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Ex-Bush Admin Attorney Advises Arizona Offices on Detecting Immigrants

HeadlineMay 13, 2010

A video has been published on the internet showing a former Bush administration attorney training police officers in Arizona on how to detect undocumented immigrants. The training is conducted by Kris Kobach, a Kansas-based attorney who helped draft Arizona’s law that orders police officers to stop and interrogate anyone they suspect is undocumented. Kobach is a former Justice Department attorney who helped John Ashcroft create a program that required all visiting citizens from twenty-five mostly Arab countries to be fingerprinted and monitored. Kris Kobach now works for the Immigration Reform Law Institute. During the training, he listed twenty ways police officers can detect undocumented immigrants.

Kris Kobach: “Indications from the dress or appearance of an individual that he has been — has recently — that he’s an illegal alien and perhaps that he has just entered without inspection, based on the totality circumstances. Number nineteen, related indications that the vehicle and/or its occupants have been on a very long trip. And number twenty, the individual avoids making eye contact with the officer, and this, of course, can give rise to reasonable suspicion, not only in the immigration context, but in other law enforcement contexts, as well.”

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