Renewed Interest in Local Partnerships: 

Since it became clear Trump embraces the 287(g) program, some local agencies already are eager to engage with ICE, even if the partnership exists only in jails.

Last month, A.J. Louderback, the Republican sheriff of Jackson County in Texas, signed such an agreement with ICE.

Louderback, who is also legislative director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, said more than 10 other counties in the state have expressed interest in brokering new partnerships with the federal government.

“We need to make sure our criminal aliens are handled consistently throughout Texas and throughout the U.S.,” Louderback told The Daily Signal.

“And the best way we can do it, the most efficient way we can do it, is to cooperate with ICE to make sure each criminal foreign-born alien is properly vetted before we let them out of jail.”

In the jail model, trained local officers interview inmates about their immigration status and identify potentially removable illegal immigrants to ICE. When booked, all new inmates are asked to state their place of birth and nationality. If an inmate indicates he is a noncitizen and foreign-born, the officer screens him by accessing a federal database that includes information about immigration status and history, then consults with an ICE supervisor.

If the local officer discovers that the person is an unauthorized immigrant, the officer may issue a detainer. This allows the jail to hold the inmate 48 hours past the normal release time before transferring the inmate to ICE custody.

ICE then would decide whether to pursue removal proceedings against the illegal immigrant.

Aside from training local officers chosen to carry out immigration enforcement duties, and providing and installing associated equipment, ICE does not pay for any costs associated with implementing the program. The local agency bears the costs.

In Prince William County, the sheriff’s office currently operates the 287(g) program through the jail. The police department’s agreement with ICE ended in 2012, after the Obama administration stopped allowing enforcement by local officers in the streets.

Prince William’s Stewart says ICE has trained eight officers in the county jail who do nothing but check immigration status.

He does not expect or want the county to expand into street-level enforcement, Stewart said, but is hopeful for one change under the Trump administration.

In previous administrations, he told The Daily Signal, ICE did not notify the county on whether the federal agency deported or released illegal immigrants after local officials transferred them to federal custody. ICE held that such information was private.

Local police rearrested 14 percent of the more than 7,400 illegal immigrants handed over to ICE since 2008, Stewart said.

“What changes now is a belief that Trump will keep his word and we will finally see the federal government deporting the illegal aliens we have handed over to them,” Stewart said.

Resistance Remains: 

Despite some renewed interest in 287(g), the program faces resistance from some states as well as so-called sanctuary cities, which limit cooperation in enforcing federal immigration law.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said last week that the city would cooperate in cases involving “proven public safety threats,” but vowed that “what we will not do is turn our NYPD officers into immigration agents.”

The Major Cities Chiefs Association, an organization made up of dozens of senior law enforcement executives from the nation’s largest cities, rejects the policy of enlisting local or state officers in immigration enforcement.

“We do not believe local police should be involved in civil immigration enforcement,” Darrel Stephens, executive director of the association, told The Daily Signal. “We do have a responsibility, however, to enforce criminal laws regardless of one’s immigration status. Our agencies work with ICE on a range of programs involving human trafficking, gang enforcement, and the like.”

In Texas, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a newly elected Democrat, terminated a 287(g) partnership with ICE in which 10 trained local deputies screened the immigration status of jailed suspects.

Adrian Garcia, a Democrat who served as Harris County sheriff from 2009 to 2015, told The Daily Signal that he tried to end an agreement with ICE that he inherited from his predecessor.

During his tenure, Garcia said, Harris County altered the program so that local officers screened the immigration status only of “violent, serious” offenders in the jail, rather than all inmates.

The 23-year veteran of the Houston Police Department commended Gonzalez for ending the program.

“It was a constant battle to stay true to what I thought the goal should be, which was to go after the worst of the worst,” Garcia told The Daily Signal, adding:

It was important for me that the community never lost confidence in the police department. There was an increasing amount of feedback that people were not engaging with law enforcement as they could or should have.

Evaluating Impact: 

Back in Prince William County, debate over the impact of its immigration enforcement program continues, even though it is less visible and contentious today operating strictly in the jail.

A 2013 study published by the American Society of Criminology found that while the policy did not affect most forms of crime in the county (including robberies, drug offenses, and drunk driving), aggravated assaults declined 27 percent after the announcement of the original policy in July 2007.

Last year, 22 homicides occurred in the county, the highest total since local authorities began tracking them in 1975. The overall crime rate is at a 24-year low, however.

Prince William’s noncitizen Hispanic population (legal and illegal) declined 23 percent from 2007 to 2009.

A 2010 study by the University of Virginia found that most of the arrests of illegal immigrants in 2009—about 70 percent—were for drunken driving, public drunkenness, and driving without a license.

The study also showed that illegal immigrants committed a relatively small percentage of the county’s serious crimes—6 percent in 2009.

Experts say it’s difficult to connect crime and population trends to the county’s immigration policy, since illegal immigrants were committing a small percentage of serious crimes, and the policy’s implementation coincided with the economic downturn.

Thomas Guterbock, the director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Survey Research, said that overall, the policy had achieved its intended effect.

“As Prince William County showed, these programs can be effective in doing what they are intended to do—finding undocumented persons who have committed crimes or serious violations of immigration law,” Guterbock told The Daily Signal. “If done carefully, they could be made to work behind the scenes as a fairly quiet and unbiased way to find and deal with those people.”

This first appeared in The Daily Signal here.

Image Credit: Creative Commons.