Immigrants’ rights advocates in Chicago have been bracing for such raids for months. No raids were reported as of Wednesday, but neighborhoods with large immigrant communities froze in place, with many residents fearful of the havoc they would wreak. Compared to his first term, Trump’s team “has a better understanding of what tools are available to them, and they’ll have that larger understanding of what they can and can’t do, and what they can do to make it more effective,” says Nubia Willman, chief programs officer at Latinos Progresando, a group that provides immigration services in Chicago.

But these organizations have also had time to prepare. Many of the same advocates say they’re pleased with the vast set of protections that Chicago city government, as well as the state of Illinois, have passed since the first Trump administration to ban local agencies from assisting with arrests and deportations and to bar police from sharing sensitive information with immigration authorities. 

Since Trump’s victory in November, they’ve focused on getting public officials to double down on those sanctuary protections. They’ve worked on strengthening their coalition and urging people in office to hold the line as the blows begin to land. Trump has vowed to slash funding and prosecute politicians in sanctuary cities, including Chicago, to force them to dismantle local protections.

“We don’t plan on backing down,” Leone Jose Bicchieri, founder of Working Families Solidarity, a group that promotes labor rights in the Chicago region, told Bolts. “I think the right thing to do for the state and the city is to not back down to the feds. You can’t set that precedent.”

Just days before Trump’s inauguration, local politicians were tested by a proposal from within to weaken the ban on Chicago police from cooperating with ICE. The proposal, sponsored by council members from two predominantly Latino areas, Alderpersons Silvana Tabares and Ray Lopez, would have allowed local police to work with ICE to target immigrants with certain criminal charges. 

The rollback was soundly defeated by vote of 39 to 11 at city council last week after a broad coalition of immigrant rights organizers, labor groups, and other allies rallied against it. 

“They want to make an example out of Chicago, make it ground zero for mass deportations. Well, I’ll tell you what: we do need to make Chicago an example—of people finding their courage and their backbone,” Leo Pargo, a community organizer in Chicago, told city council members before the vote. 

Chicago has had some degree of sanctuary protections since 1985, when then-Mayor Harold Washington restricted city employees from investigating residents’ legal status and barred cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The city council strengthened those protections by designating Chicago as a so-called Welcoming City in 2006. During Trump’s first term, immigrant rights groups worked with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to close loopholes in prior ordinances that allowed police to help deport people who were under investigation for certain crimes, or who were listed in the Chicago Police Department’s notoriously inaccurate gang database. 

Brandon Johnson, the current mayor, reaffirmed his support for these policies in a press conference last week, saying, “The fear that has found its way in the city of Chicago because of the threats that are coming from this incoming administration, the people of Chicago can rest assured that the full force of government will do everything in its power to protect the residents of this city.”

Illinois has passed protections of its own over the years, most notably the Illinois TRUST Act, a 2017 law that mirrors Chicago’s municipal ban on local law enforcement helping federal agents, applying it to police forces throughout the entire state. 

Illinois also became the first state to outlaw private immigrant detention centers in 2019; two years later, the state further limited the number of beds available for ICE to detain immigrants in the state with a law that blocked sheriffs from contracting with ICE to detain people facing deportation in local jails. Some Illinois jails were earning millions a year through these contracts. The state also barred sheriffs from joining the 287(g) program, which authorizes local deputies to act as federal immigration agents. 

Such policies cannot stop ICE from launching direct enforcement actions using their agents, like the raids that Trump’s team may soon launch in the city. Trump this week signed an executive order that allows agents to arrest people even in sensitive areas like churches and schools. 

But throughout the nation, ICE heavily relies on the collaboration of local police and sheriffs to identify and investigate immigrants who may be undocumented and detain them until federal agents collect them. Immigration experts say that, in places without that cooperation, ICE operations are severely limited.

For Felicia Arriaga, an immigration scholar and assistant professor of sociology at Baruch College, sanctuary protections reduce arrests and deportations by forcing ICE to work alone. She told Bolts, “The sheer number of people that are then being apprehended through those operations are much smaller than the number who would have been arrested through the jail enforcement model.” 

She added, “ICE field teams don’t have enough people to go out and arrest all of the people Trump says he is going to.” 

Arriaga was involved in immigrants’ rights activism in North Carolina during the first Trump administration, a time when many counties canceled contracts with ICE. The federal agency responded with raids that swept hundreds of people, and many Chicagoans suspect the Trump administration’s focus on their city is similarly driven by retaliation. 

“Raids are used as a fear tactic,” Arriaga said. “It is meant to try to deter people from trying to limit collaboration.”

