Given Pulaski County’s unfriendliness to public disclosure, it’s indeed a breath of fresh air to see how government lawyers in NW Ark. responded to FOI requests for information about local participation in a program to train police in immigration enforcement (itself an issue for another day). They released the information over objections from the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration.
UPDATE: I hear from the ACLU, however, that the police are not necessarily operating in good faith. The Springdale Police Department, for example, is trying, after the fact of its initial application, to claim the officers in this program are all undercover officers and thus exempt from identification. Previously, the department had claimed it was only interested in being able to use officers to check status of people already arrested on other charges. That wouldn’t require an undercover officer.