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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.”

—

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.

Immigrants’ rights activists have been protesting local officials that help ICE arrest and deport immigrants, pressuring them to end those ties, and candidates for these offices have felt the heat. 

Most significantly, their work has upended the usually quiet landscape of sheriff’s races, helping drive upset losses for longtime incumbents in places such as Minneapolis and Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2018, and already this year—in spring primaries—in Cincinnati and in Athens, Georgia.

Will November’s general elections add to that trend? 

The GOP’s declining fortunes in longtime conservative bastions that have soured on President Trump—who has made hostility to immigration one of his defining rallying cries—have opened the door to political turnover in areas such as Atlanta’s northern suburbs. Those areas were long impregnable to Democrats and any candidates running on cutting ties with ICE. Elsewhere, some Democratic-leaning jurisdictions face a reckoning over their ICE-friendly policies.

Below I look at 12 of the most important state and local elections on the ballot this fall that will affect ICE’s reach and local immigration policy.

The list covers different sorts of offices. But the lion’s share are races for county sheriff. These officials have tremendous discretion on whether and how to respond to or collaborate with ICE. That’s because most sheriffs are responsible for running local jails, which hundreds of thousands of people go through every year, often with little to no oversight from other public officials. And these jails are a major funnel into the country’s deportation machine, especially when a sheriff is keen on making them so, as The Appeal: Political Report explained in July. 

For one, most sheriffs have sole authority over whether their county joins ICE’s 287(g) program. This partnership directly implicates sheriffs in harming immigrant communities by authorizing their deputies to act like federal immigration agents. Only 145 counties in the nation have 287(g) contracts at this moment, but that pool includes very populous jurisdictions—and that’s precisely where Nov. 3 could upend the local landscape: In counties that cover millions of residents—in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas—candidates are running this fall on a promise of terminating existing 287(g) contracts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheriffs also decide whether they will agree to detain ICE prisoners in exchange for payments; and whether to honor so-called ICE detainers, which are warrantless requests asking sheriffs to keep jailing a person past their scheduled release to give federal agents time to arrest them. 

All of these arrangements are on the line on Election Day, and with them the prospect that voters may slash ICE’s reach, as they did in 2018, regardless of what happens in the presidential race.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

No local official is as closely associated with repressive immigration practices as Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County’s sheriff from 1993 to 2017. Arpaio ran a detention facility known as Tent City that he himself called a “concentration camp,” and he engaged in racial profiling in defiance of a court order. Arpaio was ousted in November 2016 by Democrat Paul Penzone, who subsequently closed Tent City, and Arpaio fell short in his attempted comeback this year, narrowly losing to Jerry Sheridan in the Republican primary. But Sheridan is Arpaio’s former lieutenant, and could carry on Arpaio’s legacy if he beats Penzone in November. Writing in the Political Report, Jerry Iannelli stresses that Penzone has disappointed immigrants’ rights activists over his first term. But he also reports that Republican nominee Sheridan is directly implicated in the racial profiling of the Arpaio years and he has vowed to reopen Tent City.

Florida | Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) sheriff

Bob Gualtieri has been an enthusiastic champion of ICE, both through his powers as the sheriff of Pinellas County and through his leadership role in the state’s Sheriffs Association. He helped design a new arrangement for Florida sheriffs to circumvent legal concerns and keep detaining people when ICE requests it; and he has contracted his office into ICE’s 287(g) program. Gualtieri, a Republican, faces Democratic challenger Eliseo Santana who has vowed to terminate both of these partnerships if he is elected sheriff and to reject forms of discretionary assistance with the agency. “I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community,” Santana told me in a Q&A last week. “These types of agreements are hurting our community, are destroying the family, and it’s anti-American.”

Florida | Miami-Dade mayor

In January 2017, as President Trump entered the White House and took aim at “sanctuary cities,” Miami-Dade County’s Republican Mayor Carlos Giménez announced a major policy reversal that has helped ICE target undocumented immigrants: The county, Florida’s most populous, would honor ICE detainers by holding people in jail beyond their scheduled release if federal agents request it. (Local governments typically leave the discretion on this matter to sheriffs, but Miami-Dade is the only jurisdiction in the state that does not have one.) 

The candidates vying to replace him, Republican Esteban Bovo and Democrat Daniella Levine Cava, have long been on opposite sides of this change. Both were county commissioners in February 2017 when the commission ratified Giménez’s order, despite hundreds of residents demanding a return to sanctuary policies. Bovo voted to approve the order, and Cava opposed it. Cava is now running on curtailing cooperation with ICE, including fighting a new state law that mandates that local law enforcement assist the federal agency. “I think it’s overreach and a pre-emption on how we take care of our people,” Cava said at a summer forum.

