Judge Rejects Immigration Lawsuit

A judge has dismissed a legal challenge to the federal government's alleged practice of enlisting local police officers to arrest immigrants who are here illegally.

In dismissing the lawsuit on procedural grounds, Judge Leo Glasser of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn left unanswered the central question posed in the lawsuit: whether federal law enforcement officials, without authorization by Congress, can ask local police to share their immigration enforcement duties?

At issue is the type of information that the federal government is allowed to post on the National Crime Information Center database. The database has long provided local police across the country access to information about federal fugitives charged with crimes. Police officers around the country access the database in the course of daily policing and routine traffic stops.

In a lawsuit filed in 2003 on behalf of several nonprofit organizations, lawyers allege that federal authorities began adding information regarding immigration violations to the database. That decision unconstitutionally involved local police officers around the country, the plaintiffs argued.

A federal judge yesterday, Leo Glasser of U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit. The plaintiffs included organizations such as the National Council of La Raza and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

"I think the ruling is disappointing because it does not allow the plaintiffs to address the real troubling merits of the Attorney General's decision to use the NCIC database to enforce immigration law," an attorney who filed a brief supporting the lawsuit, Baher Azmy, said.

Mr. Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School, filed the brief on behalf of several minority law enforcement organizations.

A spokesman from the Justice Department could not be reached last night for comment.

In the opinion, Judge Glasser wrote that another judge in a related case had decided that the attorney general did not have the legal authority to enter civil immigration data into the crime database.