Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2269

Roswell's police chief faxes lists of suspected illegal inmates to U.S. officials every day, for the most part a gesture ignored.

A national backlash against illegal immigration has many police chiefs squirming behind their badges. They're the faces of law enforcement in a country that doesn't always enforce immigration laws.

But Roswell Police Chief Edwin Williams has found an unlikely ally to help him feel true to his duty: the fax macine.

At least once a day his jailers fax the names of inmates suspected of being in the country illegally to immigration agents in Atlanta. It's a practice Williams started a decade — and roughly 10,000 names — ago, long before illegal immigration grew into a front-burner issue.

Today, Roswell stands alone in the area covered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) regional office in Atlanta. No other jurisdiction in the Carolinas or Georgia sends such a list, said Kenneth Smith, the office's special agent-in-charge.

The north Fulton city of 100,000 has faxed the booking sheets of 1,396 detainees to ICE in the past nine months alone, according to police department records. Immigration agents have picked up three of them, Williams said, or one out of every 465.

Once, an immigration official called to say the police department was wasting its time with the daily faxes, Williams said. So the jailers quit. When the chief found out, he went ballistic. "I said 'You will continue,' " Williams recalled. "I don't care if they just throw it away. It's my fax paper."

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http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/northfulton/stories/2006/10/25/1026metfax.html