Manny Zaragoza, one of the first Henderson County deputies to receive authority under the 287(g) agreement, questions a driver at a traffic checkpoint in Hendersonville the first weekend that the program went into effect in July 2008. /ARCHIVE

The federal program that empowers local jailers in Henderson County to investigate the immigration status of inmates comes up for renewal this fall in the midst of federal budget cuts that have prompted the federal government to announce the shut down of the same program in other jurisdictions.

Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, has proposed meeting a projected $17 million cut in the budget of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency by terminating some of the so-called 287(g) agreements that operate outside of county lock-ups, known as task-force models.

Of the eight 287(g) agreements in North Carolina, only those of the Durham City police and the Guilford County Sheriff’s Department are task force models.

The agreement between Henderson County and ICE would continue past October 15 only if both sides agree to it, according to ICE documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. But as the expiration date nears, DHS and ICE have signaled their favor for another program, Secure Communities, in which ICE agents rather than local jailers detect the presence of undocumented immigrants in jail and prison populations.

In fact, ICE has not approved any new jail or task-force 287(g) agreements since August 2010, and the agency said in a statement that it was suspending all consideration of pending applications for new task force models.

“The Secure Communities screening process, coupled with federal officers, is more consistent, efficient and cost effective in identifying and removing criminal and other priority aliens,” said the statement emailed to La Voz Independiente by Vincent Picard, ICE spokesperson for North Carolina. “ICE will begin by discontinuing the least productive 287(g) task force agreements in those jurisdictions where Secure Communities is already in place with sufficient federal personnel.”

According to ICE statistics, since the beginning of the 287(g) program in Henderson County in July 2008 until the end of the fiscal year three months later, local jailers placed 147 undocumented inmates in removal proceedings, 556 in 2009, 247 in 2010 and 165 in fiscal year 2011.

The decision to put an inmate in ICE custody often results from an interview by a local jailer with 287(g) authority during which the inmate volunteers that they have entered the country without authorization.

Under Secure Communities, ICE agents cross-reference local inmates’ biometric data with its own immigrant database and the FBI’s criminal database. After getting a match between the two databases, these agents decide whether to place the inmate into ICE custody, a process known formally as issuing a notice to appear before an immigration judge.

Secure Communities has operated concurrently with 287(g) in Henderson since November 2008 and since that time ICE agents have begun removal proceedings against 40 inmates in fiscal 2009, 127 in 2010 and 87 during the last fiscal year. North Carolina was the first state to receive Secure Communities and the program now operate in all 100 counties.

The 287(g) agreement is independent of the Henderson County detention center’s designation as the western holding facility for suspects who are in ICE custody.

Henderson County bills ICE $71 per day per federal inmate detained in its jail, and the program to date has netted more than $835,000 for the county sheriff’s department, according to Henderson County budget documents.

However, some of these inmates from other counties arrive in Henderson as the result of remote interviews conducted by Henderson County jailers with 287(g) authority.

Another factor that could impact the detention program’s future value to Henderson County is ICE’s announcement in November that it now prefers to issue immigration bonds to suspected undocumented immigrants or to even forgo the issuance of notices to appear to non-violent suspects arrested on local charges such as driving without a license.

Buncombe County Sheriff Van Duncan speaks to the Latino Steering Committee

Buncombe County Sheriff Van Duncan said his department has decided to reimburse a California carpet cleaner $400 for tamale and tortilla dough, shrimp and cheese in which three different preliminary tests erroneously detected the presence of cocaine.

“We are going to reimburse him for his food costs because it is the right thing to do,” Duncan said Thursday in a telephone interview with La Voz Independiente. “It was not Mr. Carranza’s fault that the test kits tested positive for cocaine. He said his items cost $400 and this seems fair and reasonable.”

However, Duncan said his department would not be responsible for the towing and impound fees for Antonio Hernández Carranza’s Ford Explorer or his five-month old dog found inside because they were “a direct result” of his decision not to pull over when deputies instructed him to do so.

