report showed.
Federal officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement said they would be reluctant to enter into such broad agreements with other local law enforcement agencies to handle immigration cases because of such capacity issues.
The report on Prince William’s immigration policy also cautioned that strong leadership within Prince William County’s police department helped a smooth transition to tougher enforcement of immigration laws and, absent those qualities, “it is not clear that a policy of this kind would have had the same results.”
“We close with a gentle admonition that the lessons from Prince William’s experience should be applied with great caution to other places in other times,” the report says.
