Immigration isn’t top police priority

‘Ho‘okipa,” the concept of welcome, is a core value in Hawaii. While the “Ho‘okipa Welcoming Policy Act” is a lovely sounding name for the state’s proposed stance on immigration enforcement, perhaps its application to new legislation will mislead the public on what it’s about.

So does the term “sanctuary,” which has been applied to laws in other cities and states that resemble Senate Bill 2290 and House Bill 1996. People too easily get the impression that this means illegal immigrants are invited to a place where they can safely hide, no matter what.

This is not the case with these twin measures, moving now through both chambers of the state Capitol, once you look beyond the preamble and title page. They are aimed at keeping the focus of state and county law enforcement where it needs to be: on local crime.

Generally, the measures would disallow local police from stopping, questioning or arresting someone based solely on an immigration hold or immigration warrant. The bills have received overwhelmingly supportive testimony, and for good reason: Immigration is the purview of the federal government, both in crafting the laws and enforcing them.

Local law enforcement agencies have their own resources taken up by the heavy task of local crimefighting. There are times when enforcement officers can and should work cooperatively with immigration authorities to fight local crime and keep local communities safer.

But that cannot be their primary focus, as a matter of resource management, for one thing. And if it becomes anything like a primary duty, that will erode any level of trust that police and other authorities develop with the communities that include legal and illegal immigrants.

Law enforcement relies on that trust to hear reports of criminal activity such as — in the extreme — the planning of terroristic acts.

There is some risk in passing this bill, said state Rep. Cynthia Thielen, one of five Republicans in the House. The bill passed out of the House Public Safety Committee; Thielen was its lone member who voted yes “with reservations.” And after more thought, she said, her final vote is likely to be “no.”

Thielen’s concern is that the act might serve as a “thumb in the eye” of the Trump administration, which has found itself on opposite sides of the immigration question with Hawaii state officials.

There is no doubt that Hawaii has positioned itself against the administration’s hard-line immigration policy. And this legislation could use some weeding to take out extraneous preamble language that merely exacerbates tensions with the president.

However, it’s unlikely that the passage of the Ho‘okipa Welcoming Policy in Hawaii will change the dynamic significantly. The plain fact is this measure codifies in law what is already in the U.S. Constitution about federal powers. It would support local law enforcement in setting its own priorities, provided the final law includes assurances of local assistance in criminal cases.

In a key provision, the bill lays out circumstances in which the local government would comply with a federal order to detain a suspect in an immigration case, even when there is no judicial warrant. These include suspects convicted of a felony and those for whom there is probable cause of engagement in terrorist activity.

Settling on the right constraints that would pass muster in a constitutional challenge should be the job of lawmakers debating the issue as the legislation moves through committee reviews.

But at its core, the proposed law would set the right policy tone: Immigrants who observe local laws may not be exempt from the federal investigators, but neither will they be in the local crosshairs.