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.

Reporting on immigration, I have often thought that there are really two borders between the U.S. and Mexico: the physical line between countries that migrants risk their lives trying to cross, and the idea that inflames the minds of American citizens. 

The border itself is a site of cruelty and criminalization. Society has essentially shrugged at the deaths of migrants in the desert and the Rio Grande, the felony prosecution of humanitarians, and the spectacle of men chained to each other pleading guilty to federal crimes as a group. The courts are currently debating a Texas law, Senate Bill 4, that would allow any local law enforcement officer in the state to arrest a migrant suspected of crossing this line in the dirt.

“The border,” meanwhile, is the locus of a vexed debate over race and national identity and crime that extends far beyond the physical frontier itself. The sentiment underlying Donald Trump’s words at his 2015 campaign launch—that immigrants are “bringing crime”—is present everywhere in public debates and policy. Frenzied news coverage of immigration borrows from the playbook of crime panics past and present, falsely connecting immigration to people’s fears about public safety. Recently, new legislation has sprung up in response to these fears, like the federal Laken Riley Act, which attempted to mandate immigration detention for any undocumented person accused of theft, and vigilante groups have taken it upon themselves to police migrants.

Two new books, by immigration law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Detention Watch Network executive director Silky Shah, examine how this state of affairs came to be and provide a welcome antidote to the thinking that has produced it. 

Both García Hernández’s Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien” and Shah’s Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition recount how migrants became criminalized for crossing borders, how the immigration system has come to resemble the domestic criminal legal system in its focus on enforcement and detention, and how “crimmigration,” or the confluence of these two hulking systems, effectively punishes non-citizens twice for a single crime. Both titles contain a prescription for fixing the current system (García Hernández’s is a reference to the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, the one that former Trump advisor Stephen Miller famously said was “added later” in response to a question about the hypocrisy of family separation), and both texts accordingly outline bold alternative visions. 

García Hernández presents a philosophical and moral case for expanding our understanding of citizenship and belonging. Recall Barack Obama’s famous speech outlining who his administration would target for deportation: “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” García Hernández wants us to understand that there’s a lot more overlap between these supposedly opposed categories than we’d like to believe—just like there is for American citizens, too.

Drawing from the movement for prison abolition, Shah envisions a country in which no immigrant is caged or deported—ever. Reading her accounts of the sustained efforts of ordinary people to challenge the systems that confine and circumscribe their lives, I thought of the immigrants detained at Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex in Central California who last winter embarked on a month-long hunger strike, protesting forced labor, retaliation, and intolerable conditions. They weren’t just advocating for better conditions—they wanted release, full stop.

The skeptical reader might dismiss such ideas and demands as fanciful, but both texts work to convince us otherwise. García Hernández denaturalizes present conceptions of crime and citizenship, showing that the way things are now is not how they’ve always been. One surprising example he offers is a 1926 federal appellate opinion holding that it would actually be worse to deport a migrant with a record. “Deportation is to him exile, a dreadful punishment,” the judge writing the decision explained. “Such, indeed, it would be to anyone, but to one already proved to be incapable of honest living, a helpless waif in a strange land, it will be utter destruction.” 

“Standing in the political moment in which we find ourselves, it’s hard—perhaps impossible—to imagine a radical reconstruction of immigration law,” García Hernández writes. “But a radical reconstruction is what gave us immigration law’s current fascination with criminal activity.” 
García Hernández invokes Angela Davis and Frederick Douglass’s notion of abolition democracy as a guiding principle for the immigrants’ rights movement, but he doesn’t really show us what that might look like in practice. Shah’s book, then, is a welcome companion. Written from the perspective of a longtime activist, Unbuild Walls is grounded in the practical realities of organizing. Shah’s aim is to disrupt the notion that abolition is unserious, a purely academic gambit. On the contrary, she cites her own organizing experience and lessons from two decades and four presidents worth of immigration debates to argue that, without abolitionist principles anchoring the migrant justice movement’s strategy and demands, any attempt at change is doomed to fail.

Both authors explain how the scaffolding for crimmigration was erected bit by bit over the past century, setting the stage for a swift instrumentalization during the War on Terror. They tell the story of Coleman Blease, the South Carolina senator who succeeded in making illegal entry and reentry federal crimes in 1929, and whose racism, as García Hernández notes, was striking even in the Jim Crow South. (Blease defended lynching, decried laws that he said got “between me and the defense of the virtue of the white woman,” and, as governor of his state, pardoned a white man convicted of raping a Black woman, saying he didn’t believe such a crime were possible.) 

Decades later, Blease’s law would flood federal courthouses with cases as federal prosecutors dusted off these statutes during the George W. Bush administration. By that point, the tough-on-crime era that ballooned prison populations across the country had also wholly remade immigration law. Each flagship legislative act seemed to contain a little Easter egg with grave future consequences for migrants. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established sentencing disparities for crack and cocaine, also created so-called immigration detainers, or requests from immigration agents that local law enforcement officials hold someone in jail beyond their release date. An update to that law two years later, which revived the federal death penalty, additionally installed a new category of “aggravated felony” that mandated immigration detention. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act limited avenues for relief for the wrongfully convicted; it also expanded the category of crimes that required immigration detention to include, among others, skipping a court date. The same year, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, which, among other things, allowed immigration agents to partner with sheriffs to identify and deport undocumented people. 

“As with so much else, where Congress and the president see a problem, police, prosecutors, and prisons are their preferred answers,” García Hernández writes. 

The government’s response to 9/11 turbocharged this process, creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and ramping up local law enforcement collaboration with immigration agents across the country to vastly increase deportations and detention capacity. Thanks to prosecutors’ prodigious use of the illegal entry and reentry statutes, immigration offenses would in 2004 finally eclipse drug offenses as the most common federal crime. Those statutes would provide the legal basis for the Trump administration’s infamous family separation policy in 2018. 

At this point, the immigration and the criminal legal system are now so deeply intertwined that even well-intentioned efforts to sever individual points of contact between these systems can ignore or even shore up others. As many as 2,000 families separated at the border in 2018 were excluded from the class action lawsuit challenging the practice because of alleged, and in many cases specious or minor, criminal histories or gang affiliation, as I reported recently—including dozens of parents whose only crime was, in an incredible bit of crimmigration logic, violating the illegal entry and reentry statutes. (The ACLU has fought to add these families to the lawsuit, and many of them will be able to access relief under the terms of a recently finalized settlement, but only after several additional years of separation and limbo). 

There are clear political hazards associated with criminality—much easier to construct a movement around the idea that the people you’re fighting for aren’t “criminals” than risk backlash for defending the rights of those who are. But Shah argues that the immigrant justice movement’s historical deference to this binary has undermined its broader goals. As Obama ramped up deportations, “many advocates argued that the problem with… the existing detention system was that innocent and vulnerable immigrants, not deserving of harsh treatment, were caught in the cross fire,” she observes. “Instead of challenging the idea of deportation as a public safety policy, the focus on ‘innocents’ threw those with criminal records under the bus, along with any critique of the criminal legal system that had deemed them disposable in the first place.” 

Trump’s explicitly hardline policies on immigration, for instance, led a number of liberal states to erect “sanctuary” policies limiting local law enforcement collaboration with ICE. But many of these laws’ protections excluded people already serving prison time. 

In 2021, I reported on the case of Carlos Muñoz, who was transferred to ICE after serving 29 years in a California prison for a killing he has always maintained he did not commit. Both his brothers were deported in similar circumstances, despite the fact that all three grew up in Los Angeles. Organizers tried several times to bring legislation that would fix this carve-out and ensure people like the Muñoz siblings came home to their actual community after serving their time, instead of being sent back to a country they barely remembered, but it hasn’t been successful yet. Muñoz’s case exposes a host of problems with the criminal legal system— he was a minor when the killings occurred and spent decades in prison for a possible wrongful conviction—but to some immigrants rights organizers, he was exactly the type of person who muddied their efforts to cast immigrants as tireless workers and law-abiding citizens. The problem with such a portrait, García Hernández argues, is that no one can live up to it forever.

One challenge to both arguments is that immigration policy is largely set at the federal level while in practice, those affected by it are often initially arrested by local police who share information with ICE, or ensnared in state and local criminal legal systems. The list of remedies García Hernández outlines near the book’s end—getting rid of Bleases’s statutes, which make merely crossing the border a federal crime, deleting the various provisions passed during the tough-on-crime era that funnel migrants accused of a crime into the deportation pipeline, restricting funding to DHS—are nearly all in the hands of a dysfunctional Congress. This means that for now and the foreseeable future, these solutions are near-impossible. 

García Hernández acknowledges this, writing: “To be sure, none of what I’m proposing is politically possible right now. That’s the point… The time to imagine a reconstructed form of immigration law isn’t the days leading to Congress debating a bill that might garner the votes needed to land on the president’s desk. That time is now.”

Meanwhile, to Shah, the much-vaunted goal of “comprehensive immigration reform” is actually a bit of a red herring. She has watched as activists endlessly petition national lawmakers to pass legislation that ends up diluted to the point of meaninglessness or excluding entire categories of people. Instead, she argues that organizers should focus on changes that chip away at the broader system, like shutting down a detention center or ending a county’s 287(g) program—an agreement with ICE that deputizes local cops to act like immigration agents.

Shah recounts how her organization, Detention Watch Network, switched from a focus on improving detention conditions to shutting down sites entirely after observing how battles for better conditions of confinement usually just ended up expanding the system’s reach or power. Communities across the country trained their sights on their local sheriff or detention center, and succeeded in ending ICE contracts with jails everywhere from Orange County, California to Etowah County, Alabama. In 2018, a grassroots effort in North Carolina elected five sheriffs who promised an end to ICE collaboration in the state’s most populous counties. 

Today, deportations are far lower than they were a decade ago, which Shah credits in large part to campaigns that took place at the local and state level. Shah observes that this kind of painstaking community organizing has eventually led presidential administrations to take notice, citing the fierce pushback against Arizona’s “show me your papers” law that eventually led Obama’s Department of Justice to successfully challenge it in court. “Winning local campaigns helps us make the case for ending immigrant incarceration altogether,” she writes. 

Of course, a patchwork approach isn’t foolproof. García Hernández points out that after Oregon and Colorado passed sanctuary laws protecting immigrants’ information from ICE, the agency contracted with LexisNexis and other data brokers to access it anyway. In North Carolina, meanwhile, ICE supported legislation to force sheriffs’ cooperation. 

