Mesa starting to move on Immigration

The City of Mesa and ICE have come to an agreement on prisoner ID checks of everyone who comes to jail in Mesa. The results here truly define the difference between action and words when it comes to getting the job done.

The previous council sent a letter requesting the appropriate training. Their request was placed in the queue and sat at 70th on the list waiting for a response.

Mayor Scott Smith and City Manager Chris Brady meet with the ICE officials while they were in Washington DC and got them to agree to a stopgap measure until the training can be conducted. Now, we are that much closer to checking immigration status, and have a working agreement with ICE that will make everyone's job a little bit easier.

Smith is right, the cities are taking a greater role in controlling immigration. Rightly or wrongly, sometimes you can only count on local government to make things happen. We aren't seeing much on the national level, but things certainly appear to be getting at least a little better on the county and local level.

Hopefully, this type of forward thinking and flexibility will be the benchmark of this new Mayor and Council. Sometimes sending a letter and hoping for the best is not enough. I recently got into that miniseries "John Adams" since it came out on DVD and the similarities and differences between politics and government today were pretty interesting.

Requesting the training and waiting for a response feels like when people used to sit around and wait for emmisaries and delegations from other countries to come and negotiate. Waiting for ICE to get back to them feels like John Adams waiting to get word from the US on where he should be seeking political support.

Smith and Brady taking it upon themselves to meet with ICE and get things moving reminds me of when Adams went and sought funding from Amsterdam.