Leaders say they want to make their rural Eastern North Carolina county the toughest place in the country for illegal immigrants.

The county commissioners are meeting with a lawyer to help identify public services that can be denied to illegal immigrants. And in cases where it is not legal to exclude people, they say they may eliminate programs entirely -- including federally funded prenatal care for poor women -- in an attempt to drive illegal immigrants from the county.

"They're coming to the United States illegally and bringing their pregnant wife and children," said Hood Richardson, the Beaufort commissioner who is leading the charge. "Those families are falling on our social welfare systems. We can't afford that."

Beaufort County, about 100 miles east of Raleigh, has already become a leader in the state in discouraging undocumented Hispanic immigrants. The seven-member Board of Commissioners has declared English its official language, removed Spanish signs and bilingual automated phone answering systems and has begun tracking the number of Spanish-speaking people who use social services.

In April, Richardson asked the health and social services departments to determine the number of illegal immigrant clients by counting Spanish surnames.

More than 60 people from across Eastern North Carolina, all legal residents with Spanish names, descended on the most recent commissioners' meeting to protest the move.

"It's just discrimination," said Cipriano Moreno, pastor of Alpha and Omega, a Hispanic Baptist church in the county seat, Washington. "They don't like Hispanics here. They think that all the Hispanics are here illegally, but they're not."

County Manager Paul Spruill said the county does not plan to begin counting Spanish names. But the commissioners say they will continue to target illegal immigrants in other ways.

"A lot of people are unaware of the cost; they don't know what this is doing to our hospitals and our schools," said Commissioner Stan Deatherage. "We're working as a grass-roots effort to draw attention to the problem."

How big a burden?

Deatherage says he hopes the county will inspire a national effort to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that guarantees children public education regardless of their immigration status. He says he wants to see illegal immigrants barred from schools nationwide.

Deatherage said this week that he thinks Beaufort County has one of the highest proportions of illegal immigrants in the state. Census figures, however, show that about 4 percent of Beaufort's residents are Hispanic, compared with nearly 7 percent statewide.

The census does not track illegal immigrants, but advocates estimate that about half of Hispanic immigrants are in the country illegally. If that estimate holds true, about 930 of Beaufort County's 46,000 residents were illegal immigrants in 2006.

Commissioner Robert Cayton is among a minority who has opposed the board's efforts.

"Illegal immigration is a problem in the United States, and it's one that the federal government needs to address," Cayton said.

He says the county has plenty of its own problems: lagging schools, a lack of economic development, the need for a better road system and persistent poverty.

Nearly 18 percent of Beaufort County's residents and about a quarter of its children live in poverty. Its economy is reliant on farming, manufacturing and tourism -- all industries that use immigrant labor.

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