GENEVA — “A law is a law, and we want it enforced.”

That was the message the Grassroots Rally Team of Ohio took to a forum on illegal immigration held Tuesday evening at the Geneva Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting room. The forum was in response to media coverage of incidents involving regional law enforcement and illegal aliens who ended up being deported to Mexico as a result of the aliens having been reported to federal immigration authorities.

HOLA (Hispanas Organizadas de Lake y Ashtabula), a northeast Ohio advocacy group for Hispanics, has accused some regional police departments of making unwarranted traffic stops based upon the ethnicity of the driver. The group also produced for the media several poster children for its cause: families torn apart by deportations, which have resulted from routine traffic stops.

The Grassroots Rally Team invited sheriffs from Ashtabula, Lake and Geauga counties to give their side of the issue. They also provided time to Bob Najmulski, a representative of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, who talked about the challenge facing the state in its effort to crack down on fraudulent motor-vehicle registrations by illegal aliens.

John Muzik, a member of the Grassroots Rally Team, set the tone for the meeting.

“We are against illegal immigration,” he said. “We want our immigration laws to be enforced.”

Many of those attending the forum echoed his stance as they posed questions to the sheriffs about what they are doing to make sure their neighborhoods and streets are safe.

Lake County Sheriff Daniel Dunlap laid the foundation for the sheriffs’ comments by saying that as the only elected law-enforcement official in the county, the sheriff is sovereign, a comment that drew a round of applause from the crowd of about six dozen people. He was also careful to point out that as an elected official, his office is open to all constituents. He said he has met with HOLA’s Veronica Dahlberg on numerous specific cases.

Dunlap assured the crowd that his department does not make “pretextual traffic stops”; however, if a stop is made, his deputies are going to make sure they can get a positive identification of the individual and will take whatever steps are necessary to get appropriate answers to their questions concerning the person’s identity and reason for operating that vehicle or being in a certain area.

Ashtabula County Sheriff William “Billy” Johnson outlined a similar process used in his county. He said deputies simply are following the law.

“We follow the rules according to the Ohio Revised Code. We don’t make them; we have to follow them,” Johnson said.

He said charges of profiling are “outrageous,” if for no other reason than the fact deputies don’t have the time to do that in the first place. He said deputies follow the law and make traffic stops only when there is probable cause. Once the stop is made, the same procedure is used to ascertain identity.

“When we make a stop, these people — no matter who it is — we are going to ask them the same questions,” Johnson said.

A significant challenge facing deputies is determining the validity of documentation presented, particularly consulate cards, which are issued by the Mexican government as a way to track its citizens in other countries. While Lake County commissioners passed in 2005 a resolution recognizing the cards, Dunlap said his department does not recognize them because they are “too easy to counterfeit” and there’s no central database against which to check a card’s validity. He said the deputies’ job is also made difficult because there are 60-some types of visas, so they prefer to identify individuals using driver’s licenses and auto registrations.

Johnson, Dunlap and Geauga County Sheriff Daniel McClelland all pointed out that other issues often come to light during the process of attempting to identify a person, such as an outstanding warrant for the individual in another county or from a federal agency. When that happens, deputies are going to detain the person.

Johnson said his department’s policy has been not to detain the illegal aliens if they can at least prove an address using a utility bill. They will be cited for the traffic offense, and the department will notify immigration authorities of the department’s findings regarding their immigration status.

Dunlap said his department processes about 6,500 persons through the Lake County Jail every year, and he estimated that fewer than 100 of them are “questionable” as to their immigration status. Of those, only 20 percent end up being deported.

The law-enforcement officials stressed that they do not have the power to arrest people for being here illegally or to deport illegal aliens. They do provide the appropriate federal enforcement agencies with the names and addresses of suspects, and let those authorities make the call on whether to pursue deportation. An immigration court judge makes the actual determination.

“Bottom line is ... it boils down to if you violate the law, you get cited — and you are illegal, we turn them over to immigration, and they determine if they should be deported,” Johnson said.

Dunlap noted that deportations often amount to “a free ride home” and the deported alien ends up back in the area four weeks later.

“I find it more difficult for myself to go to Canada than for them to come here,” he said, referring to the passport system implemented for U.S. citizens to return to the United States after a trip to Canada.

The sheriffs also agreed that the bigger issue in this debate is border control, and the much larger issue in local enforcement is drug trafficking. Johnson said as much as 97 percent of the work his department handles involves drugs at some level.

Najmulski said the profiling accusations made by HOLA are “serious” because of the kind of legal action that could result if a case went to court. He said he applauded the sheriffs “for not being pushed back in that corner.”

No representative of HOLA spoke at the meeting.

Members of the crowd also expressed their appreciation to the sheriffs for the work they do and the stance they’ve taken toward the illegal-alien issue. Najmulski said there are cities in the nation that have identified themselves as sanctuaries, but he does not see that happening in the jurisdictions covered by these sheriffs.

“A lot of agencies will not deal with this issue,” he said.

Najmulski said the entire nation will be watching the result of the challenge to Ohio’s proposed change in motor-vehicle registration laws, which would eliminate the power-of-attorney option used by illegal aliens to register vehicles. The League of United Latin American Citizens has filed suit challenging the department’s plan to cancel vehicle registrations for thousands of people if they cannot provide proper documentation: an Ohio driver’s license, Ohio identification card or Social Security card.

online: grassrootsrally team.org and fairus.org