Sheriff: Hall Has It Wrong

Congressman John Hall has come under fire from the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department for allegedly reporting erroneous statistics relating to illegal immigration. Hall has charged that Putnam County contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to check on the status of detained criminals only twice within the past nine months. But Captain William McNamara of the Putnam Sheriff’s Department refuted that claim, saying that in the past nine months, the department has actually reported 150 illegal aliens, not two. Moreover, during the past three years, the Sheriff’s office reported 558 illegal immigrants who entered the Putnam Correctional Facility on state or local criminal charges.

A spokeswoman for the congressman did not correct Hall’s statement, but said the congressman obtained his figures from ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center in Vermont. However, the Putnam Sheriff’s Department, by established protocol, reports illegal aliens to an ICE office in Castle Point in Dutchess County, not to the center in Vermont.

“By any objective standard,” McNamara said, “no local law enforcement official in New York State has worked more diligently than Sheriff Smith at reporting and detaining criminal illegal aliens as well as forging a model of cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration officials.”

When asked to explain Hall’s comments, spokeswoman Meaghan Smith said, “The two times referenced in the release refers to calls made by law enforcement in Putnam County to ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center. This is a 24 hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year national enforcement operations center with an 866 number that is answered by their offices in Vermont. This national center serves as an afterhours and weekend contact for all local law enforcement when the local ICE contacts— like the Detention and Removal Section at Castle Point—are closed.”

But, as McNamara said, “The Dutchess County office is the action force that works with local law enforcement to detain and remove illegal aliens.”

Hall’s spokeswoman said the congressman “is bringing federal ICE representatives to the Hudson Valley [next week] to meet with local law enforcement about how [ICE] can work most effectively and cooperatively.” The 19th District representative said the sessions were designed to “inform local police how to work most effectively with ICE regarding detention and deportation, since ICE is the primary federal agency charged with detaining and deporting criminals found to be in the US illegally.”

But Sheriff Smith’s office maintains they interface with ICE agents routinely and regularly catch foreign-born nationals suspected of entering the country illegally. For example, recently, the sheriff’s office released a report of a man arrested for trespassing in a Brewster home. He had been deported from the United States as an illegal alien on at least three previous occasions.

“This illustrates a simple and indisputable fact that, without real action being taken at the national level of government to secure our nation’s borders, these law-breakers are merely being sent for a spin through a revolving door,” Sheriff Smith said.

McNamara said the Sheriff’s Department was “eagerly waiting to participate” in the congressman’s briefing next Tuesday in Carmel in order to inform the congressman about “how effective the alien reporting and detention procedures are that the Sheriff’s office has developed over the years with ICE.”