We'll know if you've been sleeping, we'll know when....

The Homeland Security Department (a name that still sends a chill up my spine) is trying to backhandedly enlist local police forces in immigration enforcement, even though most of them oppose the idea.

The FBI's database, known as the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), includes the names of more than 40 million felons, fugitives, missing persons and others being sought by law enforcement agencies. It is used by more than 80,000 law enforcement agencies.

The database had been expanded to include immigrants who were deported for felony crimes, failed to show up for deportation hearings, or registered during a special program aimed at visa holders from Muslim nations that was implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Now, the feds want to add another 140,000 names each year, those of immigrants deported for noncriminal reasons. Also included would be the names of thousands of foreign students who don't show up for class or who otherwise violate their visas. However,

[t]he International Association of Chiefs of Police has urged the federal government to limit the database to individuals who have warrants for their arrest and to issue clear guidelines for local law enforcement. A committee of police chiefs that advises the FBI's database division recently raised similar concerns about the proposed expansion. ...

The issue is also part of a broader debate over the proper role of local police, many of whom fear that illegal immigrants will stop reporting crime if they cannot trust law enforcement and that relations with Hispanics will be strained if police are seen as an arm of federal immigration authorities.

It also would violate rules in a number of states that bar police from enforcing federal immigration laws, rules that were created to head off exactly that sort of mistrust.

None of that is relevant to the paranoid, xenophobic Bush administration, which is determined to find a way to track every damned foreigner from the moment they get here to the moment they leave, apparently in the belief that every such person is a danger:

But adding the names of noncriminals who were deported and student visa violators would significantly expand the number of foreign nationals on the list, officials said.

"It's adding more information out there," one Department of Homeland Security official said. "The last thing we want is for an encounter to occur, they can't do something and then this person commits a crime or something else that is detrimental to the community."

And if "more information" winds up screwing up community relations between minorities and already-overburdened local police who are already being force-fed a diet of fear of dissent, protest, and difference, well, tough.