Local
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Kaipat slams ICE's Haley for 'inflammatory' claim

By Ferdie de la Torre
Reporter

Labor deputy chief Cinta Kaipat bristled at the suggestion that her department is not cooperating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and reminded an ICE spokesperson that the CNMI is not “a colony.”

In a statement issued yesterday, Kaipat said that ICE spokeswoman Lori K. Haley's allegation that Labor was not responding to ICE's requests relating to more than 500 deportation referrals was not true and even inflammatory.

“The Commonwealth should be treated as a partner. We are not a colony,” she said.

Haley had yet to respond to an e-mail request for comments as of press time.

To make the Commonwealth and federal collaboration a success, Kaipat said it is necessary to have mutual respect for their respective roles and operational cooperation at working level between agencies. This operational cooperation, Kaipat said, should be done “without inflammatory defensive statements from public relations officials.”

Haley told Saipan Tribune last week that ICE has repeatedly asked Labor to provide it additional biographical information on more than 500 deportation referrals, but Labor has yet to respond to these requests.

“ICE is ready to review and determine appropriate action on the DOL referrals as soon as we receive the necessary follow-up information,” Haley had said.

Kaipat insists that Labor has facilitated ICE processes to remove illegal aliens, not delayed them.

“The statement made by Lory K. Haley, a public affairs officer and not an operational officer of ICE, is not correct,” Kaipat said. “Ms. Haley may not be familiar with the situation here in the Commonwealth.”

She said Labor has provided information to ICE officials in exactly the same manner they used to provide information to the CNMI Immigration Division.

“Our former Immigration Division deported between 200 and 300 illegal aliens each year. There is no reason ICE cannot do the same,” she said.

Kaipat recommended that ICE use its authority under Section 287g of the Immigration and Nationality Act to provide funding to local law enforcement officers to assist in locating and arresting aliens.

She said ICE has an Office of State and Local Coordination that operates this program nationwide and that many states participate in.

Kaipat also pointed to the failure of U.S. agencies to hire local people.

“I understand that ICE's personnel, assigned to the Commonwealth only on a temporary basis, may have a problem. If they need translators and informants to find people, they should use their resources to hire them. But one part of the problem stands out,” she said.

Kaipat said ICE has not hired any of the former local Immigration Division inspectors to assist them.

“These people are very knowledgeable about the local immigration enforcement situation. I think this would be an obvious resource to tap. If ICE used local talent, with the information that the Labor Department formerly supplied to local officials and now supplies to ICE, they should have considerably more success,” Kaipat noted.

Under former Commonwealth deportation processes, the Labor Department provided identification information to the Immigration Division on illegal aliens who formerly had held work permits.

Kaipat said the Immigration Division used that identification information to locate and arrest the named aliens. These people were then presented to Commonwealth prosecutors.

“Under our former deportation processes, the prosecutors would ask the alien for a current passport and a current permit allowing employment in the Commonwealth. If the alien did not have these credentials, they were deemed deportable. Of course, anyone can present a defense against the prosecution's challenge, but these cases moved quickly in the Commonwealth Superior Court,” she said.

Kaipat said under the CNMI deportation processes, most of the cases were disposed of and the alien departed within 60 to 90 days.

“We provide the same identification information to ICE on a very timely basis, and we certify illegal status in the same way for ICE. That means, if ICE needs it, there is a Labor Department official ready to testify that the alien has no current permit to work in the Commonwealth,” Kaipat said.

She criticized ICE for not deporting anyone in the six months they have been in charge of deportations in the Commonwealth.

“So now we have a public affairs officer, Ms. Haley, saying that it is our fault, not ICE's fault, for this rather astonishing record,” she said.

Elsewhere in the United States, Kaipat explained, ICE officials are responsible for finding illegal aliens and creating the necessary information with which to prosecute their deportation. She said there is no burden on state agencies to spend their resources for this purpose.

Kaipat said that before Haley offered her observations, the CNMI already initiated a meeting with ICE officials in the Commonwealth to collaborate on their problems with deporting illegal aliens. That meeting will be held in the near future,” she added.

She noted that ICE has not even processed the more than 200 cases that the Commonwealth prosecutors turned over to them on the transition date.

“Those cases involved complete prosecutor files. As I understand it, nothing remained to be done but to bring the case,” she said.

“The GAO [Government Accountability Office] report told us that ICE had not even brought many of these cases. So why ICE is complaining about the lack of data on the more than 1,300 illegal aliens that we certified to them months ago is puzzling,” Kaipat said.

She said she regards the failure to deport any illegal aliens and the consequent buildup of illegal aliens in the Commonwealth as an enormous social problem for the Commonwealth.

She vowed that she and Labor will do their best to help alleviate this problem.

“At the same time, I must spend our very meager funding resources on finding jobs for U.S. citizens. I cannot do ICE's job for it. They are the federal government. They have enormous resources. They need to use those resources to fix this problem,” she added.