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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clark did not reply to a request for comment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the tide turned on Tuesday, as Massachusetts voters approved giving people in the state driver’s licenses regardless of their immigration status. The referendum followed the adoption of a law earlier this year that expanded access to licenses; Republicans petitioned a veto referendum onto the ballot, and voters blessed the law this week.

“People are going to feel safer going on the roads, doing what Americans do—go to a doctor appointment, take children to school,” Reiter said. She works at the Brazilian Worker Center of Boston, an immigrants’ rights group that helped spearhead the Yes campaign.

The state’s immigrant advocates also cheered landmark wins this week in two counties where sheriff’s offices have long worked closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to identify and detain immigrants. Under such local arrangements, minor interactions, like traffic stops, can escalate into detainment and even deportation. 

Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod, stood out as the only county in New England to contract into ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents. But voters on Tuesday elected a new sheriff who promises to “rip up” the county’s contract to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

“The sheriff’s office should not be doing ICE’s job,” Democratic nominee Donna Buckley, who will replace a retiring, 23-year Republican sheriff, told Bolts in September. Her GOP opponent favored maintaining the county’s contract with ICE.

In neighboring Bristol County, voters ousted Thomas Hodgson, a far-right sheriff with a history of draconian anti-immigrant policies. In 2017, Hodgson famously offered to send people detained in his custody to the U.S.-Mexico border to help build former President Donald Trump’s wall, and last year the federal government shut down his county’s immigrant detention facility over alleged civil rights violations.

Each of these changes was driven by on-the-ground organizing by immigrants’ rights activists in a state that tilts heavily Democratic but hasn’t always embraced immigrants in policy-making. Local groups like Bristol County for Correctional Justice and the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities mounted active campaigns to educate voters in their counties about the stakes of these local elections. 

Elsewhere in the country, two GOP candidates with a history of championing harsher immigration enforcement failed to seize sheriff’s offices.

In Doña Ana County, a border county in New Mexico that is home to Las Cruces, Democratic Sheriff Kim Stewart easily prevailed over a Republican challenger who was advocating for a tighter relationship with federal agents. 

In Wake County (Raleigh), North Carolina, longtime sheriff Donnie Harrison failed in his comeback effort and lost to Democrat Willie Rowe. While in office, Harrison joined the 287(g) program and frequently demonized immigrants. He was ousted from office in 2018, alongside many other Republican sheriffs known for contracting with ICE who lost their reelection bids in North Carolina that year.

During his campaign, Harrison abruptly changed his stance on collaborating with ICE. When asked by Bolts in August about his public desire for Wake to rejoin 287(g), which his Democratic successor had quickly terminated, Harrison said he no longer wanted to. Advocates took his flip as a sign that protecting immigrants remains a potent issue.

Felicia Arriaga, a sociology professor at Appalachian State University, in western North Carolina, has compiled data showing that Harrison’s policies as sheriff contributed to hundreds of deportation a year; she says Harrison’s change this year was an electoralist effort to woo the center, and that his loss was met with relief by local organizers. Other North Carolina counties like Durham and Mecklenburg reelected Democratic sheriffs who came into office in 2018 and promptly limited ties with ICE.

North Carolina Republicans also failed to win veto-proof majorities in their legislature; that is likely to keep legislation they have championed to force sheriffs to work with ICE at bay for two more years, since the Democratic governor opposes it.

But at least one of the nation’s notorious anti-immigrant sheriffs survived on Tuesday in a more rural area. In Alamance, a North Carolina county roughly one hour west of Wake County, GOP Sheriff Terry Johnson won another term. He has faced federal accusations over racial profiling and for detaining immigrants in abusive conditions, and he reportedly once directed his deputies to discriminate against people who “appeared” to be Mexican, telling staff to “go out there and get me some taco-eaters.”

In Frederick County, Maryland, another mostly rural but rapidly-diversifying county north of D.C. Republican Sheriff Chuck Jenkins has a hefty lead as of publication, though many mail-in ballots, which lean heavily Democratic, remain to be counted. Jenkins has been under national scrutiny for policies that have ramped up fear among immigrants even as the county rapidly diversified under his tenure. Besides his connections to prominent national politicians and far-right groups, Jenkins has been a longstanding member of the 287(g) program and has been successfully sued over racial profiling in traffic stops.

