Thom Ringer (Yale University, Law School) has posted Going Off the Record: Local Immigration Enforcement and the National Crime Information Center Database (American Journal of Criminal Law, Vol. 35, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
While immigration federalism has received considerable scholarly treatment, comparatively little attention has been paid to particular local immigration enforcement practices. This Article discusses one practice already in wide use: civil immigration violation arrests by police based on records in the federal NCIC database. It raises several objections to the practice: its ambiguous legality; its tendency to encourage racial profiling of Latinos; and its erosion of the trust of Latino communities in law enforcement. It concludes by proposing an administrative regime to coordinate and monitor state and local efforts to enforce immigration law, and control the dissemination of immigration records.