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff and Gwinnett County sheriff

Cobb and Gwinnett, two counties in the Atlanta suburbs that have a combined population of over 1.5 million, have undergone a similar transformation. Longtime Republican bastions with harsh policies toward immigrants, they voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election for the first time since 1976, a change fueled in part by a significant rise in the local Latinx population. Now these counties’ legacy of tightly helping ICE will be tested, Timothy Pratt wrote in the Political Report in September. The Republican sheriffs of Cobb and Gwinnett have both joined ICE’s 287(g) program. And in each county, the November election pits a Democrat who has committed to terminating the 287(g) contracts against a Republican who wants to stay in the program. But even if the program falls, advocates say, far more policy upheaval will be needed to stop the repression of the region’s immigrant communities.

Massachusetts | Norfolk County sheriff 

Jerry McDermott and Patrick McDermott, no relation, are facing off on Nov. 3. Jerry, the Republican incumbent, was appointed by the governor two years ago. Patrick, a Democrat, is the county’s registrar of probates. The incumbent championed a ballot initiative last year that would have undone a state court ruling and authorized sheriffs to honor ICE detainers, which come without a judge’s signature. He did not respond to a request for comment on how he would partner with ICE if elected to a full term. By contrast, and as I reported in the Political Report in August, his challenger says sheriffs should not honor ICE requests that a federal judge has not signed, and that he would not enter into new contracts like a 287(g) agreement. “These contracts make it harder to ensure that all members of the communities … feel safe and secure,” he said.

Michigan | Oakland County sheriff

Sheriff Mike Bouchard, a Republican in a county that may be poised to reject President Trump in November, has honored ICE’s detainer requests, and as a leader in the Major County Sheriffs of America, he has worked to extend that practice throughout the country. “If ICE is coming after someone in the jail, it’s for a criminal charge,” he told Detroit News in 2017, downplaying the fact that most people in jail have not been convicted. In November, Bouchard faces Democratic challenger Vincent Gregory, a former state senator who told the Political Report that he would break with Bouchard’s policy on detainers. “I would NOT honor the request from ICE to hold the prisoners without a Court Order,” he said in an email. But Gregory also volunteered that immigration has not been central to conversations he has had during the campaign, and he does not feature the issue on his website.

North Carolina | Governor

In 2018, buoyed by the activism of advocacy groups such as Comunidad Colectiva, Action NC, El Pueblo, or Siembra NC, North Carolina saw a wave of wins by sheriff candidates—all Black Democrats—who ran on cutting ties with ICE in five of the state’s most populous counties. They promptly did just that upon entering office. This enraged Republicans, who run the state legislature. Last year, they passed a bill to require that sheriffs collaborate with ICE. But Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the legislation, effectively protecting sheriffs’ ability to not do ICE’s bidding. Cooper is up for re-election against Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest. If Forest wins, it would likely hand the GOP control of the state government, enabling them to revisit the 2019 bill. But the state could also swing in the other direction; a Cooper win may be accompanied by legislative gains for his party, strengthening the new sheriffs’ hand.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

This is the only election featured here that has a candidate who wants to scale back collaboration with ICE, and one who wants to ramp it up. The incumbent sheriff, Jim Neil, is a Democrat who attended a Trump rally in 2016, honors ICE detainers, and has faced protests from activists. He could not overcome that record in the Democratic primary, losing to Charmaine McGuffey, a former sheriff’s deputy who is running a reform-minded campaign, as Teresa Mathew reported in the Political Report. McGuffey told Mathew that she would no longer honor detainers if elected. 

Now McGuffey faces Republican Bruce Hoffbauer, a police lieutenant who has said the county should be even more active in partnering with ICE than it has been under Neil; he did not respond to a request for comment on how he intends to partner with ICE, though. (Neil has endorsed Hoffbauer since his primary defeat.) Hoffbauer is also running on increasing enforcement against what he calls “street-level crimes” such as drug offenses, which could increase arrests and jail bookings. This approach to policing, combined with a goal of helping ICE arrest people held in the local jail, could lead to even more people being funneled into deportation proceedings.

