A group of private organizations in Georgia, including one in Gainesville, is pushing for the termination of a program that gives state and local law enforcement the power to enforce federal immigration laws.

In a letter sent to the Department of Homeland Security, 25 state organizations expressed their concern over 287(g), which allows state and local law enforcement to question the legality of a person, as well as detaining and transporting criminals for immigration violations.

They asked that the program be ended in Georgia, as it was in Arizona.

“We feel like, and continue to feel like, the program is not being used in Georgia the way it was designed,” said attorney Arturo Corso, partner in the Gainesville-based law firm Corso, Kennedy & Campbell, LLP.

“The program was supposed to target violent criminals and drug offenders who were in the United States unlawfully and expedite their deportation. But instead, what we actually saw happening in practice with the 287(g) program was 95 percent of the people being deported were nonviolent traffic offenders.”

Corso’s firm deals with immigration litigation and was one of 25 organizations, including law firms and activist groups, to sign the letter.

He and the others in the group wrote that the program has “led to racial profiling and due process violations, eroded trust between police and the community and undermined public safety.”

Hall County was specifically mentioned in the letter, which stated the continuation of 287(g) coupled with Georgia House Bill 87 — adding measures for proving legality — “will lead to the profiling of anyone who looks or sounds ‘foreign’ and will exacerbate the problems ... in Cobb, Gwinnett, Hall and Whitefield counties.”

According to the Hall County Sheriff’s Office, the program was implemented countywide in 2008.

Since then, the sheriff’s office has been “very pleased with the program” and said “from its inception, 287(g) has been utilized for its intended purpose — to screen individuals who are arrested for statutory offenses unrelated to their immigration status.”

“Overall, we’re very pleased with the 287g program,” Sgt. Stephen Wilbanks, spokesman for the sheriff’s office, wrote in an email. “Philosophically speaking, we feel that we are a nation of laws, and it’s these laws that make America the greatest country in the world and the place that so many people from so many other countries want to be. As such, it’s imperative that we uphold and enforce our laws, including our immigration laws. We feel that we’ve done our best to do that in a consistent and fair manner.”

Wilbanks said the department has “noted significant reductions in what we would consider ‘quality of life’ issues such as the volume of illegal drugs coming into our community — particularly those that can be traced back to Mexico — and active gang membership.”

But, Corso said, the policy leaves the door open for more racially-based policing.

“I think that the entire policy, the whole idea of deputizing a local law enforcement agency to act like an immigration agency is a bad policy and I’ve always thought that, and that’s why I signed off on the letter,” Corso said.

“If it’s gang members and violent criminals and drug traffickers, then fine, let’s get them gone. But if it’s somebody who’s driving to work and has no criminal history and heads up a family, and the family has U.S. citizen children, and they’re contributing to our community by working in the poultry industry or the carpet industry or construction industry, and they’re paying taxes and making Gainesville a better place and Georgia a better place, I just didn’t think we should be using 287(g) to deport them.”

Corso said when the program was first implemented in the county, there were major issues with it, including what he considered to be targeted road blocks and over policing. But, he said, that landscape has changed since 2008.

“There’s been a real evolution of 287(g) in this county and where we are now is a much better place than where we were when this first started,” he said.

Wilbanks said “safety checkpoints have never been indented to be utilized as a tool to feed arrestees into the 287(g) program,” and there are policies in place that forbid such practice.

“It was never intended, nor ever implemented by the Hall County Sheriff’s Office, as a tool for patrol officers to work the streets targeting persons whom they believed to be residing in the country illegally,” Wilbanks wrote.

But, Corso said, the group’s main aim is to take that responsibility out of local law enforcement’s hands.

“What we’re saying here is if it’s bad for Arizona, it’s bad for Georgia,” said Corso. “You should cancel it in Georgia and not force good, honest, hard-working law enforcement in the field on patrol to figure out the complexities of immigration law.”