Chicago advocates say they’ll now need to be vigilant to make sure that local and state officials actually enforce sanctuary protections. 

“It’s one thing to have laws in the book, but you also have to go through the motions of ensuring that folks are doing things appropriately,” Willman said. Bicchieri agreed, urging Chicago leaders to “remind these agencies officially not to cooperate, but also unofficially make sure their members are not privately trying to give the information about folks and make sure that they’re sanctioned if they do.”

Chicago Police has affirmed officers will not coordinate with ICE and that the department will comply with the Welcoming City ordinance. But there is worry that not all officers are aligned behind the brass. Immigrant workers have previously sued off-duty cops for beating, searching and detaining them outside a neighborhood Home Depot. Some officers have been accused of sexual misconduct involving new arrivals sheltering at a police station. John Catanzara, the head of the Chicago police union, has derided the city’s protections for immigrants.

Elsewhere in the state, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued the sheriffs of Ogle County and Stephenson County in 2019 for defying the TRUST Act. The cases involved immigrants who were arrested for minor issues, like driving without a license or without insurance, then detained for up to three days after they already paid bail so that they could be handed over to ICE. The sheriff’s offices eventually agreed to a settlement that included payments to the drivers, ACLU spokesperson Ed Yohnka told Bolts.  “There is no reason for any elected official at the state or local level to violate that law because Donald Trump or Tom Homan tells them they should,” Yohnka said.

One test may come if the Trump administration responds with threats to withhold federal dollars, as it did last decade. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for many of the executive policies the president has already unrolled since Inauguration Day, advocates for withholding grants from cities unless they comply with federal immigration enforcement and agree to detain people on ICE’s requests. 

The Department of Justice on Wednesday also instructed federal prosecutors to investigate public officials who “threaten to impede” immigration enforcement. 

The city of Chicago sued the D.O.J. in 2017 over conditions it tried to impose on public safety grants, which have traditionally been a key source of federal funding for local police, courts, drug treatment, and other initiatives. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the city in 2018, determining that federal agencies cannot arbitrarily condition funds. According to the ruling, “the power of the purse rests with Congress, which authorized the federal funds at issue and did not impose any immigration enforcement conditions on the receipt of such funds.”

Yohnka hopes that courts protect sanctuary policies from new attacks. “The courts can still play an important role in upholding and protecting the rights of a local government to decide what they are and are not going to do,” he said.

The political climate in Chicago around immigration has shifted in recent years. The efforts to house and resettle new arrivals have stirred animosity among some Chicagoans, and the usual scramble between communities for limited resources has been worsened by Texas Governor Greg Abott’s Operation Lonestar, which has bussed tens of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers across the country, including to Chicago, with little coordination to allow receiving cities to prepare. 

While Chicago’s shelter system was initially overwhelmed by the influx, Mayor Brandon Johnson this month reiterated the city’s commitment to managing the arrivals without resorting to deportations.  

“What you saw from the Governor of Texas was an attempt to break our spirit here in Chicago. We rose above that attack and we actually built a system of care for Chicagoans and those seeking refuge in the city of Chicago,” Johnson said at a press conference last week after the defeat of the measure to walk back the protections for immigrants. 

Abbot’s Operation Lonestar was aimed at stoking grievances in sanctuary cities to chip away at the public support for immigrants by “creating perceptions that certain groups were getting access to resources that others are not,” Lee told Bolts. Many Republican leaders, including Trump and Abbott, have similarly scapegoated immigrants for problems with violence and drugs, despite overwhelming evidence that the rates of crime and incarceration among immigrants are far lower than that of citizens. 

“They saw Chicago as being a welcoming city, and they wanted to exploit and make an example out of us,” Lee said. “The root of this is in this national anti-immigrant movement that sought out Chicago as being an obstacle to what they wanted to achieve.” 

He added, “In the process, they have sown division and pitted communities against one another.” Javier Ruiz, a board member for the Pilsen Alliance, a neighborhood group based in Chicago’s Mexican community, says there’ve been tensions in the city’s Mexican communities towards the influx of asylum seekers from Venezuela. Some of that surrounds the federal work permits that have been issued to many new arrivals, while many longtime residents have never been able to get the papers needed to step out of the shadows, he said.

Immigrant rights organizers and labor groups have worked to counter the divide-and-conquer tactics by building a broad coalition of working class people to fight for better jobs, higher wages, adequate community investment and affordable housing, said Willman, of Latinos Progresando. To build unity, his organization has built the Excellerator Fund, a joint venture with the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation to invest in Black and Mexican-led neighborhood groups, businesses and programs on the South and West Sides, like the Ballet Folklorico de Chicago, dedicated to preserving Mexican traditional dance, and the South Merrill Community Garden.