“We try always to do the good and reasonable thing,” Duncan said. “We do not always do the good and reasonable thing and we say we are sorry when we need to.”

Hernández, 45, reached by telephone at his sister’s home in Johnson City, Tennessee, said he appreciated the gesture but that it was insufficient to cover all of his losses. Hernández said the SUV is now essentially unusable because of the odor left behind by the spoiled food.

“I have a lot of clothes that I also have lost because they smell so bad I will never get the smell out,” Hernández said in an interview conducted in Spanish.

The Mexican Consulate in Raleigh contacted Hernández, a native of Michoacan state in Mexico, on Wednesday, saying they may offer to help offset some of his losses and help him get back to California.

The sheriff said it was “unfortunate” that Hernández spent four days in jail while deputies waited for more thorough testing of the food by the State Bureau of Investigation, which invalidated the preliminary findings. But Duncan added he would have been criticized equally had Hernández bonded out of jail and the SBI confirmed the presence of cocaine after his release.

Duncan emphasized that his deputies’ decision to stop and arrest the Mexican national Sunday morning, May 1, had nothing to do with Hernández’s ethnicity, the original encounter with his deputy being so brief and the light of dawn so dim that the deputy, Patrick Vanderveen, only knew he was in pursuit of a male.

The sheriff took umbrage at the assertion from Gustavo Silva, a volunteer for Nuestro Centro in Asheville, and other Latino advocates in Asheville that Hernández’s arrest and high bond for the narcotics possession charge was racially motivated.

“I have a lot of sympathy for the Latinos who live here and the circumstances that have brought them here, ” Duncan said, adding that he has publicly stated his support for giving immigrants who are in the process of becoming legal permanent residents limited North Carolina drivers licenses which would allow them to drive to and from work.

Duncan said that he has always tried to maintain a dialogue with the Latino community since his election in 2006 and that he would welcome the opportunity for further dialogue.

The sheriff said sleep deprivation and exhaustion could be the explanation for Hernández’s erratic behavior, leading deputies to suspect that he was intoxicated.

“He was exhausted and should not have been driving,” Duncan said. “That was a danger to public safety. Another vehicle could have hit him from behind while he was stopped and the situation could have turned out to be more tragic.”

Hernández told La Voz Independiente after his release last week that he had completed the cross-country trip in three days without sleeping to see his sister in Johnson City.

During the trip of more than 2,000 miles, Hernández had a minor accident as he neared North Carolina but was confused as to where nor does he recall making the wrong turn that led him to Asheville.

Hernández on Thursday said it was not the first time he had driven for days with little or no rest. “I always go to Mexico like that but I always arrive safely,” he said.

Sheriff deputies responded to a call from the N.C. Highway Patrol about 6 am that Sunday that a car was stopped in the travel lanes of I-240 eastbound near Hominy Creek. Hernández was under the wheel when the deputy approached and continued at low speed for three miles until the Merrimon Avenue exit, where other deputies who had established a roadblock used stop sticks to deflate Hernández’s tires.

Duncan said any driver, regardless of race or ethnicity, who acted like Hernández would have gone to jail. Hernandez said Thursday he tried to heed the deputy’s intent to pull him over but to him the highway didn’t seem to have a safe place to do so. The I-240 expressway does have emergency pull-offs adjacent to both travel lanes but they are not as wide as on Interestate 40 in Asheville.

Later the same day of his arrest, three preliminary field tests detected the presence of cocaine in Hernández’s food, meant as a gift for his sister.

The next afternoon deputies charged Hernández with felony cocaine possession, and a magistrate raised his bond from $1,500 to $350,000. Two days later, a district judge sentenced Hernández to time-served for failing to stop for a blue light and siren and dismissed the narcotics charge.

