M3D1: Law Enforcement and Immigration

M3D1: Law Enforcement and Immigration

M3D1: Law Enforcement and Immigration

Question 1: Is immigration enforcement a proper role for law enforcement personnel? Does it conflict with the traditional role of “protect and serve?”

Immigration law is a proper role for law enforcement because the reality of immigrants posing danger to the country is now more amplified than ever. It is imperative to involve the participation of every agency to uphold national security especially considering the real threat posed by radicalization of American youth, which may likely be also facilitated by immigrants. However, this is not to mean that law enforcement should be left to handle this issue as they desire without some any form of regulation and due oversight. If left without adequate regulatory mechanisms, it is likely that law enforcement could diminish the likelihood of illegal and legal aliens reporting potential criminal incidences or helping in criminal investigations. Additionally, the biased application of immigration laws could lead to civil rights breaches especially of the immigrant populations, leading to harmful social divisions as noted by Kammer (2020).

Additionally, despite it being desirable for law enforcement to enforce immigration law, policies must be implemented to guide how they should participate in this undertaking. These policies are important because law enforcement lack sufficient training on how to enforce immigration law, a civil issue, which may cause diverse social problems.  Consequently, such guiding immigration law enforcement policies would help avert violations of civil rights and thus protect the overall community welfare. Ultimately, in the current age of radicalization, local terrorism and other forms of crime that are also orchestrated by legal and illegal immigrants, it is right for law enforcement to enforce immigration laws. If such enforcement is adequately guided, it will enhance the traditional law enforcement’s role of “protect and serve.” Moreover, just as mentioned by Llorente (2017), the recommendation is for law enforcement to uphold focus on criminals and on individuals though as national security risks instead of directing all their focus on immigrants who only have civil violations.

Question 2: How is the management of lawful immigration related to the security of the nation? How could people harm the country or its citizens by misusing the lawful mechanisms?

Managing lawful immigration is important for national security because it will help deal with the problem of many American policymakers succumbing to their prejudices and fears regarding what they believe immigrants to be. The source of this problem is the belief that immigrants are naturally criminals, despite the vast evidence to the contrary. Securing the security interests of immigrants will help contain the result of the prejudices they suffer from the stereotypic immigration policies that eventually compel the immigrants to engage in crime. When immigrants can access the necessary basic amenities without experiencing bias as noted by Bier (2018), they will most likely strengthen cooperation with law enforcement and be more inclined to share intelligence and help police in criminal activities investigations..

People could harm the country and its citizens by misusing the lawful mechanisms. For example, President Donald Trump recently violated the Muslims’ right to religion when he introduced a traveling embargo on Muslims by denying Muslims coming from Muslim-majority nations access to America (Somin, 2019). Despite pretending that this was to secure the country, the underlying reason was the fear that Muslims were terrorists, hence the need to curtail their entry into the country. By all means, this was an instance of using a lawful mechanism in a prejudiced way.

Question 3: Should President Trump have pardoned former Arizona Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio? Defend your position.

President Trump was wrong to pardon Joe Arpaio despite the fact that it is sometimes agreeable to contravene the stipulated provisions of the rule of law to keep law and order. Considering that Joe was the country sheriff, it was not in the best interest of the citizens for the president to pardon him because it communicated to the juniors that harassing minority populations on mere assumptions is tolerable. Retaining Joe implied that even if the junior or other senior law enforcement officers violated minority rights, their actions could be defended on the basis of protecting Americans against the social disorders posed by immigrant populations. The president should have fired Joe and instituted a committee to design better policies that could be used to deal with the problems posed by legal and illegal immigrants. Even if such policies were made, there is a high likelihood that Joe could still circumvent them and keep harassing the minority Latinos because there would be no adequate oversight as he would most likely be in charge of scrutinizing the process.

References

Bier, D. (2018). Why the legal immigration system is broken: A short list of problems. https://www.cato.org/blog/why-legal-immigration-system-broken-short-list-problems

Kammer (2020). I’m a liberal who thinks immigration must be restricted. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/opinion/immigration-democrats.html

Llorente, E. (2017). Homeland security instructs Arizona immigration agents to keep focus on criminals. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/homeland-security-instructs-arizona-immigration-agents-to-keep-focus-on-criminals

Somin, I. (2019). Immigration law defies the American constitution. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/us-immigration-laws-unconstitutional-double-standards/599140/