“These coalitions are doing the work on the ground of building those bridges together. They’re working to find the resources and then sharing those resources in equitable ways to support the needs that are unique for each community. So this allows folks to learn from one another, to build community together, to go and advocate for resources together,” Willman said. 

Labor groups are also readying their immigrant members to exercise their rights as workers. Working Families Solidarity, which works across eight predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago, helps members recover unpaid wages by connecting workers with legal aid and applying direct pressure campaigns on employers who refuse to pay, Bicchieri, its founder, told Bolts. Some workers are exploited because their immigration status makes them vulnerable, he said, and organizations can step in to hold employers accountable.

Antonio Guttierez, co-founder of the group Organized Communities Against Deportation, says his group has worked with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to set up 18 hyper-local rapid response networks that send volunteers to investigate tips about ICE activity. Despite being inactive for years, the network has grown to over 1000 participants, he said; and while some are new volunteers, some teams are being reawakened after initially forming during the first Trump administration. OCAD’s hotline has received dozens of tips about ICE agent sightings, as well as hate messages and deliberate misinformation that has made it hard for operators to manage the volume of calls and decipher which tips are real, Gutierrez said. 

Since inauguration, the rapid response teams have proactively sent out volunteers as early as 4AM to scout locations where federal agents have staged operations in the past. None of this scouting discovered major operations on Trump’s first day in office, Gutierrez said. 

Chicago organizers in recent months have also doubled down on circulating know-your-rights trainings and webinars aiming to reach immigrants that may be under threat of arrest. They have been distributing flyers and cards to remind people they do not have to consent to a search, that they have the right to contact their families and an attorney, and that they do not have to disclose their immigration status with officers. 

The city has also helped spearhead know-your-rights workshops at various locations across the city, in English, Spanish, and French, as the mayor has advertised on his social media. Some of the events were hosted by prominent local politicians like U.S. Representative Chuy Garcia.

Gutierrez stresses the importance of the right to remain silent, explaining that federal agents often have little information about the people they encounter during raids and traffic stops, so officers try to get verbal confirmation that a person is undocumented. 

He said, “Knowing those rights can definitely make the difference between whether someone is detained or not.”

The post How Chicago’s Immigrant Rights Groups Plan to Hold the Line on Sanctuary Policies appeared first on Bolts.

U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement detains an average of 37,000 people per night, often partnering with sheriffs who hold immigrants in their local facilities in exchange for a profit. For over a century, the U.S. government has relied on local jails to detain immigrants, creating a vast network of incarceration that operates with minimal oversight. Other detention centers, run by private companies, have also proliferated. The incoming Trump administration is likely to tap into this network.

We suspected that you have questions about this system, so we asked you to reach out and let us know as part of our series “Ask Bolts.”

To answer them, we turned to historian Brianna Nofil, an assistant professor at William & Mary who traces these developments in her new book, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration.

The growth in the detention of migrants, she argues, has fueled the broader expansion of the carceral state. From the detention of Chinese migrants in New York in the early 1900s to the jailing of Caribbean refugees in the South in the 1980s, her research explains how federal authorities and local law enforcement have helped each other create a patchwork of policies that incentivizes incarceration. 

Nofil answered ten of your questions, exploring the legacy of the internment of Japanese Americans, the detention of Haitian refugees in the 1980s, and other pivotal historical moments that normalized and entrenched mass detention as a central feature of U.S. immigration policy. Many queries we received revolved around instances of pushback against this history and the lessons those hold for opponents today; Nofil tackles some of those questions too.

What historical moments changed public opinion and “normalized” immigration detention? — @behrbones, on BlueSky

For as long as migrant detention has occurred, Americans have raised questions about its morality and legality. Often this happened in the small towns that rented jail space to the immigration service. In Malone, New York, a border community that detained hundreds of Chinese migrants between 1900 and 1904, for example, the local newspaper described the incarceration of migrants as “a shame upon civilized government.” Still, detention has always been most politically popular when it targets people seen as too poor, too radical, too sick, and above all, too racially different to be citizens. 

In 1981, the Reagan administration began debating building federal detention centers in response to rising numbers of refugees from Haiti arriving in South Florida—the first major investment in permanent migrant detention infrastructure. But Reagan’s Department of Justice had hesitations. They wrote in an internal memo that the “appearance of ‘concentration camps’ which, at the present time, would be filled largely by blacks, may be publicly unacceptable.” There has always been uncertainty with whether Americans would tolerate migrant detention, or whether incarceration without trial was a bridge too far in American jurisprudence.