“As an immigrant, you never really felt safe,” local resident Jesus Santiago told Bolts in September. He was once arrested in Frederick County over driving with a suspended license and then transferred into immigration detention; he was later shielded by former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. 

Democrats on Tuesday gained full control of the state government in Maryland for the first time in eight years and may look to pass more protections for immigrant residents. In recent years, they already passed bills curtailing local cooperation with ICE with enough votes to override the vetoes of outgoing Republican Governor Larry Hogan. 

“With the way Congress is, a lot of people are very focused on what they can do in their own states right now to try to improve the situation,” Sarang Sakhavat, political director at the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, told Bolts. “With Congress, we don’t really expect them to be changing much of anything.”

In Massachusetts, where Democrats also flipped the governorship and grabbed control of the government, advocates have been frustrated at the Democratic legislature’s failure to pass a bill limiting immigration enforcement; known as the Safe Communities Act, the reform was opposed by outgoing Republican Governor Charlie Baker. 

Massachusetts organizers who worked on various immigrant-rights campaigns this year also focused on making a public-safety argument.

The coalition that supported the Massachusetts driver’s license measure called itself “Yes on 4 For Safer Roads,” making the case that everyone is less safe when people are denied licenses because more driverspeople are uninsured. Similarly, opponents of county-level ICE partnerships are telling voters that communities are less safe if certain populations are disincentivized to interact with police and the legal system in general.

Working with ICE “doesn’t improve safety in any measurable way, and if anything it’s detrimental because it scares witnesses and victims away,” Sakhavat said.

Daniel Nichanian contributed to the reporting for this article.

The post Immigration Hardliners Lose Sheriff Races in Massachusetts and Beyond appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article has been updated with comment from Jenkins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*This story was updated with comments from Santillán.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Tarrant County, historically a Republican stronghold in Texas, a sheriff election is shaking up the status quo.

Sheriff Bill Waybourn has gained notoriety outside the county, which is home to Fort Worth, for his Trumpian posturing, especially his fear mongering remarks at a White House press briefing on immigration last year. Locally, critics have decried his cooperation with ICE, poor conditions in the county jail system, and his unwillingness to take measures to reduce the jail population during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Next month, Waybourn is facing off against Democratic challenger Vance Keyes, a Marine Corps veteran who has worked for the Fort Worth Police Department for two decades. Keyes believes the nation is “at a tipping point” regarding criminal justice reform, and his platform reflects what would amount to serious changes for the county. He wants to significantly reduce the jail population by making fewer arrests and advocates an end to cash bail. He has committed to changing the jail’s approach to healthcare and diverting more people to treatment facilities. And Keyes plans to get rid of the office’s 287(g) agreement with ICE.

Demographics in Tarrant County are shifting, and electoral politics seem to be following. After going for Donald Trump for president in 2016, the county voted for Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz for Senate in 2018. Now both parties have their eyes on Tarrant County, and bigger players have gotten involved in the sheriff race; O’Rourke has stumped for Keyes and former governor Rick Perry has endorsed Waybourn. 

Locally, criminal justice reform advocates see an opportunity to change policies to curb deportations, keep people out of jail, and improve conditions for those who are locked up.  

“In this election, specifically, what we know is that Sheriff Waybourn is a danger to our community,” said Sindy Mata, an organizer with the group New Sheriff Now Tarrant County, which has been trying to replace Waybourn, “whether it’s through 287(g) or the perpetuation of harmful rhetoric or the continuation of a culture that is resulting in deaths of people detained in the jail.”

Since January, 10 people incarcerated at the Tarrant County Jail have died. And many people—including county commissioners—have expressed concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the sheriff’s office.

Other local officials, like County Judge Glen Whitley, have defended the number of fatalities at the jail by saying it is in keeping with comparable counties. According to a data comparison done by the Texas Justice Initiative, it is true that there have been fewer deaths in the Tarrant County sheriff’s custody than in counties with similar jail populations during that same time frame. But advocates have countered that even one life lost is a tragedy and that Waybourn’s approach to running the jail has made it more dangerous for the people held there. 

