A new report says that the partnership between the state's local law-enforcement agencies and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement has created a climate of racial profiling, threatens civil rights and doesn't meet the program's own goals.

The report released Wednesday by the UNC School of Law and the ACLU of North Carolina examines the 287(g) program, which takes its name from the section of federal immigration law that established it in 1996.

Eight agencies in the state have the program, which trains local law enforcement to act as immigration authorities. The most common arrangement is for jailers to check immigration status after being trained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Forsyth County has a pending application to start the program, after years of debate over its merits.

At a press conference at the law school, Rebecca Headen, an attorney for the ACLU, said that the study documents allegations of racial profiling and mistakes, including lawful residents stopped and questioned and a handful of cases of citizens who have had proceedings started to deport them.

"That is racial profiling," Headen said. "It is still a violation of civil rights, and it is still morally wrong."

Deborah Weissman, a UNC Law professor whose students did much of the research for the study, said that the point of 287(g) when it became law was to go after terrorists and hardened criminals.

But what's happened instead is that after Sept. 11, the program began to be used to deal with worries about illegal immigration, she said.

Instead of going after people committing felonies, the largest category of people passing through the program in several counties have been people arrested on traffic violations, not counting DWIs, she said.

"It's been more of a political football," she said.

Interview requests to ICE were referred to a spokesman with the Department of Homeland Security who could not be reached Wednesday.

Forsyth Sheriff Bill Schatzman said he hadn't read the study and couldn't comment on it.

From what he's seen in Mecklenburg County, where the jail has the 287(g) program, jailers work hard to avoid any appearance of profiling by asking the same questions of all people jailed, Schatzman said.

The Forsyth Sheriff's office currently is part of ICE's Criminal Alien Program. It allows the sheriff's office to call ICE whenever someone suspected of a crime is also suspected of violating immigration law.

The county will be hard-pressed to expand its program because the jail lacks space for more inmates, Schatzman said.

Schatzman said that he hasn't gotten any complaints about the more-limited program in place here.

Victims who are here illegally are sometimes reluctant to come forward, but that's been true for some time and it's not clear if it has gotten worse in recent years, he said.

Randy Jones, a spokesman for the Alamance County Sheriff's Office, defended that agency's use of the federal program. The UNC and ACLU study focused in part on Alamance County, saying that the agreement with federal authorities is vague, creating a steering committee but not spelling out what it should do or how it should supervise the program.

Jones said that when people are arrested for minor offenses, it's still common to find other violations, such as false names or documents.

"It's so commonplace it's almost comical, if it wasn't such a serious matter," he said.

The ACLU and UNC researchers said that there have been reports of checkpoints put up near churches with predominantly Hispanic membership, or markets that have a largely Hispanic customer base.

Checkpoint data also doesn't have to be reported to the state database that tracks ethnicity and race of people stopped by police to guard against profiling. That makes it hard to evaluate whether those checkpoints are fair, the researchers said.

Jones said that checkpoints are rotated through all areas of the county and do not target any group.

One of the legal problems of the immigration-enforcement programs is that, unlike criminal courts, deportation proceedings do not offer everyone facing deportation an attorney at taxpayers' expense.

Yesterday's report is one of several recent ones on federal immigration enforcement.

The Migration Policy Institute released a study earlier this month criticizing an ICE program meant to go after dangerous criminals. The study said that the program has largely caught illegal immigrants who have no criminal record. ICE established arrest quotas for each enforcement team, the study said, and in 2006 ICE dropped a requirement that 75 percent of the people arrested have criminal backgrounds.

Another study, released by the Pew Hispanic Center, found that growth in illegal immigration and more enforcement of immigration laws has led to a shift in the ethnic makeup of people sentenced in federal courts.

People of Hispanic descent made up 40 percent of all people sentenced in federal court in 2007, up from 24 percent in 1991. The U.S. adult population is about 13 percent Hispanic.