Mass migration from Haiti—and fear and demonization of Black refugees, of HIV-AIDS, of poverty—was a transformative moment for the normalization of detention. The Reagan administration successfully argued that Haitians were not legitimate asylum seekers and that detention was necessary to deter migrants from coming to the U.S. in the first place. It also marked a pivotal moment for how Americans think about refugees: for many policymakers and citizens, the migrants of the 1980s weren’t the “good” post-war refugees who patiently waited in Europe until the U.S. sent for them; these were people from the Caribbean and Latin America who were showing up in the U.S. and claiming asylum. The Reagan administration was terrified of what this change in asylum practice meant, and detention aided in transforming asylum seekers into another form of “illegal immigrant” in the eyes of the American public.

Why did sheriffs become such huge players in detaining immigrants if the feds are the ones arresting people? What’s stopping ICE from just detaining people on its own? — adapted by Bolts staff from a comment on sheriffs shared by Janice, from Ohio

A persistent obstacle for the immigration service has been finding physical space to detain people. At the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. had detention beds at major ports of entry, such as Ellis Island in New York City and Angel Island in San Francisco. But if agents apprehended a migrant away from major cities, the immigration service had little detention space of its own. This became a particular issue as more migrants began using the U.S. land borders as an entry point to thwart restrictive immigration laws. In order to detain people in most of the country, the immigration service brokered deals with sheriffs to detain migrants awaiting hearings and deportations in local jails, in exchange for a nightly rate paid to the county. 

Many sheriffs saw these arrangements as highly desirable—an easy way to pump federal money into their communities and turn the local jail into a revenue-producing institution. Some sheriffs had strong political and ideological commitments to deportation and immigration restriction; others saw it as simply a favor to the feds. As communities overbuilt jail space in the 1980s and 1990s, working with the immigration service became a way to keep rural jails filled and financially afloat. And revenue from migrant incarceration was often reinvested into prison expansion and law enforcement.

Jails, and the sheriffs who oversaw them, gave the immigration service a detention footprint in virtually every American community. When things went wrong at privately-run and federal facilities, jails served as the safety valve—a place where the immigration service could transfer migrants to deter protests, respond to legal interventions, and counter criticism. In recent years, sheriffs have become even more essential in deportation, via programs like 287(g) that deputize local law enforcement to carry out certain functions of federal immigration officials.

Japanese immigrants & US citizens were rounded up & placed in internment camps during WW2. What laws or court precedents were the authorization for this action, and are these still relevant today? — Ginger, from Arizona

The FDR administration apprehended Japanese nationals under the wartime authority of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law which Trump has promised to immediately invoke as the backbone of his deportation program. The law empowers the president to detain and deport non‑citizens when the nation is at war—or in the case of a presidentially proclaimed “invasion” or “predatory incursion” by a foreign nation. The law has never been used when the U.S. is not at war. However, U.S. immigration law has long blurred the lines between migration and invasion: The pivotal 1899 Chinese Exclusion case that established federal control over immigration described migration control as a by-product of foreign affairs and immigration as an act of “foreign aggression and encroachment.” 

Japanese Americans were apprehended via an Executive Order, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944). Korematsu wasn’t overturned until 2018, during Trump v. Hawaii, which ruled on the legality of the ‘Muslim ban.’ Legal scholars have different interpretations about whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act in this way—but there’s good reason to believe the courts won’t stop him. 

The Migrant’s Jail looks at these legal precedents, but it also looks at the legacies of Japanese wartime incarceration in terms of built environment: The U.S. immigration service used existing relationships with sheriffs to aid in apprehending and jailing Japanese nationals, and after the war was over, repurposed Japanese detention barracks for the mass deportation drives of Mexican migrants in the 1950s. The immigration service has long described itself as pursuing a strategy of “flexible detention space”—this is an extreme example, but it shows how detention infrastructure could be reimagined for whichever project of racial control and removal the state deemed most pressing.

My understanding is that the Obama administration tried to get rid of for-profit prisons on a federal level. Has that work been completely undone? I’m thinking of this especially in light of the planned mass deportation (and presumably incarceration), and how private prisons and profits will play into this. — @thehoneytheif, on BlueSky

(Editor’s note: President Barack Obama’s executive order against private prisons, which was rescinded by President Donald Trump, did not apply to immigration lock-ups. But the question of how private companies feature into this detention landscape remains relevant.)

Presidents Obama and Biden both restricted the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) contracting for private prisons (and indeed, the BOP ended their last private prison contract in 2022) while leaving the door open for ICE to continue using for-profit facilities. In 2023, 90 percent of people in ICE custody were held in for-profit detention centers—that’s a 10 percent increase from the Trump administration. The private prison business has boomed under Biden, and Trump stands to inherit a multi-billion dollar network of private sector detention sites. This will be supplemented by the continuing cooperation of sheriffs and local law enforcement in housing migrants in local jails, many of which are also operated by private prison companies. 

The federal government owns and operates very few of its own migrant detention sites today. The agency claims it’s faster and cheaper to outsource detention to the private sector. But another big reason for the embrace of private prisons is that it distances the federal government from accountability for detention practices; since the privatization boom of the 1980s, the immigration service has regularly shielded itself from criticism and attempted to insulate itself from legal liability by arguing that detention’s worst abuses are the faults of contractors, rather than the directives of the government itself.

Who will be making money off of this? — @sbec, on BlueSky

Everyone! The migrant detention system (like for-profit incarceration, more broadly) rewards those who can sustain human life at the lowest possible cost: Everything from food services to medical care to data management to transportation services between detention centers to deportation flights is making companies money. In 2019, employees of Wayfair staged a walkout to protest their company providing furniture to detention centers—a reminder that even beyond the obvious suspects, like prison private companies, there is enormous profit to be made by the private sector across the board from government contracting.

What sources do you use for data around ICE detention, and how concerned should we be about their accuracy over the next few years? — DSinger, from Illinois

Decades of scholars and activists have bemoaned the inadequacy of data and recordkeeping by immigration services. In 1923, the former president of the American Prison Association attempted to find out how many local jails detained migrants for the federal government, and was stunned to find that the federal government did not maintain this information. Similarly, in writing this book, I wasn’t able to find any data on how many migrants the U.S. detained annually prior to 1947—I’m fairly certain this data doesn’t exist. And because so much of detention is happening locally, and happening in ad hoc ways (in warehouses, in office buildings, in motels), the numbers we do have are likely imperfect.

Many of these problems persist, and one nonpartisan group of scholars describes the data released under the Biden administration as “inconsistent, error-ridden, and misleading.” A 2024 Government Accountability Office report suggested that the ICE’s methodology may be seriously undercounting the number of individuals detained in the U.S. And there’s plenty of other data ICE doesn’t collect at all: It’s extremely hard to find comprehensive information about all of ICE’s intergovernmental contracts, for example. The decentralization and outsourcing of detention makes the practice all the more difficult to monitor.

But there are resources that try to fill this void. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, based out of Syracuse University, does tremendous work in tracking immigration court backlogs, detainee transfers, and other enforcement metrics—much of which they acquire through FOIA. Austin Kocher’s substack is essential for dissection and analysis of immigration data; he also has a great list of additional data resources.

Do detained immigrants have access to the same rights in the justice system as legal residents who are arrested? — Bolts Lover, from Virginia

They do not. In the 1883 case of Fong Yue Ting v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that deportation, and by extension, detention, was not a punishment for a crime. This created one of the fundamental paradoxes of immigration detention—that it’s a civil or administrative form of imprisonment, rather than criminal punishment, even when it’s taking place in the exact same jail! In practice, this means that migrants in deportation proceedings have few due process protections: They are not entitled to legal representation, to a trial by jury, to a speedy trial. If apprehended within 100 miles of the border, migrants who entered the U.S. without authorization can be removed without a hearing. 

Access to legal aid is a particular issue for migrants in detention: Only 14 percent of detained immigrants go to court with lawyers, and migrants are twice as likely to obtain relief from deportation when they have legal representation. The U.S. has tried countless ways of distancing migrants from access to legal aid and accelerate deportations and removals, such as placing detention sites in rural communities and erratically transferring migrants across state lines. They have also tried to remove migrants from U.S. soil altogether, both through practices like interdicting migrants at sea, and through the creation of extraterritorial detention camps, like the one operated at Guantánamo Bay in the 1990s.

Despite these limits, migrants regardless of immigration status do have guaranteed rights under the Constitution. With raids likely to be a component of Trump’s deportation efforts, it’s critical that our neighbors know their rights, particularly when it comes to allowing ICE into their homes. ICE frequently misrepresents themselves as “police” during traffic stops and raids, or uses other ruses to access migrants, like claiming that they are investigating a crime or that they found a lost ID. ICE agents must have a signed judicial warrant from a judge to enter your home, not an administrative warrant signed by an ICE agent—and they rarely have a judicial warrant!