In Louisiana, Shah notes, after the 2017 Justice Reform Initiative emptied prison beds, ICE swooped in to fill them. (Louisiana’s new governor is now seeking to further criminalize immigrants; the legislature is currently considering a law that would, like Texas’s controversial SB4, deputize any local officer to arrest someone they suspected of being undocumented.) A similar thing happened in New Jersey, only in reverse: After local organizing led to a bill that prevented future ICE contracts, counties that stopped detaining immigrants in their local lockups sought to recoup revenue by contracting to hold inmates from other counties and partnering with the U.S. Marshals Service to take some of their prisoners. 

Shah writes that this is a “cautionary tale of the unintended consequences if we continue to stay siloed.” The agencies involved in immigration detention and law enforcement understand the connections between the carceral state and the immigration system from the highest levels of power to the lowest, and they know how to adapt to turn them to their advantage. In order to stand a chance, she argues, organizers who’re hoping to push back must do the same.

The post Beyond Crimmigration appeared first on Bolts.

Local DAs like Willis have become a key GOP target this year, as Republicans go after prosecutors who they think are standing in the way of their political or policy ambitions. New laws in Georgia and Texas give courts and state officials more authority to discipline DAs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the GOP’s presidential nomination, has over the last 18 months removed two Democratic prosecutors from office, angry over their policies like not prosecuting abortion. 

The presidential election is also pulling sheriffs into its orbit. Far-right sheriffs have allied with election deniers, using local law enforcement to amplify Trump’s lies about 2020, ramp up investigations, and even threaten election officials. One such sheriff, Pinal County’s Mark Lamb, is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, leaving his office open. Over in Texas, Tarrant County (Fort Worth) Sheriff Bill Waybourn inspired a new task force that will be policing how people vote while he runs for reelection next year.

With roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the 2024 ballot, voters will weigh in on county offices throughout the nation next year, settling confrontations over the shape of local criminal legal systems while also choosing the president and Congress.

Bolts today is launching its coverage with our annual overview of which counties will hold such races and when: Find our full list here.

Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors and Sheriffs in 2024?

Learn whether your county is hosting a prosecutor or sheriff race next year.

These offices often get overshadowed since the criminal legal system is so decentralized, but that’s also what makes these offices so powerful: DAs exert a great deal of discretion within their jurisdiction, choosing what cases to prosecute and how harshly, as do the sheriffs who run their county jails like fiefdoms. 

Most of the counties choosing their prosecutors and sheriffs in 2024 last elected these officials in 2020, a tumultuous year defined by the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and amplified attention to racial injustice.

Many candidates broke the traditional mold of law-and-order campaigning that year, making the case instead that punitive practices haven’t delivered on safety even as they’ve ballooned prisons. Reform-minded prosecutors were elected or reelected in the counties that contain Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Tucson, and Ann Arbor, among others; voters also elected some new sheriffs who interrupted immigration detention. But progressives fell short in high-profile races in the contain Houston, Detroit, Fort Worth, and Phoenix.

Those offices are all back on the ballot in 2024. Criminal justice reformers are defending more incumbents than ever but also hope to gain some new ground where they’ve faltered in the last cycle, with the future prospect of policies that would ramp incarceration up or down on the line.

To kick off our coverage of criminal justice in 2024’s local elections, here is an early guide to storylines to watch.

1. The reform-minded prosecutors seeking second terms

Los Angeles County’s size (ten million residents) and the tensions around George Gascón’s reelection bid are enough to make LA the marquee DA race of 2024. After Gascón ousted his tough-on-crime predecessor in 2020, he faced an internal revolt from staff prosecutors unwilling to implement his reforms and survived several efforts by his critics to force a recall. (One of the loudest champions for recalling Gascón, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, was ousted by voters in 2022.)

Gascón, who has dubbed himself the “godfather of progressive prosecutors,” now faces a very crowded field to secure a second term. While he’s also faced criticism from the left for not delivering on some of his promises, his opponents are largely running to his right, promising to roll back his sentencing reforms.

Other first-term progressive incumbents are also up for reelection. They include former labor organizer José Garza in Texas’ Travis County (Austin), Eli Savit in Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Deborah Gonzalez in Georgia’s Clarke County (Athens), and Laura Conover, who went from protesting the death penalty as a youth activist to promising to never seek it as the chief prosecutor of Pima County (Tucson).

Police groups have taken note and are already involved in these races. In Austin, police groups have tried to drum up complaints against Garza, who used his first term to prosecute police officers accused of violence, breaking with usual norms of impunity in a way that has made him a target for the national right. Last week, though, Garza dismissed the felony assault charges he had brought against 17 officers for their actions against protesters in 2020. 

Other new prosecutors who’ve clashed with police include Mike Schmidt in Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), whose challenger Nathan Vasquez has a closer relationship with the police, and Mimi Rocah in New York’s Westchester County. Rocah, who won her DA race in the wake of a major police scandal, vacated convictions that were tied to the testimony of a disgraced police officer. She won’t seek reelection next year, sparking an open race.

2. Clashing visions of public safety 

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is retiring in 2024, eight years after ousting Chicago’s chief prosecutor and starting to implement some reforms. So far, the Democrats running to replace her are walking a line between promising to keep Foxx’s changes and vowing to work more closely with law enforcement; a GOP candidate, meanwhile, has denounced Foxx for turning the office into a “social service agency instead of the prosecuting arm of the people.” 

However hyperbolic, that statement underscores the clashing visions of public safety in many of these prosecutorial races. Reform-minded candidates often make the case for strengthening a broader array of public services as an answer to crime, while their critics want to keep the focus on the more conventional tools of policing and incarceration. 

In Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati), for instance, Republican incumbent Melissa Powers hopes to prevail in a county that’s trending leftward by stroking fears about the effects of a Democratic takeover. She recently said her loss would turn Hamilton County into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” naming two of the nation’s big cities with the highest share of Black residents. To prevail in November, Powers would need to perform strongly in the county’s populous suburban areas, which are far whiter than its urban core of Cincinnati.

But many of next year’s most intriguing elections will be decided within the Democratic Party. Incumbents with a record of fighting local criminal justice reforms, and who beat back progressive challengers in 2020 or 2022, may choose to seek new terms in 2024.

These incumbents include: San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, who has embraced harsher policies and dropped police prosecutions since replacing Chesa Boudin, a progressive who was recalled in 2022; Harris County (Houston) DA Kim Ogg, a fierce critic of local bail reforms whose clashes with reform-minded Democrats have escalated this year; Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, known for the frequency with which he seeks death sentences; Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has defended punitive practices toward minors; and Albany County DA David Soares, who is a leading voice among New Yorkers demanding more rollbacks to the state’s recent bail reforms. 

Some of these races will be slow to take shape since the filing deadlines are still months away. But in Houston and Cleveland, the primaries are already around the corner. On March 5, Ogg faces Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office whose platform is more muted than some of Ogg’s prior opponents but who has support from some of her progressive critics. On March 19, O’Malley faces law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn, who has pledged to never seek the death penalty and decrease pretrial detention. 

Bolts will keep an eye on these and many more races next year, with prosecutor elections still taking shape all around the nation, from Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) and Maricopa County (Phoenix) to Milwaukee and Honolulu.

3. Can criminal justice reformers even run for local prosecutor in certain red states?

When DeSantis suspended Tampa prosecutor Andrew Warren over policy disagreements in 2022, Bolts writer Piper French pondered how to take future Florida elections seriously in light of that abrupt move. “What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss?” she asked. Since then, Warren’s DeSantis-appointed replacement has rolled back some of his reforms, and DeSantis has since fired a second prosecutor, Monique Worrell, in Orlando. (Worell is still contesting her ouster in state court.)

Nearly all Floridians will vote on their prosecutor in 2024. That means that in Hillsborough (Tampa) and Orange (Orlando) counties, residents will get to weigh in for the first time since DeSantis summarily dismissed the officials they’d elected in their last local elections. 

But the atmosphere created by DeSantis will make it tricky for there to be real policy choice in those elections. In Tampa, Orlando, and everywhere else in the state, candidates will know that their win may be overturned by the governor if they run on a vision that differs from his.

A similar dynamic exists, to a lesser extent, in Georgia, where the GOP adopted a new law that makes it a removable offense for local DAs to propose certain policies that progressives have prized, as well as in Texas, where some DAs are facing similar efforts to oust them. Conservative critics of Garza, Austin’s DA, filed a complaint seeking to remove him from office this month over his approach to prosecuting lower-level offenses.

4. Who will speak up against gruesome jail conditions?

Aggravated by routinely poor health care, jail deaths are a crisis all over the country—including in states such as Georgia, Michigan, Texas, and West Virginia that will be electing all of their sheriffs in 2024.

Sheriff Bill Waybourn, for instance, has overseen a startling string of deaths in Tarrant County, Texas, though that didn’t stop the Republican incumbent from narrowly securing reelection in 2020. 

Patrick Moses, one of Waybourn’s two Democratic challengers next year, promised to step up investigations into jail deaths when he launched his bid last week. “I view the 60 in-custody deaths at the Tarrant County Jail since 2018 as 60 individual reasons to run for office,” he says on his new website. 

Other counties with sheriff races are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for conditions in their local jails, including Fulton County (Atlanta) and parts of South Carolina. 

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat, a Democrat, is facing heavy fire and calls for his resignation due the many people who’ve died under his custody in Atlanta and due to his flailing response. Asked by Atlanta News First last week if Labat should step down, the chair of the county board pointed to the upcoming elections: “In the final analysis, it’ll be up to the voters come 2024.”

5. The rise of the far-right sheriffs

After Kansas’ most populous county, Johnson County, voted for Joe Biden by eight percentage points in 2020, Republican Sheriff Calvin Hayden went on a crusade claiming that elections are marred by widespread fraud and ramping up investigations, echoing Trumpian conspiracies.

Hayden is just one of the many sheriffs who have linked up with election deniers and other far-right organizations, using the power of the badge to push their agenda. And now he’s already facing an opponent in what’s likely to be a tough reelection bid next year. 

Many sheriffs with similar politics represent far redder territory, though recent examples show they may still lose against fellow Republicans or independents. The GOP primary to replace Mark Lamb in conservative Pinal County will be especially noteworthy if it yields a new sheriff who won’t see his role as propping up so-called constitutional sheriffs all around the nation. 

6. Immigrants’ rights will define more sheriff elections

Several Southern counties in 2020 interrupted their history of anti-immigration policies. In Charleston County, South Carolina, and Cobb and Gwinnett counties, Georgia, voters elected Democratic sheriffs who terminated their counties’ so-called 287(g) contracts—agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to arrest and detain people they suspect to be undocumented immigrants.

