Sheriff Fears Texas Gov. Perry's Anti-Illegal Immigration

The border city of Juarez has been racked by violent drug related crime recently and has quickly become one of the most dangerous cities in the world to live. As drug cartels have been fighting over ever lucrative drug corridors along the United States border, the murder rate in Juarez has risen to 173 slayings for every 100,000 residents. President Felipe Calderon's strategy of sending 7000 troops to Juarez has not mitigated the situation. With a population of 1.3 million, 2,600 died in drug-related violence last year and 500 so far this year, including two Americans who worked for the U.S. Consulate last weekend as they returned from a children's party.

Yet El Paso, Texas manages to come out on top as the safest large city in the United States – a distinction due in no small part to the trust law enforcement authorities in El Paso County have built between themselves and the largely Mexican immigrant community, said Sheriff Richard Wiles.

Many governors and other state and local officials who want strict enforcement on immigration believe that the federal government has failed to control illegal immigration, and that states must take the matter into their own hands.

There are cities in this state that have made decisions that they're going to be havens for those that are in conflict with federal immigration laws or state laws, and we're going to prohibit that," Perry said. "We'll have a good and open discussion about what we're going to prohibit."

Wiles says if his officers, and other local law enforcement authorities, are required to play a large role in cracking down on illegal immigrants, it would mean local and state officers possibly making judgment calls on complex immigration issues that they are ill-prepared to handle.

The process of booking someone in our local jail is costly,” he said. “Rooming them is costly, prosecuting them is costly, providing them with a local defender is costly. Why should the citizens of El Paso have to pay more for a service that is the issue of the federal government.”

In Houston, Parker said her problem with Arizona-style laws is that it gives too much discretion to officers on the street in determining who might be here legally and who isn't. Parker said 20 percent of her city's population wasn't born in America, and that she wasn't just referring to Hispanics born elsewhere.
His officers already contact immigration agents when they come across someone arrested for a crime who turns out to be in the country illegally, Wiles said, an approach that helps to ensure that people who are a threat to public safety do not go back out on the street, and eventually get deported.
Riddle, of suburban Houston, has long been one of the loudest anti-illegal immigration voices in the Capitol. She found Perry's prioritizing validating.

"This is the United States of America. Not the United States of Luby's," said Riddle, referring to a popular cafeteria-style Texas restaurant chain. "We cannot just pick and choose the laws that we want to enforce. We cannot pick and choose the laws we want to respect."