Arizona police to play pioneering immigration role

By Tim Gaynor

PHOENIX (Reuters) - U.S. federal agents have begun training Arizona police to enforce immigration laws in a pioneering move to combat violent smuggling networks from Mexico, police said on Monday.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said federal agents began working with police in Phoenix last month to curb crime tied to smuggling over the border and are set to train select state and county officers over coming months.

"We will be the first (state) in the nation with county, city and state officers with a cross designation to enforce immigration laws," Alonzo Pena, the ICE special agent in charge of Arizona, told Reuters in an interview.

Last year, some 1.1 million undocumented immigrants were arrested crossing over the Mexico border, almost half of them in southern Arizona.

Armed clashes between rival drug and immigrant trafficking groups are increasingly common in the desert state, with several people having been shot to death in smuggling-related incidents since the start of the year.

Pena said that, once trained, the new teams would focus on breaking up human and drug trafficking rings and other border-related criminal activity in the Phoenix area.

"The intent is very clear," he said. "This is a tool to go after criminal aliens and aliens that are here illegally and committing crimes ... not to randomly question individuals about their immigration status."

The operation began last month when 10 ICE agents were assigned to work alongside Phoenix police investigating violent crime related to human and drug trafficking, Pena said.