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.

House Bill 1100, which Democratic Governor Jared Polis signed Tuesday, directs local governments to “eliminate involvement in immigration detention.” It will ensure the end of detention agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Teller and Moffat counties, the last two places in the state with contracts where ICE pays to warehouse arrestees in local jails. The law calls for these agreements to terminate by next year, and also bans state and local governments from participating in any scheme to detain immigrants with a private prison company.

Experts expect the move to force federal immigration officials to rethink overall enforcement strategy in the state, and ultimately to reduce civil immigration detention there. 

“It’s definitely a huge win,” said the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition’s Nayda Benitez, who is undocumented but shielded from deportation by the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. “This fight, ensuring that there is limited collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement agencies, is one we’ve fought for years, and this is another step forward.”

It’s estimated more than 150,000 people, or about 3 percent of Colorado residents, are living in the state without authorization. Advocates and lawyers trying to shield that population from incarceration and deportation have recently charted a series of victories: since 2019, when Democrats took control of state government, Colorado has, among other changes, banned local law enforcement from arresting or jailing someone on the basis of a civil immigration detainer; banned ICE from arresting people on courthouse grounds; allowed non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses; and opened state housing benefits to all residents, regardless of immigration status.

Backers of this latest law, HB 1100, say it is particularly important for people in and around Teller County who live in fear of contacting law enforcement when they are victims of or witnesses to a crime because of immigration status. Teller County reports close to 600 immigrants have been detained there since 2019; the vast majority of those detentions came during the Trump administration, when ICE more aggressively pursued civil immigration violations.

Benitez told Bolts that Teller County, which sits just west of Colorado Springs, has long been viewed as a hostile place for immigrants, and that she hopes HB 1100 offers that community a greater sense of security.

“People that are traveling there, that are in the area, know that you just have to be careful because that county does work with ICE,” Benitez said. “It’s an extra level of precaution; there’s ICE presence throughout the state, but not all counties have contracts with ICE or a motivation to possibly detain people. … If I’m with my family in Teller County, we drive as carefully as we can. I don’t really stay that long when I’m there.”

Though Moffat County, in far northwest Colorado, also maintains a detention contract with ICE, immigrant rights advocates say enforcement is not nearly as aggressive in that area and that HB 1100 more specifically targeted Teller County. 

Representative Lorena Garcia, a Democrat and lead sponsor of the law, told Bolts, “My understanding, from when we spoke with the Moffat County sheriff, is that their contract is worth maybe $10,000 to $12,000 a year. If they are using it, it’s a very limited amount.” (The sheriff’s office did not return Bolts’ request for comment, and ICE’s own year-end detention statistics don’t mention Moffat County.)

Garcia and others who worked to pass the law hope that, beyond limiting local involvement in immigration detention, it will also make people feel safer reporting crimes.

“I was a victim of domestic violence. I was silent for years because I did not have the courage to ask the police for help, for fear they will work with ICE and detain me,” Milagro Chavez, an unauthorized immigrant in Colorado, told state lawmakers during a legislative hearing earlier this year, through a translator. 

While people in immigration detention are accused of civil violations, they are often treated as criminals in local lockups, several families told Bolts. 

Christina Zaldivar, whose husband, Jorge, has spent many years entangled with immigration enforcement, said he was arrested by ICE after a car crash. Though no one was hurt and Jorge was accused of no crime, he was eventually placed in Teller County’s jail, an hour from home, and made to wear a jumpsuit and live in a cell for three months. “Teller County has no business collaborating with ICE, and shouldn’t be receiving dollars for this,” Zaldivar said. “Shame on Teller County. Shame on Moffat County. How dare they?”

Ending agreements with ICE in Moffat and Teller Counties presents a strategic concern for federal immigration authorities. The contracts there gave ICE more options for detaining people across wider swaths of this largely rural and mountainous state, but the end of ICE agreements in those counties will leave just one immigration detention center in the state: a 1,500-capacity facility in Aurora just outside Denver, operated by the private-prison giant GEO Group. 

ICE’s former longtime director of enforcement and removal operations in Colorado and Wyoming, John Fabbricatore, predicted the law would lead to less immigration enforcement in the state. He recently told a state House committee that ICE would have to be more selective with fewer places to detain immigrants.

“We have pretty bad winters out here,” Fabbricatore, a 24-year ICE veteran who retired last year, told lawmakers during his testimony. “If you arrest somebody down in Durango with ICE, you would have to drive them from Durango all the way up to the GEO facility in Aurora during that ice storm, or go over mountain passes, or wherever, when now you could deliver them first to Teller County, hold them in Teller County.”

Colorado’s reform follows similar legislation in California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. New Mexico also considered banning local arrangements with ICE this year, but the proposal died in the state Senate in March. Mark Fleming, an associate director at the National Immigrant Justice Center and an advocate for HB 1100, said other states that have banned local ICE detention agreements have seen drops in overall enforcement.

“In states like Illinois, where I am, what we have noticed is that the number of people swept up into the pipeline for deportation goes drastically down,” Fleming told Bolts. “By passing this sort of legislation, we have forced ICE to prioritize its enforcement and it’s led to a drastic reduction of enforcement in the state. I’d suspect very similar patterns in Colorado.”

Up until the moment Polis signed the bill into law Tuesday night, advocates had feared that he would veto it. He was under pressure from Teller County officials to do so, and there is some precedent for Polis opposing legislative attempts to curtail ICE power. 