Texas Justice Initiative found that the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office has reported that 67 percent of its deaths in the last 15 years have been from natural causes. But Krishnaveni Gundu, the executive director and co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, does not trust that classification. “If your blood pressure meds are delayed, or you have diabetes and you die and they say it’s a natural cause, that’s not true,” she said. “It’s negligence.” 

Gundu explained that the current system of prescribing and administering medication is divided between a local mental health authority, a healthcare provider, and the jail—an arrangement that often causes patients to fall through the cracks. With multiple entities involved, “it’s very easy for them to point fingers at each other,” she said.

A former jail supervisor who worked in two Tarrant County correctional facilities from 2007 until January of this year spoke to The Appeal: Political Report on the condition of anonymity because he hopes to work in the system again in the future. He told a similar story: “There are not enough caseworkers or psychologists to see every inmate every week. … I’ve gotten complaints from inmates saying their medication has run out and they can’t get any more.” 

The former supervisor also said that misclassification during booking has led to people with mental disabilities or medical needs being placed with the general population or in single cells instead of on the medical floor. He said this has led to incidents of violence and has meant that vulnerable people were not receiving the monitoring they needed. In May, the Tarrant County Jail lost state certification for nearly a week after an internal investigation into a suicide exposed that jailers had been late conducting welfare checks. In the same month, they failed to notice that a pregnant woman had given birth unassisted in her cell; the baby later died.

A spokesperson for the jail said via email that some characterizations of the facility were inaccurate, but did not provide specifics or respond to requests for further details.

Waybourn did not respond to the Political Report’s requests for comment. He told Fort Worth Weekly that he is committed to improving reentry programs and that his office is working on a mental health diversion center that would allow it “to take people who would benefit from mental health care out of our jail and place them in an environment that would help get them the care they need.” Yet local advocates have little faith in this plan, pointing out that Waybourn has thus far instituted few reforms. 

Keyes said he would introduce a model for redirecting people who need healthcare to treatment facilities “in cases where a pre-existing mental or physical condition exists, such as a detoxing or medically ill defendant.” In an email he said that “booking will refuse to accept prisoners until they have received proper medical attention.”

Keyes also said he plans to implement a policy requiring the jail to guarantee that prescriptions are renewed within a week. And he would require classification officers to administer a psychosocial and medical assessment before prisoners are housed, to ensure that those in high-risk categories would be diverted to the medical floor.  

Beyond these reforms, Keyes said he wants to make sure fewer people end up in jail in the first place. 

He said he would work with the local district attorney’s office to advocate for an end to cash bail. And he wants to change the way sheriff’s deputies handle certain low-level offenses so that they arrest fewer people. 

This would take the form of giving verbal warnings or issuing citations instead, he said. For instance, he pointed out that when an officer stops someone for a traffic violation, like a broken tail light, sheriffs in other jurisdictions have partnered “with garages to get the cars fixed so that person doesn’t have to go to court.” He pointed to other minor offenses, including shoplifting and possession of less than two ounces of marijuana, as ones where he would consider implementing such strategies.

Advocates have also been frustrated by Waybourn’s refusal to consider compassionate release for incarcerated people during the pandemic, especially given that jails are known hotspots for the novel coronavirus. “With COVID, Sheriff Waybourn has not made any changes to reduce the amount of people incarcerated by releasing people with minor offenses or those who are the most vulnerable,” said Mata. “And that’s something that needs to happen immediately.” Keyes told the Political Report that he believes in compassionate release for people who are high risk. 

One of the biggest contrasts between the candidates, though, has emerged on another critical issue in Tarrant County: immigration.

During his run for sheriff in 2015, Waybourn said he was opposed to sanctuary cities and wanted deputies to work alongside ICE to apprehend undocumented immigrants. After taking office, he entered into a 287(g) agreement with the agency, which allows local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration law. 

During a community meeting in 2018, Waybourn justified the decision by saying his department was “not enforcing immigration laws on the street. We’re going after the child molester, we’re going after the murder suspect.” But last year, the bigotry underlying Waybourn’s immigration policies became clear when he called undocumented immigrants in custody “drunks” who will “run over your children” during a White House event. 

Jonathan Guadian, a member of ICE Out of Tarrant, a coalition of organizations including United Fort Worth and RAICES, said Waybourn has actually used 287(g) to target undocumented immigrants arrested for low-level offenses, like marijuana possession. “We were finding that many of the people arrested … were immediately handed over to ICE before being issued charges from public administrators like judges,” Guadian said. “They weren’t even getting their day in court to dispute the charge.”

Keyes has committed to revoking the 287(g) agreement, which he says has created mistrust between the undocumented population and law enforcement. “If they’re victims, how much less likely are they to come forward if they believe they or a loved one are going to be deported?” he asked.

Immigration rights advocates nationwide are pushing sheriffs to cut off all sorts of modes of cooperation with ICE, though in Texas they are also challenging a state law called SB4 that requires sheriffs to assist the agency in certain ways. In spite of SB4, the 287(g) program remains voluntary in Texas. 

Tarrant County may be part of a burgeoning trend of criminal justice reform becoming an issue in sheriff’s elections, according to Emily M. Farris, an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University.

“Over the last decade there’s been this progressive reform movement in district attorney’s offices,” Farris said. “We see folks elected to DA offices who have reform ideas and make real change. It’s interesting to parallel that with sheriffs and think, ‘Are we seeing similar types of candidates turn up in sheriffs offices?’” 

Farris noted that a key difference between both offices is that DAs can be elected after serving as public defenders or holding a variety of other jobs within the legal system. Sheriffs, on the other hand, more often have a background in law enforcement. “If you’re going to be an officer you’ve bought into certain ideas of what the criminal justice system is,” Farris said. “The range is much more narrow. But [Keyes], I think, is on the end of pushing what that range is.”

The post Will Texas Democrats’ Gains Topple a Trumpian Sheriff? appeared first on Bolts.

As President Trump cheered this summer for a harsh response to Black Lives Matter, Bob Gualtieri, the Republican sheriff of Florida’s populous Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), helped ensure that protesters arrested at a demonstration would be denied bail by spinning a story that the chief judge later called misleading.

After the mass shooting in Parkland in 2018, Gualtieri was chairperson of a state commission investigating it that ended up recommending armed teachers in schools, an action he staunchly defended. 

And amid legal challenges to Florida sheriffs’ policies of detaining people for ICE, Gualtieri helped design a new arrangement for sheriffs to circumvent legal concerns and keep assisting the federal agency. 

These activities have made Gualtieri a cause célèbre for the national right. He was named Sheriff of the Year by the National Sheriffs’ Association in 2019; in 2020 he was appointed to Trump’s commission on policing.

But they have also made Eliseo Santana, a longtime employee of the sheriff’s office who is running as the Democratic nominee, intent on defeating him on Nov. 3.

“The current sheriff is the poster child for the Trump administration,” Santana told me this week. Gualtieri also presided over the Florida Sheriffs Association over the last year.

In a Q&A with The Appeal: Political Report, Santana denounced many of Gualtieri’s emblematic stances. He explained he was “horrified” by the sheriff’s proposal to arm teachers and more broadly called on the state to revisit the new mandate for schools to have armed officers. He said he opposed the state’s “Stand Your Ground” statute, which Gualtieri invoked in 2018 to justify his decision to not arrest Michael Drejka, a white man who fatally shot a Black man after confronting him over a parking spot. And he pledged to terminate Pinellas County’s existing contracts with ICE, including the county’s membership in the agency’s 287(g) program, which authorizes sheriff’s deputies to act like federal immigration agents.

“I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community,” he said when asked about his views on collaborating with ICE.

Santana’s platform goes beyond ending policies that have put Gualtieri on the national map, though. He outlined decarceral goals that are still relatively rare to hear from sheriff’s candidates.

He made the case that fewer people should be booked into the jail. “An arrest can lead to greater insecurity, and with greater insecurity we have higher levels of crimes and violence,” he said.

