Suppose you don’t have a driver’s license or auto insurance. You get behind the wheel of a friend’s car, which you’ve borrowed, and you drive recklessly, sideswiping a car and injuring a passenger.

Realizing what you’ve done, you drive off in a panic. The police catch up to you and arrest you. You don’t have any ID on you.

What do they do? If you are an American citizen, they take you back to the jail, where they have plenty of options to identify you. But what if you are an illegal immigrant?

In Mecklenburg County, they use the 287g program, which was pioneered in our jail, to ID you and possibly deport  you. But that may soon end. Without a positive ID, charging you becomes difficult. That apparently is the goal of the Obama administration, which is seeking to defund 287g, despite the success of the program (18,572 illegal immigrants have been identified since 2006, pundithouse.com reports and of that number, 11,494 were placed in removal proceedings.) The plan? Replace 287g with a program called Secure Communities.

The problem?

Secure Communities can only flag those aliens whose prints or identifying information is already in immigration databases. The local 287(g) officers can determine the status of aliens who have not had contact with immigration agents – mostly recent illegal arrivals committing their first non-immigration crime, or people admitted on border crossing cards, who are not fingerprinted upon entry like visitors from most other countries.

So if illegals haven’t had prior contact with law enforcement in this country, and most likely have not, they remain in the shadows and are officially unidentifiable, making prosecuting and detaining them more difficult. The Secure Communities program has so many holes that it only identified half the illegal aliens the 287g program in Houston did. (The 287g program identified 12, 247. Of those, the Secure Communities program was only able to ID 5,700.)

Worse yet, under 287g, all illegals are targeted for prosecution and deportation, although ultimately not all are deported. Under Secure Communities, among those positively identified, only some are “prioritized” for deportation.

This year the Obama administration is asking for $146.9 million in new funding for Secure Communities. They have deployed it to 118 jurisdictions and have identified 111,000 criminal aliens so far. By way of comparison, the administration is expected to ask for $5 million for new 287(g) agreements. The government has spent about $114 million over the entire life of the 287(g) program, and it has produced over 130,000 arrests.

The program has produced such limited results here that the sheriff’s office doesn’t use it much, pundithouse.com reports.

“The 287(g) program gives us a much better picture of who is entering our jail than the Secure Communities program,” Rush said.

And that, for this president, is apparently a problem.

Meanwhile, our illegal immigrant hit and run suspect could be getting away with much more. A few years back, federal prosecutors here arrested, tried and put away a ring of cartel-connected illegal immigrant drug smugglers, several of whom where involved in murders of rivals right here in Charlotte. When I ran their names throught the sheriff’s website, about 20 percent had been arrested on minor traffic violations and had been through the jail.

You just don’t know who you are turning loose on our streets, which, again, is apparently OK with this president.