Polis, who founded schools for undocumented and immigrant children and strongly supported the DACA program while a member of Congress, as governor surprised and frustrated immigrant rights advocates in 2019 when, early in his first term, he forced lawmakers to cut legislation seeking to create “safe spaces” in places like churches and hospitals, where ICE could not make arrests.

Even as he signed HB 1100, Polis also issued an accompanying letter endorsing ICE as an agency with a “legitimate and important role in our state and in our nation,” and reiterating that “Colorado is not, nor should it be, a sanctuary state.”

Representative Garcia, the bill sponsor, said that the governor’s concerns with the bill sometimes veered from policy and into rhetoric. “One of the things he asked us is, ‘How is this going to not make me go against my promise to not make Colorado a sanctuary state?’” Garcia told Bolts.

Aurora City Councilmember Crystal Murillo, who represented the Colorado People’s Alliance in advocating for HB 1100, said “sanctuary,” in this context, is so undefined that it’s hard for advocates to know which policy proposals will or won’t cross the governor’s line. “I’m not sure what this means for his leadership in the immigration justice space,” Murillo said. “I know some of our coalition partners were happy to see that the bill was passed, but I guess concerned by what that signaling means for future immigration justice work in the state.”

In his letter accompanying the bill signing, Polis seemed to signal that he would oppose any future legislation to ban local governments from entering into 287(g) agreements, which are similar to the local detention agreements banned by the law he just signed. Unlike those agreements, the 287(g) program deputizes local law enforcement to act with ICE and on its behalf, including by making arrests. In Colorado, only Teller County has such a contract, and it’s been a matter of legal dispute for years between the ACLU and the county.

“All local governments should be free to determine how and when they work with federal immigration officials when it comes to immigration enforcement, and the state should never get in the way of efforts to enforce state or federal law,” Polis wrote.

The post Colorado Bans Local Governments From Jailing Immigrants for ICE 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.

In the heightened atmosphere of former President Donald Trump’s administration, energized pro-immigration activism pressured many local officials to pull back from working with ICE and with Customs and Border Protection. Their successes helped hinder Trump’s drive for deportations, since internal immigration enforcement in the United States really functions through localities. It is local law enforcement that feeds ICE the data it needs to find and detain people, sheriffs who often hold detainees in their jails, cities and counties that decide when to coordinate with ICE.

Now President Biden has signaled an intent to undo Trump’s immigration legacy. The route so far has been somewhat lethargic and plagued by a disorganized approach to the border, but Biden has used his executive power to shift who will be targeted for deportation. Trump effectively made everyone without legal status an equal priority for deportation, a policy that led to the arrest of many longtime residents that the agency saw as easy pickings. Biden has reinstated more prioritization, instructing ICE to redirect its attention to people who have arrived recently as well as some people with criminal convictions. 

But his new guidelines are a far cry from the freeze or end of detentions and deportations that many activists are demanding. Even if his plan was respected by ICE agents, it doubles down on connecting immigration enforcement to a criminal legal system rife with profiling. This has compounded the scrutiny on how, and whether, local officials will cooperate with ICE.

Eli Savit, the recently elected prosecutor of Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), told The Appeal: Political Report that it would be “pretty cold comfort” for wary community members if he were to say, “Well, we’ll work with ICE and cooperate with federal immigration enforcement if we like the president.’” 

Savit announced in February that he would bar information-sharing between his office and ICE, and help people obtain special visas reserved for trafficking victims and those who assist in the investigation of crimes. Other officials around the country have also forged ahead on sanctuary policies and curtailing their involvement with immigration enforcement.

Still, immigrants’ rights activists see new dangers on the horizon. Now that ICE is under the purview of a president who has repudiated his predecessor’s xenophobia and seems to be taking steps to ensure that a narrower group of people are targeted, some local officials may treat these changes as license to step away from earlier commitments. And this is driving activists to explain why the shifts underway are not enough and to press forward with their case against establishing or resuming cooperation with ICE.

In New Jersey, which has seen hunger strikes and vocal activism, local Democratic policymakers backtracked on their willingness to end ICE contracts in December, pointing to Biden’s arrival, and alarmed activists are now raising concerns that the legislature is wavering on whether to block counties from providing detention space to ICE. 

Rosa Santana, who was a program director at the immigrants’ rights advocacy group First Friends of NJ & NY and now works at the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, says numerous officials have told her that they are now more comfortable with immigration enforcement since it is more focused on people with a criminal record. 

“You need to stop that narrative,” Santana said she told them. “It doesn’t matter if someone has had a past criminal conviction. They’re not [in detention] because of a past conviction. They’re there because of their immigration status.” (Immigration detentions are a civil, not criminal, matter. People are being held, often in private facilities with poor conditions, on top of any detention they may have also served because of a criminal arrest, and without the protections afforded to criminal defendants.)

Advocates also stress that ICE often ignores purported priorities, exploits what might seem like limited carve-outs, and can make even minor interactions with the criminal legal system snowball into deportation proceedings.

“What ICE represents doesn’t change because there’s a Democrat in office,” Katy Sastre of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice told the Political Report in December. “They represent family separation.”

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The administration’s shift in objectives was set off by an executive order that Biden signed on his first day in office. It is outlined in a memo issued by acting ICE director Tae Johnson, which redefines who will be targeted for most standard activities undertaken by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, including decisions linked to immigration detention and requests for local law enforcement.

The memo names three categories of people presumed to be priorities for enforcement: national security risks, such as people suspected of terrorism or espionage; people who attempted to enter or arrived in the country on or after Nov. 1, 2020; and people who are considered “a threat to public safety” because they are convicted of certain crimes or involved in gang activity. This last category is the most open to interpretation. But the guidelines don’t preclude the agency from arresting and deporting anyone else without legal status. 