South Carolina | Charleston County sheriff

Charleston County may have voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections, but it also has a Republican sheriff, J. Al Cannon, who has made it one of ICE’s closest allies in the state. Charleston is one of only four South Carolina counties in ICE’s 287(g) program, enabling deputies to facilitate defendants’ transfer into ICE custody. Cannon also has an agreement to detain people that ICE arrests elsewhere, including during raids, which has drawn protests. This record is on the line in November. Cannon, who has been in power since 1988, faces Kristin Graziano, a sheriff’s deputy he put on leave when he learned that she was running against him. 

Graziano, a Democrat, told me this week that she would “immediately” terminate the 287(g) program. “It’s contradictory to what we’re trying to accomplish in Charleston,” she said, namely “building our communities back up and building trust.” She added that she would not honor ICE detainers, and would “end completely” agreements that involve detaining people on non-criminal grounds. Graziano, whose website takes the rare step of laying out her views in both English and Spanish, said she has “learned” from “dialogue” with advocates from the Latinx community, whom she wants “sitting at the table making the decisions that affect their lives.”

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

In this county of nearly two million residents, Republican Sheriff Bill Waybourn has been a vocal cheerleader for Trumpian immigration politics. Speaking at a White House event in 2019, he praised ICE for “standing on the wall between good and evil for you and me,” and defended jailing people who face criminal charges on immigration grounds because otherwise “these drunks will run over your children and they will run over my children.” But Tarrant County has rapidly shifted toward the Democratic Party during the Trump era, and this has made Waybourn vulnerable to Democratic challenger Vance Keyes, a former police officer who says he is running to end the incumbent’s “fear mongering tactics.” The ICE out of Tarrant County coalition has fought Waybourn’s participation in ICE’s 287(g) program. Keyes has vowed to terminate it if he is elected. 

Tarrant is by far the most populous Texas county in 287(g). There are only two other 287(g) counties that were carried by a Democrat in a federal race in either 2016 or 2018, a mark of potential competitivenss: Williamson County (Georgetown) and Nueces County (Corpus Christi). In each, the incumbent sheriff is a Republican with a Democratic opponent; but neither of the challengers answered my requests for comment on their views on immigration and 287(g), nor do they indicate a position on their website, in a stark contrast with Keyes’s willingness to tackle the issue in Tarrant. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) district attorney

Travis County may elect as its next DA a candidate who describes himself as an “immigrant rights activist.” José Garza, a former public defender and leader of the Workers Defense Project, an organization focused on labor and immigration law, ousted the incumbent DA by an overwhelming margin in the Democratic primary. He is now favored against Republican candidate Martin Harry, given the county’s large Democratic lean. Garza told me in June that he wants to avoid immigration consequences for people facing criminal charges or convictions. “A simple proposition for me is that no one should face a more severe punishment simply because of their status,” he said, noting that for some cases it would be a matter of keeping the penalty for a crime under one year, which is a threshold that triggers deportation. 

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This is not an exhaustive list of every local election whose result will shape immigration policy; there are thousands of elected offices that will be decided on Nov. 3. I have selected elections in counties that are at least somewhat politically competitive, as well as elections that pit candidates with clear political differences.

The post These Twelve Elections Could Curb ICE’s Powers appeared first on Bolts.

After months of sustained pressure, immigrants’ rights activists clinched a major victory in Williamson County, Texas, in June 2018. In a room packed with local organizers, the county commission voted to terminate contracts with ICE and CoreCivic—the second-largest private detention company in the country—which together held 500 women in detention at the nearby T. Don Hutto Residential Center. 

Yet the center didn’t close. ICE simply cut the local government out of the equation and signed a short-term contract directly with CoreCivic to keep the detention center open. It sought to lock in long-term control over the center and two other Texas detention centers by posting solicitations for 10-year private contracts. 

The Trump administration’s draconian immigration enforcement has triggered growing pro-immigration activism around the country, and with it, increasing public pressure on elected officials to reevaluate their relationships to immigration detention. In the face of congressional inaction on immigration, many immigrants’ rights advocates have shifted their focus locally: to state, county, and municipal policymakers who can intervene directly in their jurisdictions to curtail ICE detention.

In response, the agency is creating a new playbook. It’s taking state and local efforts to block or limit its detention operations less as defeats than as temporary hiccups that it can overcome by pursuing direct contracts with its favored private providers. In some cases, ICE is combining this with finding jurisdictions with friendlier officials.

“We’re starting to see that when [local populations] become aware of how this agency is operating near their homes, they express some concern,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at the University of Denver who studies immigration detention. “In many communities, that concern is developing into sufficiently well organized advocacy networks that are able to either pressure local governments to stop coordinating with or contracting with ICE, or at least make business as usual more difficult for private prison corporations.”

He added, “And so to the extent [ICE is] able to eliminate constituents in local governments or city governments, it’s a cleaner relationship that they can have with the private prison company.”

Williamson County Commissioner Terry Cook, who voted in favor of terminating the contracts, had predicted this in her comments just before the vote, expressing concern that “the facility does not have to close and can operate under emergency conditions with CoreCivic operating it.”

In an email to the Appeal: Political Report, Cook also expressed frustration with ICE’s ability to override the county’s decision-making and continue the detentions. “It is crazy for the taxpayers to pay over $100/day/person to hold them there—not like any of them are a danger to the general population,” she wrote. “Example of silliness of national politics.”

A local advocacy organization, Grassroots Leadership, has spearheaded the campaign against the center. It rallied residents to pack public meetings and call or write to their commissioners, demanding that they rely on alternative revenue sources. It is now suing ICE as part of a public records request seeking information on the contracting process that allowed it to so quickly ensure the facility would stay open.

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The events in Williamson County are just one of the more straightforward examples of the emerging strategy. ICE has employed similar schemes over the past year in California and Michigan. “That’s why these strategies from ICE were developed, to kind of circumvent those victories in other places where there’s already a really robust campaign,” said Bárbara Suárez Galeano, organizing director at the Detention Watch Network.

At any given time, ICE detains tens of thousands of people around the country at sites that follow no unified template. They range from federal facilities to privately owned detention centers with whom ICE contracts to local jails and where county governments agree to hold ICE detainees in exchange for payments.

Most detentions still run through local governments in some form or another via contracts known as intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs). Some counties take custody of ICE detainees directly and hold them in the same jails as local prisoners. Others enter these IGSAs and then subcontract with private prison companies to provide the detention services, as Williamson County used to. While this may seem like a redundant step, it has some benefits for ICE, which can avoid some contracting requirements by using the localities as a middleman, and for the contractors, which can get localities to build more infrastructure and provide other services for the centers.

In 2017, California adopted a law that restricted IGSAs, affecting ICE’s ability to use municipalities as pass-throughs and triggering a series of developments that have showcased ICE’s adaptability. It prohibited localities from entering into new agreements to hold immigration detainees, expanding existing agreements, or approving the use of new land or buildings for private detention without certain public notice and comment. 

This inconvenienced ICE in Adelanto, a small jurisdiction in San Bernardino County with which the agency had a contract to operate a detention center run by The GEO Group. ICE wanted to expand this facility, but this law banned Adelanto from agreeing. So GEO’s CEO quietly urged city officials to terminate the contract, as reported by the Palm Springs Desert Sun, promising to keep paying it as if the contract was still active. This enabled ICE to turn around, contract with GEO directly, and expand its existing capacity by converting a local prison that was also owned by GEO into an immigration detention center.

This maneuver solved ICE’s local policy problems in the short-term, but new obstacles soon emerged: In October 2019, California adopted a new law that broadly prohibited the operation of private, for profit detention anywhere in the state; however, it enabled contracts in effect as of Jan. 1 to continue as scheduled until they reach completion.

ICE and its private detention partners kicked into gear. With only months to go until the Jan. 1 deadline, the agency quickly posted solicitations—essentially requests for private companies to bid on available contracts—that appeared tailored to existing detention centers, including the one in Adelanto, and got staggering 15-year contracts inked just ahead of the 2019 law going into effect. One of the other contracts is for the CoreCivic-run Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, which as of this writing has the largest COVID-19 outbreak out of any ICE detention facility in the country, including the first death of an ICE detainee from the disease.

A similar operation is underway in McFarland, where two prisons would be converted into annexes of the Mesa Verda ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield—another facility that got a new long-term contract late last year—adding 1,400 immigration detention beds.

Though neither Adelanto nor McFarland would be a party in these new contracts, which are directly between ICE and the private prison companies, the 2017 law requires that each still approve the use of the prisons for immigration detention purposes. And this left an opening for local activists. 

Late last year, when McFarland activists heard that ICE was seeking to incorporate the prisons into its detention ecosystem, they rallied public support among the heavily immigrant population of the city. “They were phone banking their neighbors, phone banking community members to make sure that these detention centers didn’t come into the immigrant town McFarland. All in all, before the second meeting [of the City Council], folks were able to have over 1,000 signatures in opposition to the detention centers,” said Alex Gonzalez, a community organizer with Faith in the Valley. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic somewhat stunted the organizing efforts as public meetings moved online.