Have naturalized citizens or Americans born abroad been affected by these detention practices? Will they be now? — Gina, from North Carolina

Citizens have always gotten caught in the deportation machine: sometimes by design, sometimes by the machine’s imperfect (and categorically racist) methods of identifying, sorting, and adjudicating. There are countless mentions in newspapers and other archival records: For example, in 1929, the immigration service detained Emilio Martinez, a 15-year-old Mexican-American citizen, in Edinburg’s Hidalgo County Jail for three months on a charge of illegal entry. It took a small army of sympathetic lawyers, including famed South Texas lawmaker José Tomás Canales, to locate his birth certificate and secure his release. The U.S. also has a long history of denaturalization; historian Patrick Weil found that more than 22,000 Americans had their citizenship revoked away between 1906 and 1967, some on the basis of fraudulent documents or statements in their naturalization cases, but many others on the basis of purported political radicalism or “disloyal” conduct. 

Citizens certainly could become vulnerable. But far more vulnerable will be folks with legal status that could expire or be terminated with relatively little fanfare—for example, the approximately 1 million people who are currently shielded from deportation via Temporary Protected Status. “Legal” and “illegal” are not stable categories of belonging.

Are there historical examples of pushback that have restrained immigration detention? Or has it been a one-way ratchet? — @behrbones, on BlueSky

There have been significant legal victories against immigration detention. In 1982, for example, the Haitian Refugee Center challenged the mandatory detention of Haitian asylum seekers on the grounds that the Reagan administration had made the policy through improper channels and that it almost exclusively impacted Haitians. The judge ordered the release of 1,900 Haitians from detention. 

However, the federal government’s power over immigration is so sweeping that these legal victories have often forced the immigration service to formalize policies, rather than significantly stunting detention’s growth. In the aftermath of Louis v. Nelson, the courts conceded that the Reagan administration could simply create these same detention policies through proper administrative channels and continue the practice. After a lot of grumbling, the federal government did just that. 

Outside of the courts, some of the most successful pushback to detention has been via community organizing. Making the abuses and atrocities of migrant incarceration visible has been central to restraining detention. In the 1950s, when the U.S. formally disavowed detention except in “exceptional” cases, it was due in part to public outrage about migrants being detained for years on Ellis Island while awaiting investigations. Groups like the ACLU portrayed these lengthy detentions (mostly impacting Europeans) as evidence of an out-of-control Department of Justice, and an American form of gulag or concentration camp—ideologically and morally indefensible. They published political cartoons, memoirs of detainees, countless op-eds, and generally put names and faces to the suffering.

What options do local governments have to resist detention efforts? — MB, from New Mexico | How can progressive governors push back against Trump’s agenda? (While New Jersey has enacted laws barring the law enforcement and county governments collaborating with ICE, there are all these ways ICE still gets law enforcement collaboration.) — Satenik, from New Jersey

ICE acquires the majority of its detention space through intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs), a contract between the federal government and a county or city indicating that the locality will provide detention services. In some cases, this means migrants are held in the local jail. In other cases, localities subcontract with private prison companies. Using localities as a middleman allows ICE to acquire beds quickly and circumvent the more cumbersome federal procurement process. It also means revenue for localities: To this day, ICE does not track the amount of money localities collect from private prison companies when they subcontract detention services.

Much of the organizing of recent years has focused on pressuring localities to end IGSAs and get ICE out of local jails. It has been remarkably effective: New Jersey, California, Washington, Nevada, and Illinois have all passed laws that limit or bar migrant incarceration. But these laws have been controversial. In 2023, the courts sided with private prison company CoreCivic and the Biden administration in a lawsuit challenging the New Jersey detention ban. The judge called the ban “a dagger aimed at the heart of the federal government’s immigration enforcement mission and operations.” 

Many of these federal-local relationships flourish in the shadows—people simply don’t know all of the ways their cities and counties are aiding in deportations. 

Sanctuary policies—policies of non-cooperation with ICE—aren’t a silver bullet. ICE and the federal government have resources to work around them and coerce localities into cooperation, such as cutting funding to local law enforcement who refuse to aid in deportations. (This will also likely be challenged in court.) However, sanctuary policies do throw sand in the gears of the deportation system: They can delay removals, create time-consuming litigation, and make it more difficult for ICE to identify targets for deportation. Aside from defensive maneuvers, local governments can do more to ensure equitable access to social services and legal aid: The American Immigration Council has a list of model legislation for protecting migrants’ rights on the local level.

Questions and responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The post The Past and Present of Immigration Detention: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

All Arizonans this fall could decide whether to boost the role of local police in border enforcement, as Republicans placed a measure on the statewide ballot that would empower cops to arrest people suspected of being undocumented. But the issue is also playing out locally this year, highlighting critical disagreements among law enforcement in Arizona over just how much to collaborate with federal border police.