Biden’s directives are, broadly speaking, a return to the instructions outlined late in Obama’s first term by the so-called Morton memo. That memo narrowed immigration enforcement, and in that sense it was a victory for activists who gave Obama the moniker “deporter in chief” early in his tenure. But its implementation left a lot to be desired. Chicago Alderperson Carlos Ramírez-Rosa told the Political Report that he recalls going to the local ICE field office after the memo went into effect to assist constituents who had open deportation cases and should have been protected under the new criteria, yet ICE agents rejected many of their claims.

ICE typically isn’t strict about following federal directives, and there is limited oversight and a limited set of tools that could force the agency to actually comply. 

Ellen Pachnanda, supervising attorney of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, worries that history is repeating itself, amid broader signs that ICE agents do not feel bound by Biden’s directives. Her organization has been trying to get people who don’t fit into the prioritized tiers released from detention, to no avail. “ICE retains a great deal of discretion to enforce the immigration laws as they see fit, and not necessarily follow the enforcement priorities,” she said. The agency has its own defiant internal culture and each field office operates a bit like its own fiefdom, and the extent to which each one complies will probably vary.

But even if they were followed to the letter, the administration’s instructions would not narrow the threat of deportation nearly as much as people may think.

Johnson’s memo, for example, directs ICE to prioritize people convicted of “aggravated felonies,” as defined in the immigration statutes. Despite the foreboding name, an aggravated felony does not have to be a felony nor an aggravated offense. It can include lower-level behaviors like perjury and theft—if the punishment imposed is at least one year in prison—and filing a false tax return. Advocates have similarly decried the fact that the Dream and Promise Act passed by the House last week, which is seen as a general road map for congressional Democrats’ priorities, contains a number of carve-outs that would bar people with criminal contact from access to its relief provisions.

“People try to separate criminal justice reform and immigration reform, but it’s a never ending-cycle,” said Pachnanda. “The very communities that are targets of the police, and have been, the Black and Latinx communities, now are going to be left out of immigration reform because of these old convictions.”

These issues have raised concerns that Biden’s team has not seriously grappled with the ways a racist criminal legal system intersects with immigration enforcement.

Even routine contact with law enforcement, to which people of color are far more likely to be subjected, can be the spark that leads to deportation by putting people on ICE’s radar through automatic criminal justice data-sharing. Local law enforcement can not only be the spark but the reagent when, for example, sheriffs and other jail wardens choose to do ICE’s bidding and help actively identify and detain people who may have violated immigration law. 

ICE can make custody determinations pretty much any way it sees fit, and seek to keep people behind bars based on its own assessments of their dangerousness. Even if someone is initially arrested on criminal grounds, they can be kept in detention on civil grounds if ICE requests it even after charges are dropped and even after they have completed their sentence. 

Since November, a slate of new sheriffs who won with the support of immigrants’ rights groups have ended their offices’ long-standing policies to detain people for ICE. One of them is Kristin Graziano in Charleston County, South Carolina. She says she would not be allowed to tell a judge, “I think this guy’s really dangerous, and I know he’s already served his time … but I think [he] needs to stay in jail.” She added, referring to ICE, “we can’t do it, and neither should they.”

Graziano told the Political Report that ICE tried to strong-arm her into continuing to cooperate with the agency after she became sheriff. “They came to meet with me and to congratulate me, and to ask to work together, but in the same sentence threatened to ramp up enforcement in my community if I didn’t do what they wanted,” she said. ICE’s public affairs office did not reply to a request for comment on her statement.

Instead Graziano announced in January that she was ending an agreement to detain immigrants and pulling Charleston out of ICE’s 287(g) program, which gives sheriff’s deputies the authority to run immigration checks in jails and hold people on suspected immigration violations. Graziano has doubled down on her decision since Biden entered the White House, defending it in the Post and Courier this month. 

Other local officials are also taking steps to protect people from immigration enforcement. Savit, the Ann Arbor prosecutor, asked his staff in February to take the collateral consequences of convictions into account when they prosecute cases. He also plans to prosecute fewer lower-level offenses in the first place. “I don’t see much use in sending a 19-year-old back to a country that they do not know because they were caught with a small amount of drugs, which is something that, for a citizen like me, wouldn’t even carry jail time and I’d be allowed to move on with my life,” he told the Political Report.

Ramírez-Rosa, the Chicago alderperson, fought to stop public authorities in the city from being allowed to share information about people who were in the city’s gang database with ICE, alongside other loopholes. People may see that to be a small, targeted exception, but the city’s gang database is a notoriously flawed and expansive mechanism that ultimately stripped immigrants of their sanctuary protections based on evidence as shoddy as wearing the wrong clothing.

Ramírez-Rosa says his objective was to communicate to undocumented and mixed-status households that “in no case, no exceptions, could their interaction with the Chicago Police Department, or with city officials, result in the local police or city officials turning them over to ICE.”

ICE and its allies assert that cooperation between their agents and local law enforcement enhance public safety, but immigrants’ rights activists point out that it leads the immigrant community to be reticent to interact with local law enforcement and even emergency services and other public or municipal agencies. Vulnerable immigrants and their families are often not in a position to parse the particularities of their jurisdiction’s cooperation guidelines to determine their level of relative safety; any cooperation at all sends the simple message that their local officials are working with ICE.

When public officials in sanctuary jurisdictions leave carve-outs in non-cooperation policies, there are slip-ups, and those cannot be undone. ICE will file removal proceedings no matter how someone came to their attention, such as the case of a man turned over to ICE in New York City based on an acknowledged “operational error.” 