Some of the organizing has even happened inside the facilities in question. Charles Joseph, who was detained at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center—the facility that the two McFarland prisons are supposed to be expanding—helped organize protests inside and has been vocal in speaking out against the center since his release in early April. He told the Political Report that in detention, he had been pressing ICE, GEO, and local officers to “put some preventive measures in place” to prevent COVID-19 outbreaks. Despite the encroaching threat of the virus, he believes the private prison companies don’t have an incentive to safeguard the health of the detainees and has called for local officials to prevent the expansions.

McFarland’s Planning Commission initially rejected the project, but last month its city council reversed that decision and authorized it, largely on the argument that it would prove an economic lifeline. González recalled that the company enticed McFarland city officials on promises to bring jobs, “millions of dollars of revenue,” and scholarships.

Among the council members who voted for the deal was Eric Rodriguez, a former employee of The GEO Group. Local advocates are attempting to challenge the decision as a violation of the 2017 law’s requirements for public input.

Approval of the extended GEO contract in Adelanto is still pending in the city council.

Suárez Galeano called the events in California “the most egregious” example of ICE’s emerging playbook of securing private partnerships to evade public terminations. 

The agency moved in a similarly aggressive manner in Michigan after Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, blocked the sale of a former state prison in Ionia County to Immigration Centers of America, a small, private detention contractor working with ICE.

Then, in April of this year, ICE informed the local Board of Commissioners that it would seek to begin building an entirely new detention center on a privately owned lot, a move that falls outside the governor’s power to block it. Last week, the board tabled a vote on a resolution supporting the proposal, citing a desire to get more information from ICE, but ultimately their input is not necessary for the project to move ahead. 

In fact, the letter that ICE sent to the Board of Commissioners contains a number of details, such as the size of the facility and the exact lot to be used, that suggest the agency has already sketched out a project and either selected a contractor or is going to dictate to a contractor exactly what it wants.

“What’s strange about this is that normally ICE itself doesn’t play the front role in siting detention centers. They are at least somewhat subject to government procurement practices,” said Judy Greene of the New York-based advocacy and research organization Justice Strategies, who has been following the situation. “I have not seen an instance where the party that seems to be handling the negotiations or the communications with local officials and so forth is ICE directly.”

ICE is asserting such control that it’s essentially moving forward without having publicly announced a contractor to build and run the facility. Attempts to reach the owners of the potential site were unsuccessful, and a local ICE spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment. Representatives for The GEO Group and the Management and Training Corporation, another private detention firm, told the Political Report they were not seeking the contract, a representative for CoreCivic directed a reporter to ICE, and ICA did not respond.

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This kind of strategy—ICE going in and doing the legwork itself or bestowing a favored contractor with the project and letting it execute it on agency’s behalf—could become handy as the agency keeps developing a rapid-response playbook to dodge state and local attempts at asserting control. 

“Their decisions have a local effect, but they’re not beholden to a particular municipality or particular county,” said García Hernández. He explained that private corporations like GEO and CoreCivic “are very capable of operating in a diverse range of settings … They measure their risk in light of developments happening around the United States or even in some instances around the world, more so than they do based on risks in any particular county or even city.”

ICE sees some benefits from going through localities, but there are also definite advantages to cutting them out. “The small-D democratic process is always messy,” said García Hernández. Not every state is going to take as drastic a step as California, but in his estimation, ICE views its response to the state’s efforts “as something that isn’t necessarily a plug-and-play model, but a model that they can learn from.”

There are other similar scenarios on the horizon. ICE has an active solicitation for a contract detention facility to serve its Chicago field office. If a private provider buys or builds a center directly on behalf of the agency, ICE would have circumvented a recent Illinois law that prevents local governments from contracting with ICE to provide it detention services. 

Similarly, in Minnesota, ICE is soliciting bids for a private detention center in St. Paul, as the legislature eyes axing counties’ ability to contract with ICE in their local jails.

In Hudson County, New Jersey, the local board of freeholders voted to let an IGSA to hold ICE detainees at the Hudson County Jail expire at the end of 2020. ICE hasn’t solicited contracts with a new facility in the area, but it could present another tempting opportunity. 

Rosa Santana of the legal services and advocacy group First Friends of New York and New Jersey said that ICE would most likely seek to distribute detainees to other local jails and detention centers, but it would be “extremely unfortunate” if another private center was built. She pointed to the CoreCivic-run Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, also in New Jersey. The center had the first reported case of COVID-19 in an immigration detention center and is now facing a significant outbreak. 

“It is extremely hard to hold [CoreCivic] accountable for what happens in their facilities,” she told the Political Report in a written message.

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