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Written by TJ Gilmore
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Thursday, 07 January 2010 18:29 |
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 Unfortunately travel kept me from live blogging Monday's City Council meeting. You can find Stephen Southwell's live blog here, and city official video of the meeting here.
E-Verify got shot down for approval but the council and staff will be exploring ways to encourage contractors to employ legal workers while reducing legal liability for the city as well as ensuring we don't cripple our contracting by making it too difficult to do business with the city. Mayor Ueckert made the point that if you're doing E-Verify do it for everyone, across the board. Councilman Gorena mentioned that we could set contract limits based on contract size and that we could also let companies know that once they're done working with Lewisville they could "get off the E-Verify program". I'm personally confused by Gorena's seemingly 'flexible' stance on who is covered and who isn't. Either you put in place a strong, enforceable ordinance that's fair to all businesses working with the city, or you're just putting up a piece of paper with no teeth. I fully back putting a full court press on the State to require penalties for companies that flaunt hiring laws and don't ensure that legal employees are paid fairly, in fact, I'll be visiting with my state reps this spring, pushing for just such a drive. E-Verify is getting better, but as Councilman Watts put it, 'It's great to be a pioneer, but many of them got scalped'. Any time we can get benefits from federal law without getting entangled with the federal liabilities, I'm interested. E-Verify is designed for Federal and State enforcement currently. Perhaps in a few more years that will change, but for now things like the no stopping ordinance from last meeting are the way to best deal with illegal workers at a city level. On the 287(g) front, Councilman Gorena voted for not moving forward with 287(g) but for continuing to look at the individual programs that make the most sense for Lewisville after not getting any agreement from council to pursue 287(g) certification. It's good to see that Councilman Gorena, by his vote, is beginning to understand that 287(g) is not a good tool for Lewisville. In fact, the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers have also applauded Lewisville and held us up as a model for how to best use ICE tools for a municipality like ours. Programs like CAP and Community Shield are outstanding models of leveraging tools that the federal government makes available. Councilman Watts summed it up best; the programs we're using "ICE helps us"; 287(g), "We help ICE". One of the water mains in my neighborhood broke again last night for the third time this year in that location and for the fifth time along that street in the past year. It's always fun to drive in and see a miniature version of the Bellagio Fountain Show percolating through the concrete seams. After calling the water department I got to thinking, "There's gotta be an app for this", and sure enough, there is! CNN ran an article here, discussing "GOV2.0". With access to data, it's pretty easy to create applications that can take that data and make it useful to citizens. Unfortunately, many cities don't have the money or skills to build the tools, but they do have the data. Lewisville has an active presence on Twitter and FaceBook (search Lewisville Staff for the official feed), both easy ways to get in contact if you're online. As far as 2.0 tools, Lewisville has been tinkering with 'SeeClickFix' a web app that allows you to report potholes, etc. online or from a smart phone without having an account on Twitter or FaceBook. It looks promising but would be great to have a couple of after hours phone numbers in case I want to call someone instead of just click a map. San Francisco actually posts their city data sets online so people can develop programs. I'd love to see something like this and perhaps finding a way to work with UNT students to create applications that would better serve residents. In the future, these types of tools would allow residents to be more involved in the city. That's the brain dump for this week. Thanks again for reading and if you have any ideas for local government or business stories or just general input feel free to give me a call in the 'contact me' section. |
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Last Updated on Thursday, 07 January 2010 20:15 |
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Round and Round the 287(g) Bush |
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Written by TJ Gilmore
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Sunday, 02 August 2009 00:00 |
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 Our newest city councilman has brought up the spectre of 287(g) again. As has been written here and linked profusely, even the government (not just the Obama Administration but the previous Bush Administration) believes that 287(g) is a broken program with little consistency and limited usefulness.
In response a new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been created. It indeed clears up a few things: 1- Cities can now request legal support from the federal government who will decide if they wish to support the city in any legal issues. 2- The Department of Homeland Security spells out their three priorities and continually repeats "ICE retains sole discretion in how it will manage its limited detention resources and meet its mission requirements. ICE Field Office Directors may, in appropriate cases, decline to detain aliens whose detention is not mandated by Federal statute. ICE will prioritize the detention of aliens in conformity with ICE detention priorities." Again, if the law broken isn't a Federal law they have the right to dismiss. They have a policy of dismissing any infraction below a Class B misdemeanor- which is the vast majority of ticketing offenses. 3- They give more detail on who can speak with the media and how complaints are filed. Again, not changing the program just documenting to make up for the poor accountability of the first go around. The CAP and ICE ACCESS programs that Lewisville has been using are just as effective, reduce liability, and more importantly don't have our police doing the paperwork that we pay ICE 5.9 BILLION a year to do. After spending the last year reviewing this policy, the only place 287(g) makes even some sense is if a state entity has a large jail facility with excess capacity. Then becoming a holding area for ICE and being paid partial fees makes sense. This is why the VAST majority of the 66 agencies with agreements on 287(g) are Sheriffs departments. Perhaps our councilman could get some traction with Denton County to make this a reality? 287(g) is just another way for the Feds to take our money and continue to fail at doing their job of controlling the borders. It's a shame really. We should provide a path to citizenship that doesn't take over a decade, and stop providing the temptation of a porous border for people to find economic success. Both Federal and State issues. |
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 November 2009 05:38 |
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Operation Community Shield |
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Written by TJ Gilmore
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Thursday, 25 June 2009 01:50 |
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 Police Chief Kerbow in his recent report mentioned that Lewisville had been exploring the use of Operation Community Shield. With the failure of 287(g), including feedback from the only two cities in Texas using 287(g) that the use of CAP is more effective (Carrollton and Farmers Branch), Immigration and Customer Enforcement has slowly been rolling out alternatives.
