How is there not such a duty?
Because there isn't. How is this difficult to understand?
If a person is arrested for a crime, police check their name, fingerprints, address, to determine whether or not they have a prior record or outstanding warrants.
If the person is here illegally, they have no paper, no records, no birth cert, no social, no tax id, none of these things an American would have.
Great. Post yours.
C'mon,
amigo -- papers, please.
It should be quite easy to determine ones legal status in this country without any significant burden.
Just about each and every one of those papers is the responsibility of a different state or federal agency -- and they
don't cooperate as well as they should.
How long would it take you to get a copy of your own birth certificate? A day? Two or three? And that's
after a drive to the state capitol to cut through the usual bureaucratic red tape. Now, multiply that by the number of papers you just demanded (but cannot produce yourself,
amigo), multiplied
again by the number of people the police arrest every day in every city in the country, and maybe, just maybe, you'll understand why the federal government is so darn unwilling to do its own job and trying to foist it off on the states.
We do, afterall, live in a survielance society. Not like it's the Wild West.
Since you enjoy our surveillance society so much, papers, please,
amigo.
Especially if you're prosecuting them on another crime. That should be a pretty key piece of information for the DA.
No, it's a pretty irrelevant piece of information. Whether or not a person is in the country illegally has no bearing on whether they, for example, stole a car.
Meanwhile -- papers, please,
amigo.