“The mistakes lead to removal, they lead to death, they lead to the destruction of families,” said Pachnanda, the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project attorney.

Those who vow to continue resisting ICE say this is about their community’s needs, not about whoever is occupying the White House. “Even when you’re able to win those changes at the federal level,” said Ramírez-Rosa, “it can be very tentative because a new president like Trump would come along and undo all of that.” 

Asked if the change in administrations had factored into her decision to pull out of ICE’s 287(g) program, Graziano said, “I could care less about national politics, and quite honestly I’m fed up with all of it. Change happens at the local level.”

The post Why ICE Cooperation Is Dangerous Even with Biden in the White House appeared first on Bolts.

Two years ago, faced with local anger over immigration detentions, Hudson County’s Democratic leaders promised a “path to exit” their contract with ICE by the end of 2020. ICE has long been paying this New Jersey county to supply it with jail space to detain people. But by 2018, the firestorm that President Trump’s family separation policies caused had made it difficult for county officials to stand by the agency.

It took less than a month after Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden for Hudson County officials to change course and reaffirm their detention contract with ICE. The move is raising alarm among advocates that the presidential election will stretch what Democratic politicians think they can get away with, giving them cover to maintain relationships with ICE unless the public keeps up the pressure.

Hudson County’s board of freeholders—New Jersey’s term for a county commission—rushed a vote just days before Thanksgiving to extend the detention contract for another 10 years. The heated meeting featured more than 10 hours of public comment during which every participant urged freeholders to break off the arrangement and stop holding immigrants at the Hudson County Correctional Facility. Earlier this year, immigrants in the jail went on hunger strike to protest dismal conditions and a lack of protections from the novel coronavirus. Advocates have long faulted medical neglect and other inhumane conditions in this jail. 

“These contracts have been enabling the cruelty of ICE for years now,” said Amol Sinha, head of the ACLU of New Jersey. “The whole structure of immigration detention is awful to begin with. We are detaining people solely because they are suspected to be undocumented.”

Some county officials openly cited financial motivations: Hudson County receives $120 a day for each immigrant they detain, and one spokesperson said ending immigration detentions would hurt the budgetary “bottom line.” But local officials also used Trump’s loss and the change in federal leadership as a cover. On the eve of the presidential election, County Executive Tom DeGise already said that, should Biden win, “we’ll have somebody that we can talk to” when it comes to immigration detentions. 

“One of the excuses is that Biden will come in and solve our issues with detentions,” Tania Mattos, an advocate with Freedom for Immigrants who has worked to end the county’s contract, told The Appeal: Political Report. “[The election] gave a pass for the freeholders to make this decision because now they can put the responsibility of the detention centers on the Biden administration.”

“That’s wrong, in my opinion,” she added. “It’s not time to go back to sleep. We have to keep pushing.”

Katy Sastre of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice echoed Mattos’s warning. “What ICE represents,” she said, “doesn’t change because there’s a Democrat in office. They represent family separation, and this contract with ICE [in Hudson County] brings family separation right into our own backyard.” 

Trump’s presidency heightened the cruelties of immigration enforcement. But his unpopularity also boosted immigrants’ rights organizing and brought unprecedented attention to municipal and county governments’ long-overlooked complicity with ICE. Powerful local officials who had flown under the radar have been ousted in part over their collaboration with Trump’s immigration regime. 

From Minnesota, Maryland, and North Carolina in 2018 to Georgia, Ohio, and South Carolina this year, voters replaced sheriffs and county executives who were helping ICE with candidates who pledged to break contracts and establish protective policies. These elections were fought not just over lucrative detention contracts like Hudson County’s, but also over other deals that empower local law enforcement to arrest people they suspect to be undocumented.

Will this dynamic fizzle once Trump is out of office and the agency is overseen by a Democrat?

In conversations over the last week, immigrants’ rights advocates expressed relief that the president lost and hope that Biden will curtail some of ICE’s most aggressive practices. But they also expressed concern that it may become more difficult to hold local officials accountable for cooperating with ICE, even in the nation’s more liberal jurisdictions. Democratic officials could say that the agency they’re helping is not so bad anymore, as they did in Hudson County, and the issue of complicity with ICE could lose some of the electoral salience it acquired at the height of resistance to Trump.

“There’s no question that it is going to be harder,” Sophia Gurulé, an immigration attorney who spoke about abusive detention conditions during the freeholders’ meeting, told the Political Report. “But this is when the real grassroots organizing work is the most important. Just like people were arguing under Trump, ‘We need to end ICE detention, point blank period, there is no real justification to detain a human being for violating immigration law,’ the same argument is going to persist. And it has to keep being that same argument.”

Biden has promised a slew of reforms, including a temporary freeze on deportations, a reactivation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and a narrowing of ICE’s targets that may chip away at immigration detentions. 

But there are no signs that he will shut down the data streams from local agencies to ICE that help federal agents identify people who they believe to be undocumented, nor that under his leadership ICE will stop detaining people on immigration grounds. And during the Democratic primaries, some activists were wary that Biden might carry on with an approach similar to that of President Barack Obama, whose administration oversaw deportations of 3 million people.

Sastre said this week that Democratic politicians should “remember that defending a system of immigration enforcement and detention that disproportionately impacts certain communities, that is Black and brown communities, upholds ideas that voters around the country, and specifically in New Jersey, roundly rejected.”

During the Hudson County meeting, some freeholders who favored the contract argued that renewing it is in immigrants’ best interest since ICE may otherwise detain them farther away from their families and from the legal help available in New York City. Their point echoed a statement made in 2018 by legal aid groups, though these groups did not stake that same position this year. Advocates have said that public officials’ use of this argument is belied by the sorry state of detention conditions in these jails and by their financial considerations.

