Soon, he hopes, it will be full of illegal immigrants on their way to deportation.

The Alamance County Sheriff's Department, which Johnson has run since 2002, recently became one of only a dozen local law enforcement agencies nationwide to sign up for a program that allows them to enforce federal immigration laws.

Three of the 12 are in North Carolina. Sheriff's departments in Mecklenburg, Gaston and Alamance counties are now checking the immigration status of every foreign person they arrest -- whether for running a stop sign or selling drugs -- and starting deportation of those in the United States illegally.

In Mecklenburg County, which has been using the program for less than a year, nearly 1,000 people have been deported.

Once a little-used program, local immigration enforcement is gaining popularity. Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison said he is considering it.

Johnson said the program has dual benefits for Alamance County. It brings in money, because the federal government pays about $66 a night for every immigration detainee who stays in the jail. And it rids the county of illegal immigrants, who he contends sponge public resources and are more prone to commit crimes than legal residents.

"Their values are a lot different -- their morals -- than what we have here," Johnson said. "In Mexico, there's nothing wrong with having sex with a 12-, 13-year-old girl ... They do a lot of drinking down in Mexico."

Marco Zarate, a Mexican native who is president of the N.C. Society of Hispanic Professionals, challenged the sheriff's assessment of Mexicans. He acknowledged some cultural differences -- for instance, people in Mexico's rural areas often marry as teenagers -- but said that adults having sex with children is not considered ethical in Mexico. Nor is heavy drinking.

"We're human," said Zarate, 53, who lives in Raleigh. "I'm not saying there are not people who do bad things, but it's not right to generalize. We have good people and bad people everywhere in the world."

Court statistics do not show a significantly disproportionate level of Hispanic crime in Alamance County. Between 2002 and 2006, Hispanics accounted for 12 percent of Alamance County's criminal cases, according to the Administrative Office of the Courts. In 2005, they made up 10 percent of the county's population.

Running against aliens

Alamance County, just west of Chapel Hill, has one of the fastest-growing Hispanic populations in the state. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county had 736 Hispanic residents in 1990. By 2005, it had nearly 14,000.

As in many places around the country, the increasing presence of immigrants has fueled tensions.

Johnson, 57, a retired agent with the State Bureau of Investigation, was elected to his second term in 2006 by a wide margin. A Republican, he has made his political name by railing against illegal immigration.

Shortly after he first won the office in 2002, he got national media attention for arresting Hispanics at the state Division of Motor Vehicles office. Deputies charged more than 100 people with obtaining property by false pretenses for using false documents to get licenses.

At the time, legal immigration status was not a factor in the state driver's license requirements. Some of the charges were later dropped.

Before the presidential election in 2004, he promised to go door-to-door to investigate Hispanic voters, saying he suspected many were illegal immigrants. To prove his point, he sent the names of 125 Hispanic voters to the Department of Homeland Security. He said the federal check showed that only about a quarter of them were legal.

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