This letter was written to Mayor Garcia, cc’d to the City Council, city management and APD management, after reports that APD officers were participating in interrogations of people based on a national list of 5,000 men created by General Ashcroft’s Justice Department using crass racial profiling (the selection criteria, were age, gender, and national orgin).

Mayor Garcia,

It has come to my attention that the Austin Police Department has begun assisting the FBI with questioning of those Austin residents among the 5,000 immigrant men General Ashcroft asked local police to interview. Reportedly more than a score of students have been interviewed by teams including APD, FBI and DPS officers, and another report has surfaced of someone questioned at work.

I point this out because of your objection, which you raised in our 11-26 meeting, that such questioning may violate the city ordinance you sponsored forbidding APD to report people to the INS. National ACLU acquired the DoJ guidelines for questioners. The guidelines instruct interviewers to report any immigration violations they uncover to the INS. Even if your city ordinance weren't in place, that approach is counterproductive to any request that people cooperate with the investigation.

It's especially inappropriate to visit people at work where being questioned by police could easily risk someone's job in these tense times, even if their immigration status is secure.

Questions proposed in the guidelines include inquiries into people's political beliefs and requests to report on the political beliefs of their families and friends. Interviewers are instructed to "obtain all telephone numbers used by the individual and his family or close associates." This is a heavy handed, nearly totalitarian tactic considering these people aren't suspects; they were picked based on age, gender, and national origin. At minimum it's an unwarranted invasion of privacy. Plus it risks undermining hard work done by law enforcement to develop positive and cooperative relationships with the targeted communities.

The DoJ dragnet strategy, if followed, is bound to generate resentment against law enforcement rather than cooperation, just as racial profiling has always done in the past.

Please use your influence to urge APD to re-evaluate its participation in these interrogations -- departments in Detroit, San Francisco, San Jose, and Portland have already declined to participate -- and do your best to ensure that neither APD nor anyone else shares immigration status information from these "voluntary" interrogations upstream to the INS.

Thanks for considering these matters,

Scott Henson

ACLU of Texas Police Accountability Project