“I don’t have faith that the people that are making these decisions have the best interests of immigrants in mind,” Sinha said, “because even some of the county executive staff said … that they needed the money to fill the budget gap. And I think that’s one of the worst, if not the most perverse reason to detain somebody. It’s immoral and unethical to say the least.”

This week, New Jersey’s Democratic U.S. Senators, Cory Booker and Robert Menendez, called on Hudson County and its two neighboring Democrat-run counties with similar immigration detention contracts (Bergen and Essex) to break off the arrangements. Menendez, himself a former local official in Hudson County, said in a statement that these deals were a way of “taking blood money from ICE.”

These same conversations are resonating far beyond New Jersey. 

Angela Chan, the policy director for the Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus in California, helped draft the sanctuary law that California adopted in 2017, mandating that counties break their contracts with ICE. (Illinois and New Jersey adopted laws or executive measures similar to California’s, though these protections stalled in many other states.) Chan now urges people to stay vigilant about ICE’s actions, and about the relationships between their local governments and the federal agency. 

“Local and state law enforcement are the primary way community members are funneled into ICE’s inhumane immigration detention facilities and deported not just under Trump, but also Obama and likely under President-elect Biden,” she said. “In order to reduce deportations, protect due process, and keep immigrant families together, local and state law enforcement must be completely disentangled from ICE.”

Concerns aside, many of these same advocates are also hopeful that the mobilization against local cooperation with ICE will maintain momentum and pay off during Biden’s presidency.

After all, this activism far predates 2016, even if it gained new recruits during Trump’s term. Chan stressed that, even though California’s sanctuary law passed in 2017 in part because elected officials were motivated by Trump’s overt xenophobia, the state had adopted other reforms to protect immigrants earlier in the decade in response to “President Obama’s record number of deportations and the fact that ICE is a rogue agency that has committed human rights violations.” 

Going forward, Chan said, “there will continue to be community outrage and organizing.”

Gurulé is also cautiously optimistic that people will not forget what they saw in recent years. “The Trump administration … has really exposed just the total callousness and lack of humanity that ICE has for human life,” she said. “How do you scale back from that to be like, ‘Oh, well, this detention is better, or this detention isn’t so bad’? You can’t really.” 

Even over the last few years, resistance to Trump was far from the only catalyst for immigration organizing. The Black Lives Matter movement helped expose the abuses that people, including immigrants, suffer at the hands of law enforcement around the country. This strand of activism exploded in the public consciousness under Obama. And BLM protests have frequently aimed demands directly toward municipal officials in big cities who are often Democrats. The resonance of this movement, which has worked alongside immigrants’ rights organizers, should easily outlast the Trump era.

Still, to stave off any complacency that some may feel as Biden takes charge, Mattos says she would remind people that “our ultimate ask, even under Trump, even under Obama, was to end detention centers and to end the suffering and torture of people.” 

Until that’s accomplished, she added, “I would invite them to join the organizing that’s happening.”

The post As Trump Departs, Some Democrats May Seek Cover to Maintain Ties with ICE appeared first on Bolts.

Over the last four years, the Trump administration relentlessly attacked cities that purported to offer undocumented immigrants safe harbor. As Trump threatened to withhold federal funding and derided the cities as unsafe, mayors across the country pushed back.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser told protesters, a week after the 2016 elections, that “we are a sanctuary city and our policies are clear.” 

Last year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti stood side by side with a police official and told LA residents to “rest assured. Here in Los Angeles, we are not coordinating with ICE.” 

But immigrants rights advocates warned throughout Trump’s presidency that even in cities known as sanctuaries, law enforcement practices are helping ICE identify and detain immigrants by feeding information about them into sprawling data networks that lead back to the federal agency.

There is no indication yet that President-elect Biden’s administration will close these data pipelines, even as he has outlined other changes to federal immigration policy. Going forward, advocates say, local and federal officials need to confront these practices more deliberately in order to shield people from ICE’s reach.

Over the course of Trump’s term, ICE has conducted a series of raids, many of which targeted undocumented people in “sanctuary cities.” Just this summer, around 2,000 people were detained in operations that began July 13. In that time period, over 3,000 cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in ICE detention centers across the country.

A spokesperson for ICE declined to describe how the agency had located the undocumented people in cities where it ostensibly does not receive assistance from local government, saying “we typically don’t comment on law enforcement tools and techniques.” The spokesperson added that these are not “random” operations. “All our operations are targeted,” she said.

Lena Graber, a lawyer with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco and an expert on how local police become involved in immigration enforcement, says that there is no singular definition of a sanctuary. This gives mayors a lot of latitude to decide what the term means. 

“Sanctuary is just a branding label that you can like or dislike,” Graber told The Appeal: Political Report. “What [local] agencies are actually doing is where the rubber hits the road.”

Some claim sanctuary bona fides because they don’t have any formal contracts with ICE, or because they reject “detainers,” forms sent by ICE requesting that local jurisdictions help to coordinate times when the agency can pick up detainee targets after they are released from jails and police stations. 

In most cases, city leaders tout policies against police explicitly asking people for information on their immigration status or proxies such as their birthplace.  “The day our police ask for immigration status is the day people stop reporting crimes & sharing information,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted this year in January. “We won’t let that happen.” 

But therein lies a major blind spot, advocates warn. ICE’s data-gathering apparatus has penetrated the criminal legal system to such an extent that, whether the police explicitly ask a detainee about immigration status and formally transmit that information is beside the point. 

“San Francisco may share information with data centers that ICE also has access to,” said Graber. “It may be happening in passive ways that San Francisco [officials] may or may not be aware of. … And that’s very common.”

This means that the same mayors publicly offering undocumented people protection are, to varying degrees, running governments that dump data into streams that trail back to ICE. 

This doesn’t always happen voluntarily. Local governments by themselves can only go so far in stopping information from being shared with ICE. To meaningfully rein in these networks, the incoming Biden administration would need to take action from the top, by limiting data-sharing between local governments and federal agencies.

Still, some self-proclaimed sanctuaries are more complicit than others in compiling databases born of invasive and unequal law enforcement, and in providing ICE access to them. Local activists are pressing for changes that could shut down at least some of these pipelines, including those that involve notoriously flawed gang databases.

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When a person is arrested, their biometrics are typically sent to the FBI for a background check. The FBI shares that data with ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center in Burlington, Vermont. If ICE believes that the data might be from an undocumented person, it is forwarded to the agency’s Pacific Enforcement Response Center in California, where the investigation continues. 

This process is made possible by the federal Secure Communities (S-COMM) program. All local governments are members in the program, and as a result, this data sharing occurs everywhere in the United States. It makes no difference whether the initial police contact happened in a sanctuary city. 

The program was voluntary at first, which led to a mosaic of agreements between the Department of Homeland Security and local jurisdictions. But Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in 2010 that declining full participation was not an option. By January 2013, S-COMM was fully implemented in every jurisdiction in the country. Data pertaining to every person booked into an American jail after that date is known to DHS and its component agencies, including ICE. 

This system has grave implications for immigration enforcement. 

If information entered by local police matches one of many federal databases, ICE will have sudden information about the locations of immigrants it may wish to detain. For instance, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) is a sprawling FBI database that as of 2015 contained upwards of 12 million records, including civil immigration data and orders of removal.

ICE also obtains additional information from local law enforcement outside DHS through its Law Enforcement Information Sharing Service, which the agency describes as its “back-end super highway data sharing system.” That includes an FBI system that pools records—including incident, arrest, and booking reports—from police departments across the country (even those in sanctuary cities), and a military database that compiles information as granular as parking citations and pawn shop records.

ICE also uses IT systems developed by Palantir, a company founded by billionaire Republican donor and Trump adviser Peter Thiel. Palantir’s FALCON system collects a variety of biographical data, including citizenship and immigration status, that ICE agents have used to conduct raids. Another system developed by Palantir called Investigative Case Management helps ICE locate people based on driver’s license numbers and location data from license plate reader cameras. ICE creates “hot lists” of license plates that they believe their targets are using, and when a hot-listed plate number is captured on a camera, an automatic email is generated and sent to the agency.

David Maass, the founder of the Atlas of Surveillance project and a researcher for the privacy-focused Electronic Frontier Foundation, suspects ICE might use license plate readers to find undocumented people in sanctuary cities. 

“[It’s] what I often fear about immigrants being picked up in unusual locations and where the cops just seem to be at the right place at the right time,” he said. “We may never know if it was license plate readers. But it definitely sounds consistent with license plate readers.”

Mark Fleming, who specializes in federal litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center, expressed alarm at the lack of transparency in the process. “What’s really, really tricky here is we really just don’t know what law enforcement sees when they enter these various systems.” 

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It’s not just that local records are inadvertently shared. Many police departments actively participate in insidious data-gathering that ends up opening side doors for ICE.

Here, perhaps, is where local policies are most recognizably discretionary and changeable. 

Some cities, including proclaimed sanctuaries, maintain fraught “gang databases” that can  attract the attention of ICE, which often uses the classification to accelerate the deportation process. 

A ProPublica investigation found that 95 percent of the people in Chicago’s gang database were Black or Latinx. That database contained apparent mistakes, like entries on people over the age of 100. ProPublica also found thousands of profiles of alleged gang members with no listed gang affiliation and entries for people who were never arrested but ended up on the database after encountering police in street stops. 

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, alderperson for the 35th Ward in Chicago, says he once heard a police officer describe using whether a person was wearing high-top shoes as criteria to determine if they were in a gang.

“Then other law enforcement agencies get access to that,” says Ramirez-Rosa. “And if you’re an undocumented immigrant they use that to further criminalize you and justify your deportation.”

In 2019, an inspector general’s office report found that the Chicago Police Department’s gang database had been queried by federal immigration authorities 32,000 times between 2009 and 2018. Chicago has a carve-out in its “welcoming city” legislation that exempts alleged gang members from sanctuary protections.

The National Crime Information Center also contains a gang file that casts an incredibly wide net. A person can land in this federal database if they admit to being in a gang, but also for a combination of being accused by a “reliable” informant, frequenting a gang’s known area or associating with known gang members.

The FBI rejected the Political Report’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents that list agencies, departments, jurisdictions, and databases that contribute to or share information with the NCIC gang file in part because their disclosure might compromise investigations or prosecutions. It is unknown whether information from city-level gang databases is directly ingested into the federal gang file. 

Still, labeling someone a gang member can lead to grievous immigration consequences. In a 2017 “CBS This Morning” segment, an ICE agent admitted that a young man he called a “gang associate” was given that label because “once he goes in front of an immigration judge, we don’t want him to get bail.”

The burden of this risk is borne disproportionately by Black and Latinx people. Chicago’s gang database is not the only city level gang file to be accused of racial bias. In New York, activists in the “Erase the Database” movement say the NYPD’s Criminal Group Database unfairly criminalizes Black and Latinx New Yorkers, some of whom may be undocumented. Fewer than 2 percent of the people listed in this database are white. 

