Critics Say Tactic of Raiding Building Sites to Scare Out Immigrants is Repulsive and Illegal

With the US Senate bogged down in a debate about what to do with the country's 12 million illegal immigrants, a sheriff in a small town in Florida has been testing a new and somewhat controversial solution to the crisis.

For the past three months he has been conducting dozens of raids on construction sites in his department of Panama Beach. Following up complaints from the public, he identifies the sites where illegal workers, many of them Mexican, are thought to be on the books.

He then sends a posse of five or six police cars to the building site, sirens blazing. The cars screech into the site, the illegal immigrants - as the sheriff assumes them to be - panic and run.

Police cars take chase and apprehend the workers, who are then charged with resisting arrest or carrying false documents, sent to court or handed over to the immigration services.

The sheriff, Frank McKeithen, says he devised the technique out of frustration with the number of illegal immigrants in the area and the lack of action by federal authorities. He claims to have the right to act in this way under a local law that forbids employers from taking on undocumented workers.

"We scratched our heads on what we could do and what we couldn't do, and instead of complaining about it, we decided we'd just work with what we had," he told the News Herald, a local paper.

But lawyers acting for some of those caught up in the raids have protested that the treatment is repulsive and itself illegal. They say that there is nothing unlawful about merely running from police officers, and that only federal authorities, under immigration provisions, have the right to carry out sweeps for illegal immigrants.