GASTONIA - A federal effort to enlist local law enforcement officers to help identify and deport criminal illegal immigrants is a mere stopgap in the face of a much bigger problem, officials told a congressional panel Friday.

"I and many others strongly disagree with President Bush's policy, or lack of, on illegal immigration," Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph told four House members at a hearing on empowering local law enforcement to combat illegal immigration.

"The Congress of the United States has let us down by the lack of action on the illegal immigration issue for decades," Pendergraph told the panel that included N.C. Republican Reps. Virginia Foxx, Patrick McHenry and Sue Myrick.

U.S. Rep. Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican and chairman of the subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Reform, also attended the hearing at Myrick's Gastonia office.

Pendergraph's department last winter signed a memorandum of understanding with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agreement allowed 12 deputies to be trained to screen the immigration status of people arrested in Mecklenburg, home to North Carolina's largest city, Charlotte.

The 287(g) program, as it is known, gives local officers access to ICE's database of fingerprints and photographs, which Pendergraph and others say is the only reliable way to identify the immigration status of an arrested person.

Since screening began May 1, Pendergraph said, his department has found that most of the immigrants who pass through his jail are here illegally.

"So many illegal immigrant criminals have been identified through my 287(g) program, it is causing me a jail space problem," Pendergraph said.

Pendergraph's department is one of only seven in five states with access to ICE's database.

Gaston County Sheriff Alan Cloninger told the panel his department received approval Thursday to join the program, but Pendergraph said many other law enforcement leaders who have tried repeatedly to participate say have been turned down or ignored.

Michael Lands, district attorney for Gaston County, said the federal government doesn't have enough agents to handle an illegal immigrant population of that size.

"Ultimately, ... this is a federal government problem that you need to address," he told the panel.

The government's approach to illegal immigrants, Lands said, has been "to wait until they commit a state crime and then determine if it's serious enough to deport them."

Souder responded that federal, state and local governments will have to cooperate to improve the system.

"Somehow we've got to figure out how to do this together," he said.

The human cost

The mother of a Gaston County teacher who died in a July 2005 hit-and-run crash in Brunswick County caused by an illegal immigrant pleaded with the panel for a solution.

Scott Gardner was on vacation with his family when their car was struck by a truck driven by Ramiro Gallegos, who was intoxicated and had a history of drunken driving arrests.

Wife Tina Gardner remains in a vegetative state at a nursing home, her mother-in-law Emily Moose said Friday. The couple's two young children are effectively orphaned.

Gallegos was sentenced earlier this year to 14 to 18 years in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of second-degree murder.

"If you break the law to get here, you're not going to respect the law once you're here," McHenry said.

That comment, plus a statement by Moose that "millions" of lives have been lost to illegal immigration and a complaint by Foxx that the media obsesses about the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq while saying little "about the people being killed by illegal immigrants every day," appeared to motivate Lands to interject.

"I think it needs to be said ... illegals aren't the only ones out there committing crime," he said. "There's plenty of crime by American-born citizens.