In fact, Hispanics are now the largest minority group in every mountain county except for Buncombe, Rutherford and Burke, where there are still more African Americans, and Jackson, Graham and Swain, home to the Qualla Boundary and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

If their population growth continues unabated, Hispanics will soon surpass African Americans as the largest minority in Buncombe County, where about 100 fewer Hispanics than African Americans live, and Native Americans as the largest minority in Jackson County.

In Henderson County, the 14,254-person Hispanic population is nearly three times the size of the African American population there.

The presence of 27,773 more people in mountain counties who identified themselves as either Hispanic or Latino from 2000 to 2010 prevented a net population loss in Yancey County and even bigger loss of population in Mitchell County, the only county in the mountains to lose population during the decade.

While the total population of Mitchell County fell by 108 people, the county added 320 Hispanics. In Yancey, where the total population grew by only 36 people, the Hispanic population increased by 336 people.

In Burke County, the 1,454 new Latino residents accounted for 82 percent of the total population growth of the county. The 384 new Hispanics to Avery County accounted for 60 percent of that county’s population growth.

In Buncombe and Henderson, home to nearly half of the region’s nearly 50,000 Hispanics, Latinos represented a third of the total growth of Henderson County’s population and 27 percent of the growth in Buncombe.

Esther Chavez, a native of El Salvador who is a member of the board of Nuestro Centro, the Hispanic community center of Buncombe County, says the availability of jobs and the quality of life has brought Hispanics to the region.

Chávez says politicians who wish to throw obstacles in the way of undocumented workers, the majority of whom are Hispanics, need to understand that a mass exodus of Hispanics would be detrimental to the mountain economy.

The decennial head count found that 800,120 people who identified themselves as either Hispanic or Latino resided in North Carolina last year, an increase of 111 percent more than the 378,963 who lived in the state during the 2000 Census.

In the 21 westernmost counties, the Hispanic population grew 126 pereent, from 22,090 a decade ago to 49,823 in 2010. With this increase Hispanics now account for five percent of the total population of these 21 counties.

They are more than five percent of the population in the counties of Buncombe, Henderson, Macon, Polk, McDowell, Burke and Jackson. The Hispanic population tops 2,000 people or more in Buncombe, Henderson, Burke, Rutherford, McDowell, Macon, Jackson and Haywood counties.

More than half of the region’s Hispanics live in Buncombe and Henderson counties. The region’s most urban county, Buncombe, saw its Latino population grow by
149 percent to 14,254 from 5,730 in 2000 so much so that this ethnic group now constitute nearly 6 percent of the county population.

Just as the 2000 Census found, Henderson continues to have the highest percentage of Latinos among mountain counties. The 10,424 Hispanics who now call Henderson home represent an increase of 114 percent from 4,880 in 2000 and account for 9.8 percent of the county’s population.

Carolina McCready of El Centro and the Latino Advocacy Coalition of Henderson County found the Census results a bit surprising.

“I would have thought that Henderson would have more Hispanics than Buncombe,” she said.

Paige Franklin, a volunteer with Nuestro Centro, El Centro’s counterpart in Asheville, said she believes even more Hispanics live in the mountains but that many abstained from answering the Census questionnaire for fear that their answers would be turned over to Immigration and Customs enforcement agents.

“I can almost guarantee there are more people who are not accounted for,” Franklin said.

McCready agreed with Franklin that Hispanics may be under-represented in the 2010 Census but not to the extent of the 2000 Census.

In contrast to 2000, in 2010 the Census Bureau had more Spanish-speaking enumerators working in mountain counties. The agency also purchased advertising in Spanish language media founded after 2000, including La Voz Independiente, that urged participation in the 2010 Census.

Macon County had the largest percentage increase in Latinos in the mountains. The 2,230 who lived there in 2010 represented a 738 percent increase over the 2000 population of 266 Hispanics.

In fact, the Hispanic population increased in every mountain county with the exception of Madison, where the number of Latinos dipped by 7 percent, from 454 in 2000 to 423 in 2010.