EDITORIAL - New York Times
Published: June 5, 2009

This week, in Washington and cities across the nation, immigrant advocates, clergy members and labor and business leaders have been meeting to press their case for comprehensive immigration reform. Hopes have been raised before and repeatedly dashed. But this year there is a chance — if the White House provides real leadership and Congressional leaders show the courage and sense they have previously lacked.
President Obama has pledged his support for reform that includes a path to citizenship for the undocumented. At the same time, his administration has not done nearly enough to moderate enforcement policies that unfairly target citizens and legal residents — often because they are Hispanic — while feeding the fear and hopelessness of illegal immigrants as they await the opportunity to get right with the law.
The Department of Homeland Security has been pressing ahead with the old Bush administration playbook of tightening the screws on the 12 million undocumented, particularly by lengthening the long arm of local law enforcement. Make no mistake: Stronger and more effective immigration enforcement should be a pillar of any reform plan. But stricter enforcement must be coupled with a path to legalization. And poorly designed enforcement without stringent checks on errors and abuse is a remedy worse than the disease.
The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, is sticking with the 287(g) program, which deputizes local police departments to enforce immigration law, despite all-too-frequent errors and abuses. Despite community outrage over racial profiling and indiscriminate “crime sweeps” in Maricopa County, Ariz., by the notorious sheriff, Joe Arpaio, he remains a member in good standing of Ms. Napolitano’s enforcement team.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expanding its Secure Communities program, which automatically checks the immigration status of everyone booked in jail. That sounds benign, but advocates have raised legitimate concerns over its lack of oversight and internal controls. Any blanket checks of arrestees, both innocent and guilty, could easily provide cover to police departments that use neighborhood sweeps and mass arrests as a pretext to “cleanse” communities of unwanted immigrants — not just violent criminals, but harmless housekeepers, day laborers and gardeners.
There could be no quicker way than this to erode the hard-won advances in community policing, through which law enforcement agencies rely on the trust and cooperation of the people they protect.
There is a grim contradiction at work here, with the Obama administration simultaneously, and self-destructively, twisting the dials of hope and fear.