Operation Community Shield is in short an anti illegal criminal gang measure that gathers intelligence from local police officers and matches it against ICE's databases of illegal aliens. It was originally created to address a particularly ruthless Mexican drug cartel, MS-13, that had made inroads to the United States. In May of 2005 that focus was expanded to include all transnational street and prison gangs. This program seems to bridge the gap between local law enforcement intelligence on suspected gang members and ICE's intelligence on illegal aliens. These two pieces of data historically didn't combine, so you had an incarcerated gang member who could have been detained and deported if ICE knew, or you have someone detained and/or deported by ICE without them knowing the illegal alien was also a criminal. Seems like a simple case of 'right hand, let me introduce you to the left hand' if you ask me. I've not had a chance to speak with the chief, however, based on my research there doesn't seem to be the same level of resource drain as 287(g) since we're simply forwarding our existing anti gang intellegence to ICE for cross reference. Our police aren't being asked to take on the liability or additional training and expenses, and since this looks like it's being applied to all gang related members, would pass the Constitutional 'profiling' test. Where we would be expending resources is as additional 'boots on the street' should an ICE gang sweep be instituted in our area (of which there have been at least 2 through the metroplex since 2005), but this doesn't seem too onerous and fits under the typical interjurisdictional agreements our police and fire alread have in the region. In short- this is the kind of no nonsense law enforcement activity that will definitly remove the criminal aliens from the region- or at least make it unpalatable to stay here. What this won't do is solve our illegal immigration problem, which at its heart is an economic issue. As long as you have businesses willing to bend, skirt, and outright break employment law- you will have day labor, legal immigrant, citizen, or illegal immigrant. It's a simple function of avoiding payroll tax at the business level. If people truly wanted to eliminate illegal immigrant employment, they would demand that their hotels, restaurants, lawn companies, repair companies, and any other business they spend money with please show proof of compliance with government I-9 statutes. One could also ask if the business uses E-Verify or some other sort of verification system for employment. If enough of us asked for it, I have a feeling compliant companies would begin marketing that fact (we're an I-9 compliant business) as a competitive advantage. Too long we've enabled this behavior by turning a blind eye to the services that we get for cheap due to artificially low wages. Having grown up in a part of Arizona that provides North Texans with most of their daily salad greens, I can guarantee that if you don't personally know which local farmer grew your lettuce, you're contributing to illegal immigration. Heck, just look back to 2005 when Wal-Mart paid $11 million to settle a lawsuit alleging they'd hired hundreds of illegal workers. For some reason Wal-Mart seems to continue to thrive. The quickest solution is to spend a little more of our money with people who can assure you they do business legally and comply with federal employment law. Otherwise, you get what you don't pay for. |
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Last Updated on Thursday, 25 June 2009 02:32 |
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Written by TJ Gilmore
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Wednesday, 17 June 2009 15:29 |
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Tuesday night's council meeting had an update on what the city is doing to combat illegal immigration. The specifics are on pages 158 on in the linked PDF. Here's the Summary: - Carrollton and Farmers Branch are the only two cities in Texas who have registered with 287(g). Both cities have told Lewisville that the CAP program Lewisville uses is more effective.
- Lewisville recently requested to be part of a new ICE program called Operation Community Shield. I'll have more on this in another post. Looks promising.
- Lewisville is focusing on the 'demand' or employer side of the equation. Much easier to enforce and provides equality under the law. Putting a spotlight on employers skirting the law is, in my opinion the best way to reduce illegal immigration. No money, no incentive. Of course the only law that's enforceable is traffic violations when soliciting in the roadway. Anything else is on private property.
- One property owner in the Huffines area has expressed interest in filing complaints about the activity on their private property. This migh help, but there are several property owners that would have to voluntarily comply to remove solicitation from that area of town.
- On the legal front, the city attorney has recommended spending $7,500 to have a constitutional attorney explore ways that staff may not have come up with to reduce illegal alien activity in Lewisville. City staff have been unable to find a way, including several citizen ideas that wouldn't immediately cost the city hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in litigation over the past several years.
I'm excited to see the city discussing what they've been doing for the past couple of years. Unfortunately, if people aren't involved or actively looking for this information, all they see is the eyesore and this kind of information needs to be easier to obtain. The staff and council seem to be covering the bases and even be going above and beyond by retaining external services to ensure our taxes are spent responsibly. Personally, I'm glad we're addressing the business side of this equation, it protects our businesses from unscrupulous competitors and still protects legal citizens who might resort to day labor as a way to make ends meet in these tough economic times. |
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 20:48 |
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