These sheriffs are all up for reelection in 2024, all in counties that may be competitive in a general election.

It may be hard for immigrants’ rights activists to break up more of these contracts through the polling booth in 2024, though. Per Bolts’ analysis, there are almost 90 counties presently in the 287(g) program that hold sheriff’s races, but they’re mostly in staunchly conservative areas. The exceptions are largely in Florida, due to a recent law signed by DeSantis that mandates that sheriffs join 287(g) whatever their own preferences. Outside of Florida, only one Biden-carried county has a 287(g) contract and is voting for sheriff in 2024: Bill Waybourn’s Tarrant County. 

But collaboration with ICE extends far beyond 287(g). Many sheriffs rent out jail space to ICE, or seek out federal grants to police immigrants. And come 2024, sheriff races in Arizona—a border state with a long history of anti-immigrant practices—may be the central battleground for those debates, especially with yet another unpredictable election taking shape in Maricopa County. 

Home to Joe Arpaio, one of the nation’s most visible far-right politicians, Maricopa County in 2016 saw Democrat Paul Penzone oust Arpaio and end some of the county’s most aggressive practices against immigrants. But Penzone also severely disappointed immigrants’ rights activists by maintaining close ties with ICE and keeping federal agents in his local jails.

Penzone announced this fall that he’ll resign in January, making the race unpredictable at this stage. In early 2024, the county board will need to replace him with a new Democrat, who’d then decide whether to seek reelection; already in the running is Penzone’s 2020 Republican rival, Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy. In this county of 4.4 million, the race may present an opportunity for local immigrants’ rights activists to gain a stronger ally, though it also opens the door for one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies to swing back to the far right. 

7. The many other elections that will matter greatly for criminal justice policy 

Sheriffs and prosecutors are just slices of the vast institutional edifice that runs the nation’s criminal legal systems. In 2024, big cities such as Baltimore and San Francisco will elect their mayor—an office that often, though not always, exerts direct control over the police department.

Ten states will elect their attorneys general, a role with broad authority over law enforcement. At least 33 will elect supreme court justices, who’ll shape local policy and individual criminal cases. 

And all of these races are bound to be overshadowed by a presidential campaign likely to pit President Biden against his predecessor. Trump is again playing up a strongman image, proposing the death penalty over drug sales and outlining a vast deportation infrastructure for which the collaboration of local sheriffs could prove critical. 

The post The Thousands of Local Elections That Will Shape Criminal Justice Policy in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

In 2018, fierce organizing by immigrants’ rights groups led to a sea change in North Carolina: sheriff candidates who promised to stop collaborating with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won in five of the state’s most populous counties. All were Black Democrats. Soon, the new sheriffs in Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties severed their contracts with ICE, and those in Durham, Forsyth (Winston-Salem) and Buncombe (Asheville) counties announced they would no longer detain immigrants for ICE without a judicial warrant, sparking immediate releases. 

“It was very euphoric,” recalled Stefanía Arteaga, co-executive director of the Carolina Migrant Network, which was closely involved in the organizing efforts. She recalls the relief felt by some of her friends, “not having to be so fearful that a simple traffic stop could lead to a deportation.”

ICE responded with heavy retaliation. It conducted raids across North Carolina, sweeping up over 200 people in just a few days. It was “a time of total panic,” recalls Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of the immigrants’ rights group Siembra NC. 

The agency also built a PR campaign to turn voters against Mecklenburg Sheriff Garry McFadden, posting billboards around Charlotte with the mugshots of immigrants who had been released on bond after the sheriff’s department rejected ICE’s requests to keep jailing them. (McFadden secured re-election anyway last year.) And it beefed up its presence elsewhere in the state, recruiting a dozen rural counties into a new form of partnership that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to identify undocumented immigrants and detain them for the agency.

Now ICE is closing in on another long-held goal: a state law that would force sheriffs to do the agency’s bidding anywhere in North Carolina.

Thanks to their new supermajorities, Republicans likely have the votes to push through legislation that would preempt the new sheriffs’ policies. Prior iterations of this bill, which ICE helped craft, were vetoed by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper, but the GOP recently gained the ability to override his vetoes and quickly pushed through long-stalled priorities like abortion restrictions. Immigrants rights’ advocates tell Bolts they are bracing for ICE’s bill to be next. 

House Bill 10, titled “Require Sheriffs to Cooperate with ICE,” would force sheriffs to proactively contact ICE to check the status of anyone booked into their jail for a felony or class A1 misdemeanor. 

The bill would also mandate that sheriffs honor so-called immigration detainers—-administrative requests by ICE to keep someone in jail beyond their scheduled release, without a warrant, in order to give federal agents time to pick them up. 

One of its chief sponsors, Republican Representative Destin Hall, says the bill is meant to target “woke sheriffs.” He promised in a video that it would “put a stop” to their “sanctuary” approach. 

Up until now, sheriffs have enjoyed the discretion to disregard detention requests from ICE. After 2018, the newly elected sheriffs said that jailing someone under these circumstances violates their constitutional rights, since detainers are not backed by a judicial warrant. 

“We have a person fax over a document not viewed, not authorized, not verified by a judicial official, a judge, or federal magistrate,” McFadden told Bolts to explain why he stopped honoring detainers.

Elsewhere, some federal courts have ruled that ICE detainers violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable seizures. Colorado, California, and Illinois have outlawed them altogether. Still, McFadden and others may soon face a mandate to jail people based on them.

Passage of HB 10 could significantly alter the landscape of immigration detention in North Carolina given the volume of detainer requests ICE has historically made there. According to an immigration database managed by Syracuse University, the agency sent over 64,000 detainers to North Carolina jails between 2005 and 2021. 

“These detentions have huge negative consequences,” said Marín Baena. “All of a sudden a family is left in crisis. Oftentimes there are kids that get left behind—people are just scrambling to try to figure out how to pay rent for the next few months. It has a huge economic impact and it has a huge psychological impact on the people in our communities.” 

Because of the 2008 federal data-sharing program called “Secure Communities,” which automatically sends fingerprints of anyone booked into a jail through a federal database, ICE maintains a virtual presence in jails across the country regardless of their sheriffs’ approach to  immigration. But when sheriffs actively cooperate with ICE, it can increase the agency’s reach exponentially. 

Sheriffs represent a critical link for ICE because they oversee jails, which gives them a captive population to mine on ICE’s behalf. And zealous local officials like Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, who was the first in the state to sign on to the new partnership with ICE in 2020 and recently launched a statewide campaign for lieutenant governor, have gone out of their way to further fuse civil immigration law and the criminal legal system.

Proponents of HB 10 like Page defend this entanglement with rhetoric that conflates immigration and crime and casts immigration enforcement as a matter of public safety.

“I feel that assisting I.C.E by serving I.C.E federal arrest warrants and subsequently transferring criminal illegal aliens directly into their custody will make our communities safer,” Page said in 2020.  At a recent hearing for HB 10, he testified, “I truly believe the best way to make our communities safer is to remove any criminal elements.” Page has joined forces with other far-right sheriffs crowdfund donations to build a wall alongside the U.S. border and protest President Biden’s immigration policies. These efforts are often affiliated with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national organization that is labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center; Page has traveled with FAIR and spoken at their events. 

Page, now the face of support for HB 10 among North Carolina sheriffs, declined an interview request, and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment for this story. 

Immigrants’ rights organizers warn that stepping up local collaboration with ICE will instill fear in North Carolina’s immigrant communities. “I’ve actually had clients who have told me that they didn’t go to the hospital when they had their first child because they were really worried,” said Adriel Orozco, an immigration attorney formerly with the North Carolina Justice Center who’s currently assisting the groups against HB 10.

Immigrants who land in local jails are typically still legally innocent and only held pretrial, often for minor reasons. North Carolina, for instance, does not allow undocumented people to apply for driver’s license, so someone could face a series of cascading ramifications—arrest, warrantless detention, transfer to a detention center in Georgia, since North Carolina has none of its own, and threat of removal—all for the alleged infraction of driving without a license. 

“The way that the bill is written puts anyone that’s charged at risk of being held for ICE,” said Arteaga. That includes not only people accused of serious crimes, whom HB 10’s supporters tend to focus on when discussing the bill, but also those who have been booked on minor infractions —and even people who may have been stopped for pretextual reasons because of the language they speak or the color of their skin.

“Racial profiling is utilized to intentionally place people into removal proceedings—because sometimes law enforcement knows that all it takes is an arrest,” Arteaga said. In Alamance County, for instance, the U.S Department of Justice  found racial profiling so extreme that the federal government stepped in to end a contract the county had with ICE in 2012; sheriff’s deputies, according to a federal civil rights investigation, were between 4 and 10 times more likely to stop Latinx drivers for traffic violations than white drivers. The county entered a new agreement with ICE during the Trump administration.

This year, 11 sheriffs wrote a public letter opposing HB 10 and denouncing immigration detainers, echoing the point that requiring local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE would make communities less safe, not more. “Multiple studies show that mandatory immigration enforcement makes people less likely to trust government authorities without improving public safety,” the group wrote. 

One of the sheriffs who signed the letter, Wake County’s Willie Rowe, is new to the office. He ousted a first-term Democratic incumbent last year in a primary before beating Republican Donnie Harrison, the longtime former sheriff who had forged a close relationship with ICE and whose possible return had alarmed local immigrants’ rights advocates.

McFadden also signed the letter. “Imagine people are being victimized in our city, our community, and [are] afraid to report it to law enforcement with the fear of ICE and deportation,” he told Bolts about his decision to no longer honor detainers. “For me, it was a very easy decision.”

The letter also warns of the “constitutional violations” and “Fourth Amendment concerns” that warrantless detention raises.

The group of 11 sheriffs represents over 40 percent of the state’s population. But the state’s influential sheriff association has not spoken up against HB 10. 

The association opposed an earlier iteration of the legislation in 2019, then switched to supporting it once lawmakers removed a provision allowing civilians to file a civil suit against sheriffs who don’t cooperate with ICE. The association said it had no formal position on the proposal’s 2022 iteration, though its sponsors claimed the association supported it. 

The association, which did not respond to requests for comment, has taken no position this year, and many sheriffs are staying quiet on HB 10.

Ten of the 11 sheriffs who signed the letter against HB 10 are Black, which stems largely from the turnover in the 2018 elections. “I think there’s a serious tension [within] the sheriffs’ association around this perceived loss of power by white sheriffs,” Arteaga says. 