A local election next week will help decide if the leadership of a populous border county will have any appetite to increase partnerships with the border patrol in coming years.

Operation Stonegarden, a federal grant program that gives local police the funds and equipment to patrol the border region for immigration enforcement, has become a dividing line among candidates in this year’s race for sheriff of Pima County, home to Tucson. While the incumbent sheriff, Chris Nanos, says he agrees with the county’s decision to leave the program several years ago, his opponent in the July 30 Democratic primary wants Pima County to rejoin Operation Stonegarden. 

Sandy Rosenthal, a former deputy with the Pima sheriff’s office and Nanos’ challenger next week, has sharply criticized the sheriff for leaving Stonegarden money on the table amid budget and staff shortages that have contributed to poor conditions at the jail. At a June candidate forum, Rosenthal endorsed the federal border partnership as a way to stem the flow of fentanyl into the community.

“It allows us to get more deputies out in the farther reaches of Pima County,” Rosenthal said during last month’s forum. “When you give up an area, when you give up a responsibility, bad things happen. The cartels, they enjoy what’s happening now. They don’t have to worry about any deputy sheriff being out along the border. There’s no coverage whatsoever.” Rosenthal did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts.

Nanos told Bolts that local law enforcement should not take up border enforcement duties since securing the border is primarily a federal function—a position the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed. Nanos also said the county didn’t benefit from the Stonegarden patrols, which typically occurred in remote areas that have little crime: The sheriff said that less than 1 percent of emergency calls his office receives come from the area along the border. Cartels, Nanos said, practically never smuggle fentanyl through the open desert, opting instead to use vehicles crossing ports of entry.

“That grant didn’t benefit the community at all. It benefitted border patrol because it gave them boots on the ground,” Nanos told Bolts. Officers on Stonegarden assignments, Nanos said, “didn’t work for the sheriff. They worked for border patrol. They were on border patrol radio. They answered to border patrol supervisors.”

Public officials often point to the border as a proxy for the everyday issues that Pima residents face, especially the drug crisis and crime, Nanos said. Stoked by voices from the far right on the national stage, residents across the political spectrum in Southern Arizona have echoed fears that migrants are responsible for a flood of fentanyl pouring across the Mexican border that has resulted in countless overdoses and deaths.

But extensive research indicates that immigrants commit less crime than U.S.-born people and that there’s no correlation between undocumented people and rising crime. As for drug smuggling, fentanyl rarely moves into the country through the open desert and is almost always smuggled in through legal ports of entry, with U.S. citizens accounting for 89 percent of convicted fentanyl traffickers, according to a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Adelita Grijalva, the Democratic chair of Pima County’s Board of Supervisors who opposes Stonegarden grants, told Bolts she worries about what their return would mean for her constituents. More than a third of people in this county of more than one million residents are Hispanic, according to the 2020 census. 

“People of color, specifically Latinos, are going to be targeted because of the way we look,” Grijalva said. “There’s an assumption people shouldn’t be in our communities because of what we look like—what my family looks like—that we may or may not be citizens. So having our Pima County Sheriff pulling people over based on that suspicion is a huge concern.”

As immigration crackdowns escalated at both the state and federal levels, a decades-long immigrant rights’ movement in Arizona pressured local governments to end participation in the Stonegarden program. 

In 2010, then-Governor Jan Brewer signed what became known as the state’s “show me your papers” law. Under the law, police could arrest and charge immigrants with a state crime if they were not carrying their immigration documents. Critics said the law, portions of which were eventually struck down, gave local police free reign to target people based on their ethnicity and would lead to racial profiling.

The 2010 law made Arizona unlivable for many in the state without papers who struggled to find necessities like work, housing and medical care, said Tony Pineda, a staff member of the Southside Worker Center. The center formed in 2006 to give day laborers a safe place to find employment and negotiate wages after jobseekers ran into problems with border patrol and local police. But even with the center’s help getting legal support, housing assistance and other essentials, immigrant families in the area struggled under what was the country’s strictest immigration policy at the time, Pineda said.

“It was something we suffered a lot from. At that time, I was undocumented as well. There was a big impact on the city for immigrants, and I saw it harm the members of the Worker Center,” Pineda said.

This organizing against Brewer’s signature law laid the groundwork for the fights to come. Neighborhood groups across Tucson and immigrant rights organizations became more active and built stronger connections with each other to unite against the restrictions, Pineda said, eventually pushing the city of Tucson to sue the state to block the law. The Southside Worker Center later joined groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to challenge the “show me your papers” law in court.

