The number of deportations through a federal program has more than doubled in Whitfield County in the last two years.
But the entire amount of deportations in Georgia and Tennessee has dropped over the same period.
“At the beginning, we couldn’t process every alien that came in. A lot of them had to be let go because we only had a few people trained,” said Capt. Wes Lynch, one of seven officers with the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office who were trained in 2008 to enforce immigration law under a program known as 287(g).
So far this fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, the officers have identified 422 people for deportation compared with 379 in 2008.
Of those, 206 people have been deported or accepted voluntary departure in Whitfield County, according to officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency.
Capt. Lynch said the process is complicated, but his staff has learned how to do it and has become more efficient at it.
“This processing is time consuming and it can be very complicated,” Capt. Lynch said. “It can be done but it’s a process that (has) certain steps you have to go through. People have to be specially trained to do this, and we didn’t get any additional personnel,” he said.
“The initial struggle was how do we utilize the personnel that we have to try to get the job done the best that we can, so to begin with we started out slow and carefully,” he added.
Now, he said, his staff can process almost everybody who comes into custody who is an illegal immigrant.
Georgia peaked in deportations in 2008, when the four agencies — the Georgia Department of Public Safety and the Cobb County, Hall County and Whitfield County sheriff’s offices — already had joined the program, but now it has declined.
Close to 2,000 people have been deported or accepted a voluntary departure so far this year in Georgia, compared with 2,571 last year and more than 3,500 in 2008.
WHAT IS 287(g)?
A section under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 that authorizes the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies to permit designated officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions.
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