For Felicia Arriaga, a professor at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs and the author of the new book Behind Crimmigration, which chronicles the recent history of local collaboration with ICE in North Carolina, this helps explain why more sheriffs in North Carolina haven’t rallied to the defense of those who are being targeted by ICE.

“If there were white sheriffs who were eager and open about not honoring detainers—because there are a handful of white sheriffs who do not honor detainers, at least in conversation with community members, that’s what they say—I think the conversation would be very different,” she told Bolts. 

McFadden, who is Black, echoes the point. “When the eight African American sheriffs took over the largest counties in North Carolina, it became a threat to the good ol’ boy system,” he told Bolts. 

The governor of North Carolina vetoed the bill’s prior incarnations when they came across his desk in 2019 and 2022, and Republicans lacked the votes to force it through. But the landscape is different this year. The GOP gained seats in both chambers in November, clinching a veto-proof majority in the Senate. They then secured a veto-proof majority in the House this spring thanks to Democrat Tricia Cotham’s defection to the Republican caucus.

HB 10 passed the House in March by a veto-proof majority. Every Republican lawmaker who voted supported it, as did three Democrats: Cotham, Michael Ray, and Cecil Brockman. 

It has since lingered in a Senate committee as Republicans prioritize these other issues and marking up the budget, but advocates tell Bolts they expect it to move forward.

“The votes are not in our favor. At all,” said Arteaga. 

In anticipation of the bill’s passage, the Carolina Migrant Network is switching course to consider litigation against it. The group is also reviving its immigration bond network in order to connect detained immigrants with lawyers and get them released on bond so that people aren’t sent to ICE detention centers out of state. 

They are also searching for ways to reduce arrests so that fewer people are booked in jail in the first place. This would interrupt the jail-to-deportation pipeline at an earlier stage in the process, Arteaga said. That could mean focusing attention away from sheriffs, whose hands would be more tightly bound by HB 10, and onto police chiefs and mayors who can choose to respond to infractions by issuing tickets rather than booking people into jail. 

Orozco noted that Democratic municipalities around the state could respond to HB10 by implementing local laws protecting immigrant communities. “Durham actually has a program to fund legal services for immigrants and an immigration court … so that’s a service other larger more populated counties could do,” he told Bolts. 

But, he added, there are already state laws on the books limiting what localities can do, such as the 2006 law cracking down on the issuance of drivers’ licenses to undocumented people. And if HB10, which its sponsor has referred to as a “test case,” becomes law, there’s no telling what other protections the legislature might seek to curtail. 

“One of the biggest fears,” Orozco said, “is that anytime there is a really great progressive or more inclusive policy for the immigrant community—that the legislature is just going to come back and figure out a way to restrict the ability for counties and cities to do that.”

To Marín Baena, HB 10 is just one piece in state Republicans’ larger agenda to transform North Carolina into a place that excludes entire groups of people from living safely and freely. 

“There’s a pattern here,” she said, pointing to other legislation like the recent 12-week abortion ban. “Who gets to call this state home and feel like they live here and don’t have to be afraid of hiding who they are?” 

The post North Carolina GOP Is Cracking Down on the Black Sheriffs Who Stood Up to ICE appeared first on Bolts.

Ryan says he was there to monitor the police behavior toward protesters, standing removed from the gathering. “I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go watch,’ because police have a tendency to overreach to these little things,” he recounts. “I don’t think I should have been arrested. But I was.” The police initially accused him of resisting arrest but they later admitted that this characterization was incorrect and apologized; still, they maintained trespassing charges.

A few weeks later, Ryan announced his candidacy for Broome County district attorney. He says he’d bring into the office a more skeptical perspective toward the criminal legal system, born of his experience as a defense attorney and public defender. “We all know that they police certain communities and treat certain communities differently,” he told Bolts. “If you’re not in a position of power to change it, then it’s not going to change.” 

He added, “The only one who is a gatekeeper to make sure that horrible jobs aren’t done is the district attorney because he or she has the ultimate discretion on whether to prosecute and how to prosecute, and what justice to extract from each individual situation.”

Broome County’s DA race is among dozens this year that will decide who leads local prosecution and law enforcement in New York. Fifteen counties are electing their sheriffs and 24 their DA, and the filing deadline for candidates to run for a party’s nomination passed last month. 

Most counties drew just one candidate who’ll be facing no competition. They include conservative sheriffs who have resisted gun control, the high-profile DAs of Rochester and Staten Island, and a sheriff who defied calls to resign for sharing a racist social media post—and is now poised to stay in office for four more years. 

Still, a few flashpoints have emerged. Candidates are taking contrasting approaches on bail in Broome, discovery reform in the Bronx, and policing in Queens. Rensselaer County (Troy) faces another reckoning with its unusual decision to partner with federal immigration authorities.

Bolts has compiled a full list of candidates running in the June 27 primaries, which will decide the nominees of the four political parties that have ballot lines in New York State: the Democratic, Republican, Working Families, and Conservative parties. Candidates can still petition until late May to appear on the Nov. 7 ballot as an independent.

These elections are unfolding against the backdrop of reforms the state adopted in 2019 to detain fewer people pretrial and offer defendants more access to the evidence against them. Democrats earlier this month agreed to roll back those reforms after years of pressure by many DAs and sheriffs. Their new package, championed by Governor Kathy Hochul, gives judges’ more authority to impose bail, amid other provisions that will likely increase pretrial detention. Hochul also backed a push by New York City DAs to loosen discovery rules requiring that prosecutors quickly share evidence with the defense, but the final legislation did not touch those.

Tess Cohen, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who is running for DA in the Bronx, is one of a few candidates this year who is voicing support for the original pretrial reforms and distaste for the rollbacks. Cohen is running in the Democratic primary against Bronx DA Darcel Clark, who was reported by City & State to be the chief instigator in lobbying state politicians to  loosen discovery rules. (Clark and other city DAs flipped on their push in the final days.) Cohen faults state politicians for making policy based on the media blowing up specific instances of crime.

“The problem with people like the governor bowing down to press coverage that is sensationalist and fear-mongering, and almost always inaccurate, is that we actually make our communities less safe when we do that,” Cohen told Bolts. “We have very good data that shows that holding people at Rikers Island on bail or low level crimes does not make us safer.” 

A study released in March by the John Jay College found that people who were released due to the bail reform were less likely to be rearrested. 

Eli Northrup, a staunch proponent of the original reforms as policy director at the Bronx Defenders, hopes that the upcoming elections usher in more local officials who are “looking to change the system, shrink the system, work toward having fewer people incarcerated, rather than using it as a tool for coercing pleas.”  But he is also circumspect after the new rollbacks. Even if a reformer were to win an office, he says, they’d likely have to contend with police unions, mayors, and other entrenched powers looking to block reforms. “What we should be doing is spending less money on policing and prosecution and investing that very money into the communities that are harmed the most by violence,” he says.

To kick off Bolts’ coverage of New York’s criminal justice elections this year, here are five storylines that jump out since the filing deadline has passed.

1. Challenges from opposite directions for two New York City DAs 

Queens four years ago saw a tense Democratic primary for DA between Tiffany Cabán, a public defender who ran as a decarceral candidate, and Queens Borough President Melinda Katz, who prevailed by just 60 votes. Four years later, Katz faces a primary challenge from her right from George Grasso, a retired judge and former NYPD official, who is calling for harsher policing and thinks the city is waging a “war on cops.” Grasso is running with the support of Bill Bratton, the former NYPD commissioner and a frequent critic of policing reforms. 

Public defender Devian Daniels is running as well, saying she wants to fight mass incarceration from the Queens DA’s office after “years of witnessing abuses on the front lines as defense counsel.” The Democratic primary typically amounts to victory in this blue stronghold. 

In the Bronx, Darcel Clark’s sole primary challenger, Tess Cohen, says wants to take the DA’s office in a more progressive direction. She says that Clark’s lobbying to loosen the state’s discovery rules is emblematic of how prosecutors can coerce defendants into guilty pleas. “If you’re held in Rikers, and you can only get out if you plead guilty, and you can’t make that argument that you’re actually innocent because you don’t have the evidence, then you end up pleading guilty just to get out of Rikers,” she told Bolts. 

Cohen explained that she would also change how the office decides whether to recommend for pretrial detainment. “If we are in a space where our recommendation for sentence or our plea offer means the person is immediately going to be released from jail, they should be released anyways,” she said. “You should not be holding someone in jail that you plan to release the minute they plead guilty.” 

Clark did not reply to a request for comment.

2. North of New York City, the policy contrasts on pretrial reform are muted

Broome County, on the border with Pennsylvania, had the highest rate of people detained in jail as of 2020, the year the reforms were first implemented, according to data compiled by the Vera Institute for Justice. Ryan, the Democratic lawyer running for DA, told Bolts he supports the reforms, crediting them for helping slightly reduce the local jail population. 

But his two Republican opponents in this swing county disagree. Incumbent Michael Korchak has pushed for their repeal for years, while his primary rival Paul Battisti, a defense attorney, says the reforms were “extreme.” Neither Battisti nor Korchak replied to requests for comment. Their rhetoric is in line with the position of many, but not all, upstate DAs who have lobbied to roll back the pretrial reforms ever since they passed in 2019. 

But candidates have tended to converge on pretrial policy in the other DA races north of New York City. There are three such counties besides Broome with more than 100,000 residents. 

In Ulster County, Democrat Manny Nneji, who is currently the chief assistant prosecutor, faces Michael Kavanagh, who used to have the same job and now works as a defense attorney, and is running as a Republican. In interviews with Hudson Valley One earlier this year, both candidates largely agreed that the 2019 bail reform should be made more restrictive, and jostled about who is tougher on crime.

In Onondaga County, home to Syracuse, Incumbent William Fitzpatrick is running for re-election as a Republican against Chuck Keller, who filed to run for the Democratic nomination but also that of the Conservative Party, an established party in the state. (New York law allows candidates to run for multiple nominations at once.) The Syracuse Post-Standard reports that the local Conservative Party in March chose to endorse Keller over Kitzpatrick after Keller shared with them that he supports bail reform roll backs in line with what lawmakers ended up passing in early May. (Christine Varga is also running in the Conservative Party primary.)

In Dutchess County, Republican William Grady is retiring this year after 40 years as DA, a tenure during which he strongly fought statewide reform proposals. Democrat Anthony Parisi and Republican Matthew Weishaupt, who have both worked as prosecutors under Grady, are running to replace him; after he entered the race, Parisi faced a threat of retribution from Grady, for which the DA later apologized. Weishaupt has said he thinks the discovery reforms are “dangerous” in how they help defendants. Parisi did not reply to questions on his views on the reforms.

Six smaller counties—Columbia, Delaware, Hamilton, Lewis, Seneca, and Sullivan, with populations ranging from 5,000 to 80,000 residents—also host contested DA races this year. 

3. Half of this year’s DA elections are uncontested

A single candidate is running unopposed in 12 of New York’s DA races. Ten of them are already in office, but two are newcomers: Todd Carville ​​in Oneida County and Anthony DiMartino in Oswego County. Both are Republicans and currently work as assistant prosecutors.

Michael McMahon, Staten Island’s DA, is running unopposed for the second consecutive cycle: He is a Democrat in a red-leaning county, but the GOP did not put up a candidate against him. He has been very critical of the criminal justice reforms adopted by his party’s lawmakers, and has pushed for their rollback. Another prominent critic of the pretrial reforms, Monroe County (Rochester) DA Sandra Doorley, is also running unopposed. Doorley, a Republican who was the president of the state’s DA association back when the reforms were first implemented in 2020, faced a heated challenge four years ago but is now on a golden path toward a fourth term.

4. Will ICE’s 287(g) program retain a foothold in New York?

Rensselaer County, home to Troy, is the only county in New York State that participates in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents in county jails—and one of the only blue-leaning counties in the nation with such an agreement. Immigrants’ rights activists from Cape Cod to suburban Atlanta have targeted 287(g) by getting involved in sheriff’s elections in recent years, tipping these offices toward candidates who pledged to terminate their offices’ partnerships with ICE.

Patrick Russo, the Republican sheriff who joined 287(g), is retiring this year. The race to replace him will decide whether ICE’s program retains its sole foothold in New York.

But will anyone even make the case for breaking ties with ICE? The two Republicans who are running for Russo’s office, Kyle Bourgault and Jason Stocklas, each told Bolts that they would maintain their county in the program with no hesitation. 

The only Democratic candidate, Brian Owens, did not return repeated requests for comment. He said at a press conference last month that he had no position on the matter. “I’d want to educate myself a little more before I’d make any decision on that,” he said. Owens is a former police chief of Troy, a city that during his tenure saw local activism pressuring officials to not collaborate with ICE, so these are not new questions. Still, Russo coasted to re-election unopposed four years ago, and it remains to be seen whether the 2023 cycle gives immigrants’ rights activists any more of an opening. 

5. Most incumbent sheriffs are virtually certain of securing new terms

Albany Sheriff Craig Apple drew national attention in 2021 for filing a criminal complaint against then-Governor Andrew Cuomo for groping, but he also attracted criticism for fumbling the case. The New York Times reported at the time that Apple seemed to be made of Teflon, having rebounded from past controversies with multiple re-election bids where he faced no opponent. History repeated itself again—he drew no challenger this year. 

But judging by the lay of the land throughout the state, this says less about Apple than it does about a broader dearth of engagement in New York’s local elections: Overall, 80 percent of the state’s sheriff races are uncontested this year. 

This includes the sheriffs of Fulton and Greene County, who have fiercely opposed a new gun law banning concealed weapons in a long list of public spaces, alongside many peers who are not up for election this year. Fulton’s Richard Giardino took to Fox News to signal he’d only loosely enforce it. 

And it includes Rockland County Sheriff Louie Falco, who faced calls for his resignation in 2020 after he shared a link from a white supremacist website about Black people on Facebook. Three years later, he won’t even face any opponent as he coasts to a fourth term.

The post Tensions High on Bail and Policing as New Yorkers Elect DAs and Sheriffs appeared first on Bolts.

Editor’s note (Jan. 7, 2023): Donna Buckley won the sheriff election on Nov. 8, and she terminated the Barnstable County contract with ICE on Jan. 4, her first day in office.

Barnstable County, which comprises Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is known for its beautiful coastal scenery, busy summers and snug, sleepy off-seasons. 

Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor earlier this month sent about 50 Venezuelan migrants on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard who were then promptly transferred to Cape Cod. Local politicians decried the stunt as a cruel attempt to expose the area’s immigrant-friendly self-image as fraudulent, but refused to take the bait.  “We are going to take care of these people,” state Senator Julian Cyr, a Democrat, told reporters. Articles about the open-armed response abounded.

But Barnstable also has another distinctive feature: an unusually tight relationship with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

It is the only county in all of New England that has an active contract with ICE’s 287(g) program. This program, which is typically up to sheriffs to opt into, deputizes local officers to assist ICE in sharing data about, questioning, and detaining people suspected to be unauthorized immigrants. 

“It just makes everyone feel worse, afraid. Afraid to be deported any time,” Katia Regina Dacunha, a Brazilian immigrant and Barnstable resident, told Bolts. She moved to this country 18 years ago and gained citizenship seven years ago. “ The level of anxiety and tension is huge in our community.” 

Among more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices in the country, only about 130 have this arrangement with ICE. Of this sliver of 287(g) participants, sheriffs are up for election this November in 39 counties—34 of which voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. 

Barnstable is one of the exceptions. It favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by nearly 25 points. Once a Republican stronghold, it has voted for Democrats in every presidential election since 1992. Most local politicians, including every county commissioner, is a Democrat, though the outgoing sheriff is a Republican and the GOP has held the district attorney’s office for the last 51 years.

Immigrant rights advocate Mark Gabriele, a member of the community group Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, says people in the county don’t particularly favor punishing non-citizens, but rather many in the resort communities that dot this part of southeastern Massachusetts simply aren’t aware of the program that lumps additional anxiety onto an immigrant community already on high alert.

“It never dawns on a lot of people that we have this active 287(g) thing, this certainly unfriendly atmosphere,” he said. 

The sheriff who signed this agreement, Republican James Cummings, has for years published demographic information about the people his office refers to ICE each month—in total, more than 300 people since 2018. (A Syracuse University national database shows that ICE placed detainers on people held in the county jail during the partnership, though not all may have been deported.)

This could all change soon, though. Cummings is retiring after 23 years on the job, and in November voters are set to choose a replacement in a contest where cooperation with ICE has become a faultline. Republican lawmaker Tim Whelan wants to preserve the ICE partnership, and Democratic attorney Donna Buckley says she’d “rip up” the 287(g) agreement on her first day in office.

Buckley, who served as general counsel for Cummings for the last four years, says she only decided to run this spring because, she said, she lacked confidence in Whelan to reform an office she’s observed as failing to prepare incarcerated people for success after release. Her entry into the race gave voters an affirmative choice in a contest that otherwise would be unopposed.

“The sheriff’s office should not be doing ICE’s job,” Buckley said. “The sheriff’s office should be focusing on all of the people who come out (of jail) and make sure they do not commit more crimes, that they do not have more victims, that they don’t overdose and die, that they don’t put our police at risk.”

“[The 287(g) agreement] has nothing to do with correction, rehabilitation and treatment of people who are sent to the custody of the sheriff, and it needs to go,” Buckley added.

But it speaks to Gabriele’s point about the relative apathy on this issue that even Buckley emphasizes her position on immigration enforcement is not a defining part of her platform. She describes the 287(g) involvement as merely symptomatic of what she alleges to be a broader problem of mismanaged priorities in the office, as opposed to casting it as a matter of social or racial justice. She also says the issue does not come up much on the campaign trail.

“One thing I’ve definitely noticed,” said Sarang Sekhavat, political director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, “is that immigration, for folks who support immigration and pro-immigrant policies, is a low priority. It’s not the kind of thing they’re usually calling their legislators about.”

Many in Massachusetts may also have no idea where a sheriff fits in on immigration enforcement. A recent survey by the firm Beacon Research showed most in the state don’t know the name of their sheriff and don’t understand well what the job entails.

Whelan, who didn’t respond to requests for an interview for this story, told The Provincetown Independent that 287(g) is “a tool by which we can keep Cape Codders safe.” Proponents of 287(g) often cast it as a crime-fighting measure, since it consists of researching people after they are brought into a jail—though nationwide data shows that 287(g) is typically used against people arrested for low-level offenses or traffic infractions. Cummings, who is currently being sued over the program by Lawyers for Civil Rights and Rights Behind Bars, also defends it.

“What we’re doing is working, and it’s not costing us a lot of money and all the things they’re saying about immigrants’ rights, it’s all B.S.,” Cummings told The Cape Cod Times.

The lawsuit argues it is, in fact, costing taxpayers money, and draws on the Cape Cod Times reporting that showed the sheriff’s office spending more on overtime pay even as the number of people jailed there fell in the pandemic. The suit notes that some sheriff employees who’d earned the most in overtime were also among the handful who’d been specifically trained and deputized under 287(g). One of them, Corrections Officer Kevin Fernandes, had a salary of $85,050 last year and made another $60,476 in overtime, the lawsuit states.

Critics like Gabriele also fault the program for perpetuating racial disparities within the legal system.

Barnstable County is about 92 percent white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities has compiled a running tally of Cummings’ published demographic information, showing that Black men comprise the plurality of those the sheriff has reported.

According to this data, out of the more than 320 people Cummings has listed over the years, at least 98 are from Jamaica—easily the largest share by country of origin.  The largest group of immigrants on the island by far is Brazilians, but there are about half as many people from Brazil as from Jamaica in Cummings’s published statistics.

Said Buckley of Cummings’s policy to publish information about jailed immigrants, “It’s making them look like these bad scary people and not acknowledging the fact that they’re no different than anyone else” incarcerated in Barnstable County.

In Massachusetts, unlike in many other states, sheriffs are almost singularly empowered to run jails. They do not have regular patrol and arrest duties. In her interview with Bolts, Buckley pointed out that she would have no control over deciding which people end up in custody.

Still, the participation in 287(g) exacerbates a problem of disproportionately harsh policing and incarceration that affects Black men in Barnstable as well as in the state at large. A 2020 report by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School documented large racial disparities in Massachusetts throughout the stages of the criminal legal process, fueling huge differences in the incarceration rate among white, Latinx, and Black residents.

“There are all these layers of where the problem could be originating,” Gabriele said. “It could be in (racial disparities in) accusations, in prosecution. You don’t get screened for the 287(g) until you’re actually on the premises of the jail, so the overrepresentation of Jamaicans could’ve originated earlier in this whole criminal prosecution process.”

Whether or not Buckley wins, there are signs that 287(g) may be on its last legs in Massachusetts. It exists now in just two areas: in Barnstable, and in an agreement between ICE and the state prison system. 

County-level agreements have already been reversed in neighboring Plymouth County, where the sheriff voluntarily ended the program a year ago, and in Bristol County, where the Biden administration terminated the 287(g) contract after a scathing state investigation into a violent episode in 2020 in that county’s now-shuttered ICE detention center. The office of Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey found the Bristol County officers had committed civil rights violations and recommended the termination.

Healey, a Democrat, is running for governor this year and heavily favored to win. Her campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment on whether she’d preserve the state prison system’s 287(g) agreement.

If she wins, she would succeed Republican Governor Charlie Baker, who this year vetoed a bill to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. The Democratic legislature overrode his veto, but opponents collected enough signatures to force a referendum in November on whether to repeal the new law.

Dacunha argued that the changes that this election may bring would make Barnstable County a safer home. 

“People want to pay taxes, contribute to the communities, get their status, not be afraid to do that,” she said. “Somehow, they are here. So what are we going to do about it? Close our eyes and abuse them?”

The post Cape Cod Will Decide Whether to “Rip Up” Agreement for ICE Collaboration appeared first on Bolts.

Update: Sheriff Chuck Jenkins prevailed in the Nov. 8, 2022 election.

Jesus Santiago remembers when La Chiquita Grocery was the only place nearby he and his family could go for the hard-to-find ingredients that are staples of cuisine from their native Mexico. When he first moved to Frederick County, Maryland, as a child in 2002, it was an overwhelmingly white county known for its strong conservative leanings. Speaking Spanish in public often brought stares and there weren’t many kids who looked like him in school. 

Over time, things changed. The Latinx population in Frederick County grew nearly seven-fold from 2000 to 2020, driven largely by job opportunities in the area and low housing costs, and more and more stores like La Chiquita popped up around town; the share of the white population, which sat at 90 percent in 2000, is now below 70 percent. But there was always one constant: “As an immigrant,” Santiago says, “you never really felt safe.”

The rapid demographic changes were met with hostility by local officials. The county declared English to be its official language in 2012 to deter immigrants from coming. Members of the county’s board of commissioners pushed to block landlords from renting to undocumented people and require businesses to verify the immigration status of their workers. Commissioners even attempted to get local public schools to report on which students were undocumented. 

These efforts were all designed to make daily life difficult for immigrant communities. But the local sheriff’s department, which has been led since 2006 by Republican Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, went furthest in declaring war on people like Santiago. 

In December 2010, while driving home from work, Santiago noticed a police car following him. It kept behind several minutes before pulling him over for purportedly crossing a solid road line. Santiago had heard stories of immigrants like him in the community getting stopped for petty reasons before being detained. Now, it was his turn.

Santiago was arrested for driving on a suspended license and taken to the station, where officers ran his fingerprints. Upon discovering his undocumented status, Frederick County police immediately contacted federal agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and put Santiago in a cell block reserved for immigrants facing deportation. Santiago spent Christmas and New Years behind bars. Forty-two days went by before he managed to convince an immigration judge to lower his bail to an amount his family could afford to pay; on the 43rd day, he posted bail and was released to his family while his case was processed.

Sanitago’s story is no outlier. Under Jenkins, Frederick County became home to one of the most draconian anti-immigrant local law enforcement regimes in the country. Working hand-in-hand with ICE, Jenkins’ police force deported more than 1,500 immigrants and detained countless more. The sheriff has ridden his anti-immigrant platform to the summit of small-town stardom, becoming a darling of Fox News and making an appearance at political gatherings held at the White House by former President Donald Trump and later at his Mar-a-Lago beach home. But that joyride might soon come to an end. 

Jenkins is up for reelection in November, and immigrants’ rights advocates hope this is the moment their longstanding efforts to reverse local policies finally pay off. 

Jenkins faces Democrat Karl Bickel, a former sheriff’s deputy and a retired policing analyst at the Department of Justice, who says he would curtail the sheriff’s department’s relationship with ICE if he wins.

“It’s just not the place of local law enforcement to get involved in immigration enforcement,” Bickel, who has met with Santiago and other affected immigrants during his campaigns, told Bolts. “It’s time to start the hard work of rebuilding trust with the immigrant community.”

The central pillar of Jenkins’ immigration policies is a special agreement made with ICE known as 287(g). Under 287(g), sheriff’s deputies are empowered to act like federal immigration agents within their county jail; when someone is booked in jail for whatever reason, it allows deputies to inquire about their immigration status and to keep those who can’t prove their immigration status locked up when they’d otherwise be freed until ICE collects them. It’s why Frederick County police were able to keep Santiago detained for so long for a misdemeanor offense. 

Supporters of 287(g) like Jenkins claim the program is a necessary public safety tool for tackling serious crime. The available data for 287(g) arrests, both nationally and for Frederick County, contradict Jenkins’ assurances and show that it is frequently used against people arrested over minor infractions. Immigrants rights advocates criticize the program on the grounds that local law enforcement weaponizes it against immigrants and other people of color, targeting people after booking them over offenses like traffic violations. 

“It leads to a real destruction of community trust towards law enforcement,” says Viviana Westbrook of the Catholic Immigration Network. Westbrook says she’s represented clients in Frederick County who have been mugged or assaulted but refused to call the police. 

“Undocumented people are afraid that reporting a crime will cause them more danger than the actual crime they’ve been a victim to,” Westbrook adds.

Bickel, Jenkins’s challenger, echoes that criticism of the program. In an interview with Bolts, he committed to ending the county’s 287(g) contract.

Bickel also said he would curb other forms of cooperation with ICE and would reject detainers—requests from ICE, which do not include a criminal warrant signed by a judge, that a jail keep detaining someone past their release date. But Bickel left the door open to sharing information with the federal agency in cases involving detained individuals who committed higher-level crimes such as homicide or assault of any kind. In such cases, the sheriff’s department would still not detain the individual on behalf of ICE, Bickel said, but would contact the agency to inform them that the individual has been released.  

Only a small share of counties nationwide are part of the 287(g) program, including Frederick and two of Maryland’s 22 other counties. 

And Frederick is one of just a handful of 287(g) counties nationwide that voted for Joe Biden over Trump in 2020 and have local elections this year. This marks Frederick among the 2022 midterms’ critical battlegrounds for local immigration policy, alongside counties dispersed around the country such as Barnstable in Massachusetts, and Wake in North Carolina. 

Still, the number of jurisdictions nationwide participating in 287(g) more than tripled between 2016 and 2020, thanks to a concerted effort by the Trump administration to promote the program. The common factor among new participants, law professor Alina Das writes in her book No Justice in the Shadows, was not a high crime rate, but rather a change in demographics. According to Das, nearly 90 percent of jurisdictions signing up had seen growth in their Latinx population above the national average in recent years. These were the same dynamics at play in Frederick County when Jenkins came into power. 

Jenkins was first elected in 2006 on the back of a campaign demonizing immigrants. According to a legal brief by the ACLU of Maryland, Jenkins claimed that “the immigration problem” was the nation’s “single biggest threat”—one that he intended to solve and “shoot them right back” out of Frederick County. It didn’t take long for local advocates to question whether the sheriff’s devotion to the 287(g) program was grounded in crime prevention or just thinly veiled racism. 

Former president of the Frederick County NAACP chapter Guy Djoken thinks back with dismay on his first time meeting Jenkins. He and representatives from immigrant advocacy group CASAand from the state’s ACLU chapter gathered in Jenkin’s office in 2008 to make the case that 287(g) was not an effective tool for fighting crime. As they finished their presentation, Jenkins asked if he could show them something before leaving. The sheriff turned to his computer screen which lit up with a video from immigration restrictionist group NumbersUSA. In the video, a presenter stands before an enormous container of colorful gumballs meant to represent the billions of poor people living in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, arguing that immigration levels to the U.S. should be cut. 

“We couldn’t believe our eyes. This wasn’t about stopping crime at all. It was about getting immigrants out of America,” Djoken, who led the Frederick County chapter of the civil rights organization from 2004 to 2016, told Bolts. “We realized then that there was no hope for education or cooperation. We needed to fight back.”

Jenkins did not respond to an interview request or questions before the publication of this article. He responded after this article was published. On a call with Bolts, Jenkins said he stood by 287(g) and his past comments on the program. He said he did not believe the program had negatively affected any trust between his department and Frederick County’s immigrant community. Regarding the NumbersUSA video, Jenkins said he played the video that day to “show where we were headed as a country,” mentioning millions of “illegals” and unsustainable immigration levels.

Throughout his tenure, Jenkins has associated with other organizations that advocate for harsher immigration policies, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). FAIR, which shares a founder with NumbersUSA, the white supremacist and eugenicist John Tanton, funded a trip to the southern border with Mexico for Jenkins and seven other sheriffs in 2014. FAIR also works with another far-right group, Help Save Maryland, which partnered with Jenkins to set up a statewide tour to promote 287(g). Both FAIR and Help Save Maryland have both been labeled as ‘hate groups’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

Jenkins is also involved with far-right groups Protect America Now and Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Both groups, which boast hundreds of members between them, have actively promoted conspiracies around the 2020 election and sit at the center of a network of organizations working to police future elections. Their strategy is to use baseless claims of voter fraud to empower sheriffs to monitor ballot drop boxes and poll locations—tactics that democracy advocates warn will be used to intimidate voters, particularly voters of color. 

In the years following Djoken’s 2008 meeting with Jenkins, local progressive, civil rights, and immigrant advocacy groups coalesced against the county’s 287(g) program and the sheriff’s extremism. But as pressing as these issues were, Frederick County leaned conservative and remained roughly 80 percent white, and convincing residents to care would take time.  

Jenkins would cruise to reelection in his next two campaigns, including beating Bickel in 2014 by 25 points. Bickel sought a rematch in 2018, and cut the margin to just four points. He is now running for the third time.

Among the major difference makers in that tight, 2018 election were the organizers with groups like Safe Haven Frederick, ACLU of Maryland, and the RISE Coalition of Western Maryland who worked to capitalize on the anger at Trump’s immigration policies to remind voters that their sheriff was working closely with ICE. (Similar activism elsewhere that year succeeded at ousting other longtime sheriffs with ties to ICE.) Organizers staged several protests against the county’s participation in the 287(g) program, in addition to pro-immigrant rallies and events. Their efforts centered the voices of affected local residents like Roxana Orellana Santos and Sara Medrano, two Latina women who have successfully sued Jenkins’s office for racial profiling after they were wrongfully arrested while going about their day. 

The county has shifted bluer since. Biden’s 10-point win over Trump marked the first time a Democratic presidential candidate carried Frederick County since 1964. In 2021, Democrats used their new majority on the county council to create the first Immigrant Affairs Commission, a body meant to facilitate communication between immigrants and elected officials. 

“When people face a common challenge, it brings them together,” says Djoken, who attributes many of the recent transformations in Frederick County to the coalitions built in response to its 287(g) agreement. 

Meanwhile, on a statewide level, Maryland Democrats who run the state legislature have moved against local anti-immigrant ordinances. In December, the legislature overrode vetoes from Republican Governor Larry Hogan to adopt a law banning local jails from being paid by federal agencies to detain undocumented people and a law banning state officials from sharing driver’s records and facial recognition data with federal immigration agents. 

Jenkins’s critics believe that conditions are in place for the sheriff to lose in a still-diversifying Frederick County, from the local backlash to Trump to this statewide move to be more welcoming to immigrants. And they intend to keep reminding people of his policies.

Santiago, who was brought by his parents to the U.S. when he was seven years old, was eventually protected from deportation in 2012 when then-President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. But the threat 287(g) poses to other immigrants like him, including his own family, is on his mind.

“It scares me because my dad drives everyday and he’s undocumented,” he said. “There are times when he and my mom leave the house and I won’t hear from them for a few hours. I get worried. Did something bad happen? Did they get stopped?”

If Frederick County were to quit 287(g), Santiago added, “I’d be able to sleep better at night knowing my mom and dad won’t get pulled over by somebody racist and get detained.”

The article has been updated with comment from Jenkins.

The post “You Never Really Felt Safe”: Resistance to Far-Right Maryland Sheriff Builds in Election Lead-Up appeared first on Bolts.

Update: Willie Rowe beat Donnie Harrison on Nov. 8, 2022.

A week before Donald Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination in May 2016, 13-year-old Alex Matehuala asked Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison to cut his office’s longstanding ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Standing in a church in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in front of nearly 100 people, most of Central American descent, Alex told Harrison that his schoolmates worried every day that their parents would be taken before they got home. 

“Will you continue to renew a racist program that puts families at risk of being separated?” he asked. 

The 287(g) program, which Harrison joined in 2007, authorized local deputies to check the immigration status of people they arrested—a job that’s usually the purview of federal authorities—and detain suspected undocumented immigrants after they’d otherwise be released. Over the previous two years, it had led to more than 1,000 deportations, according to data compiled by Appalachian State University sociologist Felicia Arriaga. It had also spread fear among immigrant communities: a low-level traffic infraction could easily escalate into deportation proceedings. 

But Harrison said he saw no reason to end the program. In 2016 and 2017, ICE deported another 498 people from Wake County through 287(g), according to Arriaga.

“I have been in forums with [Harrison] where community members have literally been crying. Their families have been torn apart by having a loved one deported for a very low-level offense, getting flagged through 287(g) and leaving their kids behind,” Angeline Echeverría, the former director of El Pueblo, the Latinx advocacy organization that sponsored the 2016 event, told Bolts this month. “Just, like, terrible, devastating stories. And Donnie was not moved.”

Ahead of the 2018 midterms, with Trump’s immigration policies rattling the nation, local law enforcement agencies’ cooperation with ICE came under intense scrutiny. In North Carolina, that dynamic put several sheriffs in the hot seat—including Harrison, a Republican who hadn’t faced a serious challenge since becoming sheriff in 2002 despite Wake County trending Democratic. 

Harrison lost by 10 points to Gerald Baker, a former deputy who pledged to withdraw Wake County from 287(g) and made good on his word after taking office. Harrison wasn’t alone in defeat. Six of North Carolina’s most populous counties—also, Mecklenburg (Charlotte), Guilford (Greensboro), Forsyth (Winston-Salem), Buncombe (Asheville), and Durham—elected new Black Democratic sheriffs who vowed to restrict collaboration with ICE. 

Four years later, Harrison wants his job back and he is on the ballot in November’s sheriff election. During the Republican primary, he reiterated his support for 287(g). After he won the nomination in May, the immigrant-rights activists who helped oust him in 2018 geared up for another fight—this time in a very different environment. There was no blue wave on the horizon, and immigration no longer drove headlines. Baker, meanwhile, lost the Democratic primary amid allegations of mismanagement, cronyism, low morale, and criticism of his aggressive but ineffective response to the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder. Harrison’s new opponent, former deputy Willie Rowe, lost to Harrison by 18 points in the 2014 sheriff’s race. Even in a county Trump lost twice by double digits, advocates feared that if 287(g) flew under the radar, Harrison could stage a comeback.  

But on Aug. 17, Harrison’s campaign made an abrupt reversal. In a statement provided to Bolts, Harrison said that if elected, he would no longer participate in 287(g) or honor ICE detainers—requests that sheriffs continue detaining someone beyond their scheduled release time in order to give ICE time to pick them up. A consultant for Harrison’s campaign also said he would recognize Community Action IDs—alternative identification cards for immigrants who cannot obtain state IDs—which he’d previously rejected but Baker began recognizing earlier this year.

“Mr. Harrison fully understands the concern many residents and citizens have about the 287(g) program targeting specific races and nationalities,” Brad Crone, the consultant, told Bolts in an email. “There are better ways to address public safety concerns by extending criminal checks for all people who are processed into the detention center.”

Immigrant-rights advocates are skeptical about Harrison’s change of heart. “Because of the administration that he ran before, I don’t quite believe it,” Arriaga said. “It feels like there’s gonna be something else, and I’m scared of what that something else would be.”

“I’ve certainly heard of candidates positioning themselves in a certain way in primaries and then shifting to the center for the general election, thinking they need to appeal to a broader constituency,” Echeverría added. “I have never seen it this dramatically in a local election in Wake County. This is a huge about-face.” 

Harrison might be attempting to neutralize a contentious issue as he seeks to win back the sheriff’s office—Rowe has already promised not to rejoin 287(g). But Echeverría says his record of pushing immigration enforcement while dismissing the community’s concerns about ICE collaboration speaks volumes. 

“Any reporter looking into his record can see that he consistently renewed the 287(g) agreement when he was sheriff,” she said. “He was not persuaded at all by community members whose lives were upended by the program and whose families were separated. So it’s just—I mean, I guess people have short memories.”

Harrison was always an immigration hardliner. He was the first sheriff in North Carolina to enroll in Secure Communities, in which local police run the fingerprints of every person they arrest through a national database to determine their immigration status. Harrison said the program would help his office “find more criminals or criminal aliens who otherwise could have slipped through the cracks.” In its first two years, nearly two-thirds of Secure Communities deportees from Wake County hadn’t been convicted of a crime. (President Joe Biden halted Secure Communities after taking office.)    

In November 2007, the Wake County Board of Commissioners agreed to hire 12 deputies to implement 287(g), which cost about $539,000 a year to operate. By 2009, eight North Carolina counties and the city of Durham had entered into 287(g) agreements as well, with sheriffs falsely blaming immigrants for rising property and violent crime rates. 

Sometimes, overt racism bubbled to the surface. One sheriff complained about “trashy” Mexicans “breeding like rabbits.” Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson told his deputies to “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters.” (In 2012, the U.S. Justice Department sued Alamance County for targeting Latinos. Its sheriff’s office was forced to withdraw from 287(g), though Alamance joined the program again during the Trump administration.)Harrison’s participation in 287(g) didn’t create roadblocks to reelection in 2010 and 2014. Echeverría says El Pueblo and other immigrant advocacy groups didn’t coalesce into a political force until 2015, when Republican Governor Pat McCrory signed a law that prohibited sanctuary cities and banned government agencies from using consular or embassy documents to verify a person’s identity.

Trump’s immigration policies further moved the issue at the forefront of the nation’s preoccupations, especially in urban counties like Wake, which voted for Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points. Harrison nevertheless argued that his close ties with the least popular federal agency made the county safe. “If I turn a child molester or a bank robber loose, or whatever on the street, and I turn him loose because I didn’t know who he was and he went down the street and robbed a bank or molested a child, who’s going to be blamed for it?” Harrison said in 2018.

A study of North Carolina from the libertarian Cato Institute found “no statistically significant impact of 287(g) program participation on either violent or property crime rates.” In addition, most people ensnared by 287(g) were sitting in jail pretrial and over misdemeanor charges, including minor offenses such as driving without a license or with a broken taillight.

Baker made 287(g) central to his 2018 campaign, promising to leave the program “for the sake of humanity.” The issue drew national attention and financial investments. The ACLU ran ads in Wake County that highlighted 287(g) and criticized Harrison’s support for a deputy who was involved in an assault on an unarmed Black man. 

Echeverría says that when Baker severed ties with ICE, many in the Latino community were “very excited that there’s an elected official who said he was going to do something positive for the community and actually did it.” When Baker began recognizing Community Action IDs earlier this year, “that probably made it more tangible and more real.”

Ending 287(g) was “a local issue that’s tied to a national issue,” Echeverría said. “And the national apparatus was horrific at that time. So it couldn’t fully give the relief that community members would want. But it definitely made a difference.”

Activists notched a victory “at a time when, honestly, a lot of the policy advocacy on the state level and on the federal level was going nowhere,” she added. 

But ICE pushed back. After Baker and other new North Carolina sheriffs terminated 287(g) and stopped honoring detainer requests, ICE retaliated by conducting a wave of raids in North Carolina, which it called the “direct result of some of the dangerous policies that some of our county sheriffs have put into place.” 

Under Trump, ICE also tried to expand its reach, though participation in 287(g) remains rare: Fewer than 150 of the nation’s roughly 3,000 counties have joined, including just 14 of North Carolina’s 100 sheriffs. (All state sheriffs are up this year.) Of them, 13 hail from rural counties Trump won handily. The exception is Nash County, which narrowly backed Biden. There, GOP Sheriff Keith Stone, who signed onto 287(g), faces Democrat David Brake in November. (Brake did not respond to Bolts’s request for comment.)

These 14 counties’ combined population is far smaller than those of Wake and Mecklenburg (Charlotte), which quit 287(g) after the 2018 midterms. Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden is running unopposed for reelection in November. 

Those 2018 results reflected a new political reality: In many urban areas in North Carolina and across the country, partnering with ICE is untenable. 

That hasn’t sat well with Republican-led legislatures. Florida passed laws requiring local law enforcement to honor ICE detainers and participate in 287(g) by 2023. Texas and Tennessee required local police to honor detainers in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Arkansas and Mississippi banned so-called sanctuary cities. Twice in the last four years, North Carolina Republicans passed bills mandating that law enforcement honor ICE detainer requests. Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed both. But in November, the GOP hopes to pick up enough legislative seats to claim supermajorities that can override Cooper’s vetoes.