Though police are often loath to give them up, there is precedent for curbing the use of gang databases. In Los Angeles, the California Department of Justice recently restricted access to data entered by the police department into the state level gang database after LA cops were charged with faking evidence to falsely classify people as gang members.

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State and local governments have taken other steps to control ICE’s access to their data, with varied success.

In 2017, California adopted the California Values Act, which bars the use of the state’s law enforcement databases for immigration enforcement. One example of such a database is the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS), which contains information on criminal history, driver’s and vehicle licenses, and parking violations. 

Implementation was shaky. Agencies with access to the database are responsible for self-reporting cases of misuse to the state attorney general’s office. And reporting from Voice of San Diego indicated that ICE may have indeed misused CLETS.

Under pressure to enforce the law, the California DOJ updated regulations so that the division of ICE that detains and deports undocumented immigrants, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), had to either pledge not to use CLETS for immigration enforcement or be cut off from the database altogether. ERO refused, and it subsequently lost access in October 2019. 

“To cut off ERO, from … one of the largest law enforcement data networks in the country is a massive victory,” said Maass, the Atlas of Surveillance creator. “But what made it actually even bigger, is the way that that decision trickled down across the entire state,” preventing ERO from using other state and local databases as well.

Many activists, though, say that it’s not enough to target ICE’s access to data from police surveillance. The surveillance itself, they warn, is enough to put immigrants—and the community at large—at risk.

Hamid Khan, a privacy advocate and former undocumented person, says immigrants should be wary about trusting local jurisdictions who claim to protect their data, even supposed sanctuaries like California.

“The backdoor access to information is huge,” Khan said. 

Ultimately, organizers emphasize, ending immigration consequences to local law enforcement involves preventing those contacts in the first place. 

For instance, in Austin, Texas, criminal justice reform and immigrants’ rights advocates worked together to reduce arrests and decrease the potential for law enforcement interactions that lead to data transmission. “We will continue to demand the elimination of unnecessary arrests that forever disrupt the lives of people of color and immigrants, and demand a stop to the feeding of our people to the prison to deportation pipeline,” Julieta Garibay, director of United We Dream Texas, said last year.

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These battles over the law enforcement database in California and policing in Austin may serve as local models for curtailing ICE, but they are also cautionary tales of the limits of local action. To really curb the agency’s ability to use local law enforcement data to detain and deport people, President-Elect Joe Biden would have to lead the charge.

In 2014, the Obama administration narrowed and rebranded Secure Communities as the Priority Enforcement Program, which purported to focus on individuals who had committed serious criminal offenses, appeared on gang databases, or were national security threats. But Trump reactivated Secure Communities by executive order when he took office in 2017. 

Now Homeland Security is in the process of giving a technical apparatus that supports S-COMM a major upgrade. Aside from storing biometrics (including fingerprints and iris scans) the program’s new system will be able to check an image of a person against a known identity or against “galleries” of photos.  

If Biden decides to embark on the complex task of rewiring ICE’s data network to protect sanctuary cities, Secure Communities would be the place to start, experts say. 

“A Biden administration could end that information-sharing on day one,” Fleming of the National Immigrant Justice Center said. “The Biden administration could limit the data-sharing based on jurisdictions that want to participate. The Biden administration could say we’re only going to allow the sharing for individuals convicted of [a specific class] of violent felony.”

The immigration page of Biden’s campaign website does not indicate a clear stance on S-COMM, although it does include a mea culpa for the immigration policies of the Obama era. 

“Joe Biden understands the pain felt by every family across the U.S. that has had a loved one removed from the country, including under the Obama-Biden Administration,” the site says. “He believes we must do better to uphold our laws humanely.”

But other language on the same page (“Biden will direct enforcement efforts toward threats to public safety and national security”) reads like the stage is being set for a return to the Priority Enforcement Program era, which would keep the foundations of Secure Communities in place. 

According to Chris Newman, legal director of National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a Biden administration would have to go further than Obama’s did in 2014 to really change the status quo.

“I think they really will need to hit the off switch on the database-sharing at the point of booking,” Newman said.

Immigrants’ rights advocates acknowledge that even reimagining Secure Communities would not be enough to create true sanctuaries. That would require concerted and ambitious efforts at all levels of government to constrain ICE’s reach and shut down data pipelines. Conversely, the federal deportation dragnet has mostly grown in scope and complexity over the past decade.

“One of the more insidious aspects of this kind of DHS encroachment is that the only way they will ever succeed, even on their own terms, in reducing the undocumented population to zero would be to document everyone at all times,” said Newman.

“And to think about what level of surveillance would be required to achieve that result is chilling.”

Explore other Political Report coverage of local cooperation with ICE.

The post The Major Blindspot Undermining Sanctuary Cities and Helping ICE appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans lost sheriff’s elections last week in populous Southern counties that have been close ICE allies. This is likely to bring an end to prominent ICE contracts in Georgia’s Cobb and Gwinnett counties and in Charleston County, South Carolina. 

These results are major wins for immigrants’ rights advocates who have long worked to change policies in these jurisdictions, which are home to more than 2 million residents combined.

“We celebrate the ouster of the sheriffs who were responsible for the targeting of community members, working in collusion with ICE,” Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, told The Appeal: Political Report. “These incredible victories are the culmination of more than a decade of fighting back by immigrants’ rights organizers against the devastating 287(g) program which led to untold numbers of families being torn apart.” 

