Hooray to the Tulsa Country Sheriff's office! Boo to Mayor Cornett of Oklahoma City.
"We house them (illegals) in a separate pod, all by themselves, because of the language barrier, unless they're from rival gangs and might cause a problem," said Sgt. Shannon Clark of the Tulsa County sheriff's department.Leonardo Carrizo | For The Dispatch
How those detainees ended up in the two-story, medium-security immigration pod is a controversial subject, rife with claims and denials of racial profiling.
Oklahoma's attorney general gave no guidelines to police and sheriff's departments about how to enforce the new law, which requires them to check the immigration status of anyone arrested for a felony or drunken driving.
As Ohio lawmakers consider a bill modeled on Oklahoma's new crackdown -- considered the nation's toughest -- they already can see the fallout here.
"Only the federal government can enforce immigration laws," said Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett. "There's a misperception in our own community about new discretion our police received in our city. It's been difficult to communicate directly to our citizens."
"Gosh, the Tulsa County sheriff's department is the model in Oklahoma for the way state and local enforcement agencies ought to be cooperatively enforcing immigration law," said Randy Terrill, the Republican state representative who wrote the legislation.
Of the 742 detained in the Tulsa jail in the first six months of this year, 677 were Mexican citizens.
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