“I assure you I can come in and in a short amount of time put things back on track,” Harrison told a candidate forum in April, three weeks before the primary. The sheriff’s office had a critical staffing shortage, he said. Fentanyl was epidemic. Gun violence was rampant. Harrison promised to make the county safe. 

That included working with ICE. Asked point-blank during the forum if he would reinstate 287(g), Harrison responded, “Yes. I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.” 

“I can tell you, 287(g), people don’t understand it, didn’t understand it,” the former sheriff continued. “I don’t have time to tell you now other than the fact that if you get arrested and you come to the jail, then they found out that you were illegal, or you were not legal, then they can take over as far as what will happen after that. I would not want a sex offender living in my neighborhood. And I can tell you this, the people that I talk to like the 287(g).”

But he also said he didn’t think 287(g) would exist by the time the new sheriff takes office in December. Crone, Harrison’s consultant, told Bolts that a key factor in Harrison’s reversal on 287(g) was his belief that Biden plans to kill the program by the end of the year. 

It’s not clear where that idea came from. While Biden promised during the presidential campaign to end 287(g) agreements forged during the Trump administration, his administration has made few moves in that direction—to the chagrin of his allies. 

Another factor appears to be political necessity. No Republican has won a countywide contest since 2014, the last year Harrison won the sheriff’s office. In 2018, he outperformed every other Wake Republican but still lost by double digits. Harrison entered the general election this year with big advantages in money and name recognition over Willie Rowe, Harrison’s Democratic opponent. But Wake County’s blue lean still makes him an underdog, says Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina, and an expert on the state’s voting patterns.

“You can put up the best Republican ideal candidate, and I think voter loyalty and behavior is still going to matter when it comes to this kind of dynamic,” Bitzer said.

Harrison couldn’t afford to let the election become a referendum on 287(g). “He wants to win,” said Rowe. “That’s the motivating factor. The numbers aren’t there to support that kind of policy.”

Even so, Harrison’s campaign didn’t equivocate about his new positions. Crone said that Harrison would not rejoin 287(g) even if the next president pushes to expand the program. He does not believe it’s necessary, Crone said. Everyone entering the jail will be screened to verify their identity and to look for outstanding warrants or see if they are wanted in another jurisdiction. 

Harrison’s new stance on detainer requests—he won’t honor one without “a warrant signed by a magistrate or judge,” Crone said—is also arguably more categorical than Rowe’s. 

Rowe told Bolts that he believes detainers violate the Fourth Amendment. However, he said that he would honor them as a “last resort” to keep people accused of violent crimes behind bars, but only after first asking the DA and courts to raise their bonds. “That’s the legal way to do it,” Rowe said.

Some critics question whether Harrison’s election-year conversion is genuine. “You can say anything to get the vote,” Rowe said. “But the proof in the pudding is when it comes time to put it into practice—what are any loopholes to get around? I can say, every time I work with immigrants, ‘Well, they’re a threat.’ And that word is used so much in dealing with so many people. You just say, “They’re a threat, and this is why I’m taking this course of action.’”

Iliana Santillán, the current director of El Pueblo, remained skeptical but said she’s “hopeful he’d maintain his promise if elected but am reminded once again of the hundreds of families separated during his time as Wake County Sheriff from 2002 to 2018.”

*This story was updated with comments from Santillán.

The post The Winding Road to Ending ICE Collaboration in Raleigh appeared first on Bolts.

When President Donald Trump ramped up his campaign against cities that adopt sanctuary policies to protect immigrants from ICE, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office found itself on the front lines.

Larry Krasner, a former public defender and civil rights lawyer who was elected DA in 2017, worked with the office of Mayor Jim Kenney to expand the city’s existing sanctuary protections. In 2018, they cut ICE’s access to a local law enforcement database. Within his office, Krasner instituted policies to curb immigration consequences such as deportation for some immigrants accused of crimes.

But Philadelphia officials and the Trump administration continued battling. The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain attacked the officials for their sanctuary policies, drawing a rebuke from Krasner, and the Department of Justice tried to withhold grant funding from the city. A judge struck down the attempt. Despite Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, cooperation with ICE still looms large in local politics, and it has emerged as a campaign issue in the DA election this year.

In the Democratic primary on Tuesday, Krasner faces Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor who is running with the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, Philadelphia’s police union. 

In a televised debate on May 5 hosted by the city’s NBC affiliate, the candidates sparred over ICE and a DA’s responsibility in upholding Philadelphia’s sanctuary status. 

“We want a prosecutor, not a social worker,” Vega said in the course of his answer.

“This is a sanctuary city,” Krasner said. “The mayor declared that.”

Whoever wins the Democratic primary will face Republican Chuck Peruto, who has also taken issue with Philadelphia’s sanctuary policies, in November.

“Worst case scenario, a lot of these measures get rolled back and we’re gonna see a spike in deportations again,” said Miguel E. Andrade, an activist and the former communications director of Philadelphia based immigrants’ rights group Juntos.  

In the May 5 debate, the two Democratic candidates were asked how they would use prosecutorial discretion regarding immigration laws. 

“We set up the first ever unit to make sure we could protect victims who are undocumented, witnesses we needed who are undocumented, but also in appropriate cases defendants whose criminal violation was minor but who faced unreasonably large consequences from immigration,” Krasner said. He noted that his office had helped break a 10-year contract “in which the city would immediately expedite information to ICE.”

Vega said in response that Krasner was harming the city “in terms of his dealing with undocumented people who have committed crime” by reducing charges on some immigrants who are “violent predators.” He added he would not share information with ICE regarding victims of crimes who may be immigrants. “Those people who are unleashed on my community, they are going to be prosecuted,” he added, “and if the federal government comes in and lends a helping hand, then so be it.” 

Asked in a follow-up if he would share information when ICE asks, Vega responded, “If it’s the information as to a defendant, yes.” He added, “But they don’t have to ask for that: That is in the computer banks of the police department.” 

“But if they want you to give it to them, you will?” the moderator asked once more. 

“Yeah, I have to, I have to follow the law,” Vega replied.

ICE does have robust data-gathering pipelines that penetrate sanctuary protections across the country. Law enforcement agencies put information such as biometrics and other data into networks that feed into ICE databases and alert the agency to information that it can use to target immigrants, such as people with outstanding orders of removal.

Still there are plenty of policies and decisions that local officials are making that limit the amount of data ICE is able to extract. Those are guardrails that new officials could lift. 

“Just because they have access to other databases doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do the work to limit their access,” said Andrade. “Why would you not … force ICE to use their own resources instead of Philadelphia municipal resources to do their dirty work for them?”

Vega’s campaign did not answer requests for comment on his views on immigration policy. The FOP, which has endorsed him, also did not reply to requests for comment.

Krasner moved to restrict the data that ICE can see soon after taking office. In August 2018, he worked with Mayor Kenney to block ICE from Philadelphia’s Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System (PARS). PARS is a database that records information about people arrested in the city. 

Through PARS, ICE was going after people arrested by the Philadelphia police who it suspected of breaking immigration laws, regardless of whether they ended up being accused or convicted of crimes. PARS does not list immigration status, but it does reveal whether an individual was born outside the United States. ICE is known to investigate foreign-born individuals caught in the nets of law enforcement as an alternative to knowing their legal statusa replacement, even though many foreign-born people are citizens or have legal status; movements in other places have tried to to stop law enforcement from asking about people’s birthplace or sharing that data. 

As of 2017, nearly 13 percent of Philadelphia’s population was born outside the United States. And the city’s ICE field office was arresting immigrants with no criminal convictions at a rate significantly higher than that of any other region. 

“Many immigrants are scared to participate in our criminal justice system because they are fearful that they or their loved ones will be deported,” the DA’s office said at the time to justify its decision to end PARS access. 

“Quite frankly, cooperating with ICE at this time makes our city less safe,” the statement added.

During his first term, Krasner also created an immigration counsel position in the DA’s office to protect some defendants from being deported as a result of a criminal conviction. 

The counsel’s job, as reported by WHYY in 2019, is to consider swapping charges and tailoring plea agreements to avoid triggering immigration consequences for some offenses including shoplifting, soliciting prostitution, or assault. 

Criminal convictions can prompt deportation proceedings, even for people with legal status. But whether they do will hinge on the sentence (jail terms can have immigration consequences if they last at least 365 days) and the exact charges prosecutors use. Most Pennsylvania theft statutes are grounds for deportation, for instance, but not all. This gives prosecutors the option to pursue charges and sentences that either shield noncitizens or threaten them with removal.

Krasner hired Caleb Arnold, an attorney who previously worked for an immigration law firm, to fill the role. When deciding whether to intervene in a case, Arnold weighs a number of factors, including the severity of the allegations, time spent in the U.S., dependent family members, and criminal records. 

High-level crimes like murder aren’t eligible for Arnold’s consideration. “When people are charged with low-level offenses and pose no risk to public safety, they should not face a threat of deportation,” Brandon Evans, Krasner’s campaign manager, said in an email exchange with The Appeal. 

Krasner said during his debate with Vega that “there are cases where it is appropriate for someone to be deported, because the crime is serious. And that’s fine.” 

Vega often draws a connection between his opponent’s approach to criminal justice and increased violence, pointing to the spike in shootings and homicides in Philadelphia in 2020. And during the debate, he did this in the course of his answer on ICE and immigration laws. “I’m here to protect people. You can’t even go to Macy’s on a Sunday morning without being raped,” he said. 

Evans said it would be “absurd” to suggest a link between the shootings and the DA’s sanctuary initiatives. “The office isn’t cutting plea deals where people charged with homicides receive misdemeanor convictions to avoid collateral consequences,” he said. 

Studies have shown that there is no detectable causal relationship between the presence of undocumented immigrant populations and crime.

And immigrants’ rights activists make the case that it is cooperation with ICE that endangers safety. Andrade fears that losing sanctuary protections could harm public safety as communication further breaks down between undocumented people and the police. 

Katia Pérez, an activist with Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive organization in the city, echoed those worries, mentioning her own experiences. Her mother was undocumented for the first eight years that she lived in the United States. And Pérez’s stepfather was abusive.

“The police weren’t called,” Pérez said. “She was afraid they would ask questions. And situations like that are not unique.” 

Pérez says Krasner is off to a great start. But she would like to see the DA’s office and other city officials push reform further.

“The threat of deportation should never be on the line,” Pérez said.

The post Philadelphia D.A. Candidates Debate ICE Cooperation Ahead of Election Day appeared first on Bolts.