He said he would set a presumptive standard of not arresting people for some low-level offenses like driving on a suspended license or simple drug possession, instead issuing them a warning or a citation for which they have to appear in court. Sheriff’s deputies make arrests at their discretion. Further north in Florida, Gadsden County Sheriff Morris Young has drawn national attention for his policies of minimizing arrests; some sheriffs elsewhere have also put in place cite-and-release policies.

Santana also explained he wants to shift some of the sheriff’s budget, both internally toward programs that aren’t premised on arresting people, and also to services and agencies outside of law enforcement that he says would be better equipped at handling mental health issues.  

Pinellas County is a narrowly divided county that voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 and then Trump in 2016, before swinging back to supporting Democrats in the 2018 elections for governor and U.S. Senate. Because of a law that the state’s Republican Party passed last year, all of Florida’s elections this fall will exclude residents from voting  who have not been able to pay off their court debt linked to felony convictions.

The interview was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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You have stated in a candidate questionnaire that: “We need to re-allocate resources away from community domination and towards community service.” What do you mean by this?

When we have a response model, when the police is called on by 911, and they respond to a situation, they are imposing themselves as an outside force. If we were in a life and death situation, that would be a very important response. But the majority of calls for help are not that extreme. Often, they’re based on some kind of mental illness crisis, drug abuse, or family disturbance. The majority of our resources and funding has been for that rapid response—take care of the situation and then leave—whereas I see community policing as an essential element. It is imperative that we have a peace officer get to know the neighborhood, and instead of being reactive to a situation that has become a crime, they can be proactive. So that’s the reallocating of the funds—from building a tank, getting machine guns, having a bulletproof vest, and then going in there controlling the situation, arresting somebody, and taking them away. We need to move away from that model.

When you speak of reallocation, are you only thinking of shifting funds to other law enforcement programs? Would you also favor steering funds toward programs that operate outside of law enforcement & the sheriff’s office? 

As sheriff, I am responsible for the well being and safety of people within Pinellas County. It is not to arrest people; my responsibility is to keep everyone safe. If I see that there is a need to address a core issue, and by redirecting my funds toward that I see a direct reduction in crime and in the population of the jail, I’d rather spend that money at the front end than at the hind end.

So what comes to mind right now in Pinellas as needing more funding for community services that are not in the law enforcement umbrella? For instance, programs are being set up in some places for civilian departments to respond to 911 calls involving issues relating to mental health or homelessness, rather than law enforcement officers. Is that something you’d like to see?

Absolutely. I will build up the necessary support to back that from the municipalities and the county. When you have a call going through 911, we need to be able to screen it, to see if the person calling is asking because their child has a mental crisis. We need to have a specialist that can handle that type of a situation right off the bat and not a law enforcement officer whose only training is to arrest and to take people in.

If we’re able to spend this money at the front end and get people the help they need without incarcerating them, it’s not just saving some money, it’s also keeping people out of jail.

Let’s talk more about reducing the jail: There’ve been calls to reduce incarceration around the country, of course, and often people look at the role of prosecutors. What could you from the office of the sheriff accomplish in that regard?

Individual deputies have the ability, when they confront minor level infractions, of forgetting about it and giving a verbal warning, or doing a citation to have them appear before court, or arresting the individual. As sheriff, I set the direction on how that is going to happen. When there is a minor infraction that is not going to lead to a threat to our community, I do not want somebody to be arrested and taken to jail. So that will leave two alternatives, up to the individual officer: Either they’ll give out a citation for appearance, or a verbal warning. 

When we take somebody out of the community and arrest them, and put them in jail for two or three days until they see the magistrate, if they have a job it is very likely they just lost it, and when they apply for another job, they have to list that they’ve been arrested and that makes it very difficult for them to find additional work. An arrest can lead to greater insecurity, and with greater insecurity we have higher levels of crimes and violence. 

What policies would you put in place to have clear standards of not arresting people for lower level offenses, given that moments of individual discretion can feed inequality in terms of who benefits from that second chance and who does not.

It comes with training. When you leave something to the discretion of an individual, then their own biases, whether they know about them or not, come into play. And so it is important that when we give them this ability of choice, we also give them the training to be able to recognize what they carry with them. I will be putting in body cameras. It will allow me as this ultimate supervisor to see that they are doing the protocol and applying it equally to all the individuals. 