Charleston, Cobb, and Gwinnett are all members of ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents within jails. The program has put thousands of people each year on ICE’s radar. Local officials justify this policy as a way to target people who commit violent crimes, though the vast majority of people affected were booked for lower-level offenses or were never convicted. As a result, people can be funneled into deportation proceedings and find themselves locked up in detention centers that are known for inhumane conditions. Project South is among the organizations suing ICE for failing to respond to a whistleblower complaint alleging that women in Georgia’s Irwin Detention Center were forced to undergo gynecological surgeries that could result in sterilization.

Participation in the 287(g) program is up to the sheriff—much like many other forms of cooperation with ICE—and the Democratic nominees in each of these counties ran on terminating it, a stance they reiterated in interviews with the Political Report in September and October. The Republican nominees favored the 287(g) program, by contrast. The three Democrats prevailed.

Cobb County’s longtime sheriff, Neil Warren, lost to challenger Craig Owens. In Gwinnett County, a sheriff with notoriously aggressive policies toward immigrants retired, and the resulting open race was won by Kebo Taylor. 

And in Charleston County, Sheriff Al Cannon lost to Kristin Graziano, who told the Political Report in October that the 287(g) program is “contradictory to what we’re trying to accomplish in Charleston,” namely “building our communities back up and building trust.” Charleston has a separate agreement to help ICE detain people the agency arrests elsewhere, and Graziano indicated to the Political Report she opposed detaining people on noncriminal grounds.

These results add to a series of recent wins by candidates who pledged to cut ties with ICE. 

In 2018, North Carolina was the epicenter of that surge, driven by extensive grassroots activism. Five of its most populous counties elected new sheriffs who ran on no longer assisting ICE, including by terminating 287(g) contracts. They promptly did so after entering office. All five of the new North Carolina sheriffs who ran on improving immigrants’ rights are Black, as are Owens and Taylor in Georgia, even as sheriffs nationally are overwhelmingly white.

Then, in 2019, Democrats took over Prince William County, Virginia’s second most populous jurisdiction, and used their newfound power to quit the 287(g) program this year.

A broader blue shift also contributed to last week’s results in Charleston, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. Joe Biden carried each county by more than any Democratic presidential candidate since at least 1976. The two Georgia counties, in particular, are longtime conservative bastions that have seen tremendous change in their population and politics. For instance, more than two-thirds of Gwinnett County residents were white in 1996, when Butch Conway was elected sheriff and made his county a national leader in targeting immigrants. Now, it’s about a third.

Still, advocates emphasize that it took a lot of work to get these partisan flips to translate into policy commitments by candidates. 

Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, which has opposed cooperation with ICE in Georgia, told the Political Report in August that, “four years ago, nobody knew what this [287(g)] program did,” whereas this year it was a core campaign issue. “The last few years of organizing were very important for us to make sure that 287(g) becomes a top issue in this election, and it really has become that way,” she said. 

Other organizations, such as Mijente, Project South, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and SONG Power, fought to curtail ICE’s reach through these sheriff’s races, and through protests and community events. And in a project sponsored by the Georgia NAACP, the group Informed Georgians for Justice sent questionnaires to all Georgia sheriff candidates, inviting them to clarify their views on immigration and other issues. 

Georgia organizers had already scored a win in the June Democratic primary. Sheriff Ira Edwards lost in Athens to challenger John Williams, who took issue with the incumbent’shis record of helping ICE. Athens is not part of 287(g), but Edwards had honored ICE detainers, which are requests that he detain people beyond their scheduled release to give federal agents time to arrest them. 

Williams said he would not honor ICE detainers. “It’s almost a level of terrorism when people are living in fear to the point that they will not ask for help,” he told the Political Report in June, right after his primary win. Williams also won the general election last week.

Graziano and Owens, the incoming sheriffs in Charleston and Cobb, also said during their campaigns that they would oppose ICE detainers. But Taylor, the incoming Gwinnett sheriff, left the door open to assisting ICE in ways beyond the 287(g) program. Advocates have said they will push local officials to be bolder to protect immigrants.

Graziano told the Political Report she has learned from organizers in Charleston’s Latinx community, whom she wants “sitting at the table making the decisions that affect their lives.”

Elsewhere in the country, two Republican sheriffs who have championed ICE and who joined 287(g) won in counties that narrowly went for Biden in the presidential race. Bill Waybourn in Texas’s Tarrant County (Fort Worth) and Bob Gualtieri in Florida’s Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) defeated challengers who had pledged to terminate these contracts. 

But many candidates who called for winding down local relationships with ICE prevailed. Charmaine McGuffey won a heated sheriff’s race in Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati); earlier this year, she secured a primary win against a Democratic incumbent who had honored ICE detainers, which McGuffey vowed to oppose. In Massachusetts’s Norfolk County, voters ousted a GOP sheriff who had championed greater ICE cooperation.

And in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Democrat Daniella Levine Cava flipped the mayor’s seat from the GOP. Cava ran on curtailing cooperation with ICE, which has been spearheaded by the retiring Republican incumbent Carlos Giménez, and on opposing a new state law that mandates that local law enforcement assist the federal agency. 

Change will be most swift in the three 287(g) counties that elected new Democratic sheriffs.  Since Election Day, the incoming Cobb and Gwinnett sheriffs have confirmed to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they plan to exit the program. And Graziano told the Political Report in October that she would terminate the 287(g) contract “immediately” upon taking office. 

She confirmed her plans through a spokesperson this week. “It will be a simple process, and I intend on keeping my promise to rescind the contract with ICE,” she said.

The post ICE Suffered Blows in the South in Last Week’s Elections appeared first on Bolts.