Nassau County, on New York's Long Island, announced on Tuesday that its police officers will be joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement's mass deportation effort — quite literally.
"We are going to cross-designate and embed Nassau County police detectives with ICE," county executive Bruce Blakeman said. Ten detectives will have the power to arrest and jail people who are under deportation orders — a function usually reserved for federal immigration officers.
While Blakeman said the purpose is to help ICE, it also gives local authorities a way to deport people whose alleged crimes would otherwise not be enough to get them jailed.
"It's an additional resource for them [ICE] and it helps us because it rids us of criminals that basically have not received any consequences for bad behavior," Blakeman said.
The Nassau County move appears to be an expansion of a long-standing ICE program known as 287(g), which enlists local law enforcement to help with immigration enforcement. But for the past decade, that program had been limited to jails, where local officers screen people who've already been booked on other crimes, identifying those wanted by ICE. They also facilitate their transfer to federal custody.
In earlier versions of the program, local officers were also trained and empowered to make immigration inquiries and arrests in the community, but ICE abandoned the practice in 2012, in part because of the difficulty in overseeing what local officers were doing.
Critics — including many police chiefs — have cautioned against that model, which risks blurring the lines between crime prevention and immigration enforcement, and can undermine an immigrant community's trust in local police.
But that model may be coming back, starting with Nassau County.
"Our partnership sends a clear message that ICE and Nassau County stand committed to prioritizing the safety of the public," says Brian Flanagan, acting deputy field office director for ICE in New York City. He focused on the county's pledge to arrest and hold people wanted by ICE for 72 hours.
"Nassau County will enable ICE to house and transfer potentially dangerous alien offenders in a safe and secure environment," Flanagan said.
That's also been a theme for Tom Homan, the White House border czar overseeing the administration's mass deportation effort. On Saturday, he told a meeting of the National Sheriffs' Association that he's prioritizing criminals for deportation. If critics of ICE don't want immigration agents sweeping up non-criminal immigrants, he said, they should welcome such cooperation between feds and local jails.
"If you don't let me get the bad guy in the jail and you force me into the community, you're going to get exactly what you don't want," he said. "More agents in your community and more collateral arrests."
So far, though, relatively few local jails and law enforcement agencies have entered into formal arrangements with ICE. Some Democrat-controlled cities and states bar local law enforcement from cooperating closely with ICE. In California, Attorney General Rob Bonta has pledged to enforce the state's "sanctuary" laws.
"We are monitoring compliance — or lack thereof," Bonta said on KPBS. "And if there is a failure to comply we will act."
But in other jurisdictions, the barriers are more practical. Many sheriffs and police departments say they just don't have the budget for their officers to spend time helping ICE. Some red states are trying to address that: Earlier this week the state senate in Indiana passed a bill to provide grants to local agencies that sign up for 287(g), to help cover the training and overtime costs for participating officers.
ICE may also be less interested in getting field help than it is in getting the other resource controlled by local law enforcement: jail space. As it ramps up its deportation efforts, it risks running out of places to hold people as they wait to be deported.
"We're looking at a lot of different avenues to get beds," Homan told the sheriffs over the weekend. He said ICE may try to get more spaces from private prison contractors and the Defense Department, but it's also counting on county jails. "We're looking at the sheriffs," he told them.
"Many sheriffs provided bed space to us for a long time," he said. "[But] some sheriffs walked away, because they said, 'We can't afford your detention standards.'"
Homan said ICE has been too demanding of the local jails that house migrant detainees, and does too many inspections. To the sheriffs' applause, he promised that was about to change.
"We're happy that you can detain somebody, with a contract with us, as long as you follow your own state standards. If that's good enough for a US citizen in your county, that's good enough for an illegal alien detained for us," Homan said.
It remains to be seen whether looser oversight will produce the number of beds ICE is likely to need. So far, jails that already have contracts with federal agencies are not reporting a major increase in ICE detainees. At the Washoe County jail, north of Reno, Nevada, Deputy Cade Goodman says, "I think everyone is looking over the fence, trying to see what's going to happen."
Should ICE request a bigger allotment of beds, he said the jail has some extra room, but he doubts the county will allow the feds to take it all.
"We're committed to the safety of our community and that comes first," he says.
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