Another massive mobilization in support of immigrant rights came around 2018 after the federal government adopted a zero-tolerance policy that separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border and incarcerated them in detention centers widely condemned for abusive conditions. Many in Pima County found the hardline border policies inhumane and cruel, Pineda said. As images of children locked in cages and stories of newborns ripped from their mothers’ arms spread across social media, voices grew louder against the family separations and the anti-immigrant sentiment at the policy’s root.

“It had a big impact on the community, even for people who are already established here, regardless of legal status,” Pineda said. “They also suffer because they have families too. It was something that took root in the entire city, and across Pima County.” 

As the unfolding family separation crisis became the face of federal immigration policy, attitudes in Pima County toward border authorities soured, said Isabel Garcia, co-founder of the Coalición de Derechos Humanos and the former Pima County Legal Defender. This heightened pressure on elected officials to separate their local police forces from border patrol missions, Garcia said.

“We were protesting all over. We had massive demonstrations in front of the federal courthouse. Everybody came out about the children,” Garcia said. “We were very inspired by the unity, more than anything. So they couldn’t lie to us anymore. We knew exactly what it entailed—that these police officers, when they checked in, had to become border patrol agents and follow the commands of border patrol.”

Garcia said that the Stonegarden program had a chilling effect on public trust in law enforcement, where people stopped reporting crimes and calling 911 for help out of fear that they or their loved ones would be arrested and deported.

These are complaints that immigrants’ rights activists have voiced against local partnerships with federal immigration enforcement elsewhere in the country. In neighboring Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio reshaped the department to act as an extension of immigration agencies during his long tenure from 1993 to 2017. His actions spurred a legal battle in 2007 that eventually led to a federal court ruling that the sheriff’s office had engaged in racial profiling and ordering the department to reform the discriminatory practices. 

Critics of the Stonegarden program in Pima County say it did little to benefit public safety and resulted in thousands of people being needlessly detained, interrogated and harassed by local cops over immigration status—especially Latino drivers.

“It was all just to check them for Border Patrol. We wound up with people getting arrested and deported at that point,” Garcia said. “Imagine all of these stops. If I get stopped, I’m still scared, and I’m a lawyer and a citizen. There is no justice for us anymore.”

In 2018, over objections from the Republican sheriff at the time, the Pima County Board of Supervisors voted to end the county’s participation in Operation Stonegarden, which had given the county around $16 million over the prior 12 years. Board members who voted to not apply for the grants expressed concerns that the program banned using the grant funds for humanitarian relief and that targeting immigrants could chill people’s trust in local police.

Tucson, the county’s largest city, also withdrew its police department from the Stonegarden program in 2020 after federal officials denied the city’s requests to spend some of the grant money on humanitarian aid for migrants seeking asylum. The city’s police chief at the time told the Arizona Daily Star that the feds’ denial “really seemed like the end of the line” for the program, which the chief said was “not a great fit for the work we were doing.” On the other hand, the neighboring town of Marana still participates in Operation Stonegarden. Marana Police uses the funds to assign patrols in rural areas thought to be routes for smugglers and drug cartels, a police spokesperson said. 

While the members of the Pima County Board of Supervisors have changed since initially rejecting the federal money, there isn’t currently enough support to sign off on the Operation Stonegarden program even if the winner of the sheriff’s race applied for the grants, said Grijalva, the board chair. Democrats currently have a four-to-one majority on the board.

Still, all seats on the board are up for election this year, so the board’s position may change depending on the outcomes in November. A new sheriff who makes it a mission to ramp up immigration enforcement could also put more pressure on other county officials, especially if it coincides with changeover in the federal administration. 

The winner of next week’s Democratic primary between Nanos and Rosenthal will face one of three GOP candidates—Bill Phillips, Heather Lappin, Terry Frederick—in November. All three Republicans have expressed support for harsher practices on immigration. The Democratic nominee will be favored in the general election in this county that typically votes blue, but Republicans have had local success—including winning the sheriff’s office as recently as 2016.

Groups are also already gearing up for a fight to convince voters to reject Proposition 314, a measure that was put on the November ballot by Republican lawmakers that would empower state and local law enforcement to arrest people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. (Opponents of the measure are trying to knock the measure off the ballot, and litigation is ongoing as of publication.) Both Nanos and Rosenthal oppose the ballot measure.

Grijalva is confident that, in Pima County at least, voters will want to keep in place officials who oppose scaling up enforcement. 

“The positions on Stonegarden, for a lot of people, that’s been their deciding factor on who they are going to vote for,” she told Bolts. “Pima county continues to be a place that is humanitarian, that wants justice, and wants our community to be safe.”

Correction (July 26): An earlier version of this story misstated that Grijalva has endorsed Nanos’ reelection bid; she has not. 

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