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Barnes, who was close to signing an agreement giving certain officials in his department access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement databases, said the Department of Homeland Security’s policy violates current security regulations at the Greensboro and High Point prisons.

“Ultimately, they don’t want you to use a Taser,” Barnes said. “That could be a deal breaker. I’m not going to comment on that.”

ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said the agency’s use-of-force policies do not allow the use of an EMDD (electro-muscular disruption device) on immigration detainees.

“You could have EMDDs in prison,” Rocha said, “but we would not allow the use of them on our inmates.”

Barnes said it’s difficult to draw that line in a prison. For example, if prison guards had to respond to a fight in a crowded recreation room, they wouldn’t have time to verify the nationality of those involved before deciding what action to take, Barnes said.

According to the sheriff’s office’s most recent inmate breakdown, there were 64 non-U.S. citizen inmates awaiting trial in Greensboro and High Point jails. Of those 64, 48 were here illegally.

Stun guns and tasers are neither a new nor an unusual tool for quelling unrest in prisons across the country. However, their use continues to generate controversy both in the United States and under the UN Convention against Torture.

Tasers, first introduced 25 years ago, temporarily paralyze a person with a 50,000-volt shock. The weapons are alternately described as “non-lethal” or “less lethal” because suspects and detainees have been shown to die immediately after the shock, although a clear link has not been proven.

When inmates are shot with a Taser, Guilford Prison policy requires that they be immediately examined by medical personnel.

Col. Randy Powers, the office’s deputy sheriff, said there have never been any deaths related to the use of Tasers in either the prisons or in the field.

According to Powers, tasers are preferable to pepper spray to break up scuffles or overpower violent suspects because tasers can only be aimed at one person, whereas pepper spray can accidentally hit several people.

Barnes said the mere presence of a Taser acts as a deterrent.

“There’s something enlightening about that little red dot on the chest,” Barnes said. “But to us, it’s a use of force. A report is written and a file is created. You’d be surprised how little we actually use it.”

Between January and June 2009, stun weapons were used in 11 of 114 reported cases of violence by prison guards at the Greensboro and High Point prisons, according to Major Debbie Montgomery, chief of the prison division.

The Taser problem at the Alamance County Detention Center came up during a 2008 ICE inspection that resulted in an overall rating of “poor,” according to documents obtained by the public interest group Fairness Alamance through a Freedom of Information request in July.

Unlike the Alamance prison, which serves as a regional focal point for federal inmates, Barnes’ office would play a smaller role in 287(g). Barnes’ plan calls for two deputy sheriffs, both fluent in Spanish, to be given reciprocal authority and access to ICE files.

Currently, if an undocumented person from another country is arrested and charged with a crime, it can take days or weeks to find out who they are and what other warrants are out for their arrest. Under Section 287(g), that delay will be reduced to minutes, Barnes noted.

As part of a major overhaul of immigration detention policy, President Barack Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, who oversees ICE, last month issued a memo that the new 287(g) partners must sign. One goal was to ensure uniform treatment of detainees across jurisdictions.

Although the sheriffs support a unified approach, details still need to be negotiated, especially the Taser issue, Barnes said.

In Alamance County, Sheriff’s Office spokesman Randy Jones said the jail had used Tasers before the 287(g) program and continues to use them. Jones said there was no mention of a Taser ban in the 287(g) agreements under which Alamance County operated, and he could not explain the 2008 ICE inspection.

“They considered it a ‘deficiency’ to have Tasers. Just the possession of them,” Jones said. “But we are not changing our use of Tasers.”

In the memo, which law enforcement agencies must sign by October, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano emphasizes that 287(g) is aimed at dangerous criminals: drug dealers, murderers and kidnappers.

With her July announcement, Napolitano also sought to “alleviate concerns that people could be arrested for minor offenses as grounds for deportation proceedings,” a key criticism facing Sheriff Terry Johnson of Alamance.

Hannah Gill, a Graham resident who founded Fairness Alamance, said the new 287(g) approach is a response to similar situations across the country.

“Obviously the lack of immigration reform has created a lot of challenges and problems for communities,” said Gill, an anthropologist. “We’re going through a period where there’s really extreme anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Gill said the memorandum aims to put a spotlight on serious, violent offenders while preventing 287(g) partners from wasting their resources on minor traffic offenders, which she said has created a climate of fear of police in the Latino community.

Last week, the top stories on the ICE website were that investigators had “deported the second man this week wanted in Mexico for murder,” 53 gang arrests in Florida, several child pornographers were arrested, and a tractor-trailer carrying 97 immigrants “including children” was smuggled into Nogales, Arizona.

This is in contrast to the widespread criticism of 287(g) programs across the country, one of which reached a boiling point in Alamance County in July 2008. That year, a young library worker was arrested at her workplace after it was discovered that she had sought prenatal care from the county health department. Marxavi Angel Martinez, then 23, had been brought here illegally from Mexico at the age of three.

Barnes says he has no such vision for Guilford’s 287(g) program. The initial plan would be for a sworn Special Operations deputy to go to prison and question inmates suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

Once they are determined to be ICE cases, the inmates would likely be transferred to Alamance, a regional facility that is not as overcrowded as Guilford, Powers said.

Addressing concerns about potential racial discrimination against Latinos raised in recent community forums on 287(g), Barnes describes the program he envisions as being “self-initiated” by the people who commit crimes.

“If I have no reason to deal with you, if you have not broken the law in any way, then you will not get into trouble with this,” Barnes said.

“If ethnic profiling has occurred in other countries, we are simply sorry and woe betide them. We will not do that here. We are not looking for people to infiltrate the system or tear families apart.”

As part of the U.S. government’s efforts to transform the deportation process into what a newly appointed ICE official called a “truly civil detention system,” the agency will end the detention of families at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Austin, Texas.

The notorious for-profit facility, the subject of vigils, ACLU lawsuits and harrowing footage of children locked behind barbed wire and families in cells with open toilets, is set to be converted into an immigration detention center for women, the New York Times reported Thursday in an interview with John Morton, the new head of ICE.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at

373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn