BIRMINGHAM, ALA. — After confusion and misgivings from some police about how to enforce Alabama’s new immigration crackdown, the state is requiring special training in the law for all its 16,000-plus sworn law officers.
Officials hope the unusual move will alleviate uncertainty about the law on the front lines of law enforcement.
Police chiefs, prosecutors and judges have said that the lengthy law’s complicated provisions were hard to understand, and federal court rulings that blocked some sections while letting others take effect only made life tougher for officers. Some departments have relied on little more than news reports for information about the law, officials say.
R. Alan Benefield, head of the Alabama Peace Officers’ Standards and Training Commission, said Thursday that the panel decided last month to take the unusual step of requiring four hours of training for every sworn officer in the state because of the law’s complexity and the lingering confusion.
He said new laws or court rulings are sometimes added to the state’s normal training curriculum, but full-blown courses for specific laws aren’t held very often.
More than 1,000 officers already have finished the courses, he said, and thousands more from local, county and state agencies will go through training in coming weeks. Mr. Benefield said refresher sessions and curriculum updates likely will be required as courts issue new rulings on challenges by the Obama administration, pro-immigration groups and other opponents of the law.
The law has caused confusion in some areas.
On Nov. 16, in a case that made international news, a German manager with Mercedes-Benz was arrested under the law for not having a driver’s license with him while driving a rental car. The Tuscaloosa city attorney said the charge was dismissed after the man provided the documents in municipal court. State officials said the case was handled properly under the law.
But in an incident just this week, Honda Manufacturing of Alabama said a Japanese worker temporarily working in the country was cited under the immigration law. A person with knowledge of the case said the man was ticketed by a city officer at a routine roadblock even though he had a valid Japanese passport and an international driver’s license.
Statehouse Republicans said descriptions of the incident didn’t match the law, which doesn’t include a provision for ticketing someone. Also, the law states that police should accept a passport with valid stamps as proof that someone is in the country legally.
In lawsuits filed by the Justice Department and others, courts have blocked sections of the immigration law, including a one-of-its-kind provision requiring public schools to check the citizenship status of students. But other sections began taking effect in late September, including one that requires police to detain people if they’re discovered not to have valid documents during a routine encounter such as a traffic stop.
Training materials from the course, provided to the Associated Press by Mr. Benefield, emphasize that only the federal government has the power to determine whether someone is in the country legally, but that police agencies and administrators can be sued under the state law for failing to enforce either it or federal immigration statutes.
A course handout explains how officers should operate under the state statute - profiling based on race, color or national origin is barred - and says the law “does not authorize state, county and municipal agencies to seek out ’illegals’ for deportation.”
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