Again in the interest of identifying how you would narrow the possibility for arrest, are there specific types of behavior for which you would set a presumption of non-arrest? For instance, I’m thinking of cases of simple drug possession, or behaviors tied with homelessness.

Yes to all of what you said. One of the things is when somebody is driving and they do not have a driver’s license, or have an expired tag. 

And, depending upon the infraction, like with homelessness or drugs, give the deputy the ability of doing a referral to the proper professional that would be able to assist them and resolve some of these issues, so they’re not a repetitive thing.

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You’ve talked about training. One problem that’s continually exposed is that rules only go so far if there’s a culture of impunity or lack of accountability. So what can you do as sheriff to make sure that these rules have any teeth and consequences? For instance, what can you do to ensure you are not hiring people with a history of misconduct?

The deep cultural change within the agency occurs from the very top. I will follow up on this situation and make sure that every single officer knows that this is my values, this is what I would do and they have to act accordingly. The body camera is essential to give me some of that feedback. And it’s not just making sure that we screen and eliminate those that come with baggage, we also need to have the training process be reflective about values. If the training officer has extreme biases, every new person coming in is going to have that bias.

Would you be in favor of creating a civilian review board with an oversight role over the sheriff’s department and with independent powers like those of issuing a subpoena to the sheriff’s department if they choose to?

Absolutely. It is beyond necessary. The civilian review board, someone that has full access to all of the records and all of the information pertaining to what we’re looking at, is essential. 

Another aspect of reducing the jail population, beyond reducing arrests, is what happens once people are booked in jail. Do you feel like the pretrial policies of the county are appropriate at present? How can you as sheriff change pretrial detention?

The system that we have is attacking people that are not economically well. When you have no credit, when you have no asset, then you have to have cash to be able to bond out. If you do not have the money, then you’re held hostage in the jail until a family member or somebody comes up with the money to let you go. And that to me is offensive, it’s something that needs to be eliminated. I do not want to have somebody be in jail because they’re poor. That comes from the state legislators, and also with different courts. So I would be coordinating with them to eliminate that so we have less people detained in precourt processes that are not a threat to our community. But even more than that, let’s stop arresting people that don’t need to be in jail.

When the pandemic began, county officials made a concerted effort to reduce the jail population by releasing people on their own recognizance, and also arresting fewer people. Do you think policies like that should be extended to non-pandemic times?

The process that we have now should continue. Obviously the people that were released, they didn’t need to be in jail, they were not a threat to our community. And after the pandemic, they’re still not a threat to our community, and they don’t need to be in jail. 

It took a crisis to be able to get people to wake up and reduce our jail population. But it’s always been a crisis. It’s just that they had not been aware of it.

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Your opponent led a commission on the Parkland shooting, and among its recommendations was to enable arming teachers as a form of school protection. What is your position on that? 

I was horrified. And then he lobbied the state legislature so that they would pass a law saying that every single school in the state of Florida has to have an armed individual within the school. And that is law as we speak. When we have an armed law enforcement officer in a school environment, it is minorities that are impacted greatly by having more arrests, and the school-to-jail pipeline becomes even more of a reality. I will hand pick the school resource officers, the deputies that will be assigned to the schools, to make sure that they have the right mindset. They will have to take the law enforcement hat off and provide services that have nothing to do with arresting our young men and women that are there. It’s mandated by the state that we have to have an officer, so this for me is the best option to comply with the law.

Some places around the country responded to the Black Lives Matter movement this summer by removing such school resource officers from schools. You are stressing it’s a state mandate, but would you want to see the state revisit that mandate and rethink their role?

Absolutely, I would definitely welcome that. 

I want to ask you about another law: Florida has a so-called Stand Your Ground statute, and Sheriff Gualtieri invoked it in not arresting Michael Drejka in 2018. Do you think that he made the right decision given state law, and do you think that law should remain in place at all or would you favor the state repealing it?

When you have a sheriff that uses a law to justify a murder of an individual, then obviously that law is not written properly. We don’t need that law. The way it’s being used is justifying murder by certain people. But even people that want “Stand Your Ground” thought that his decision not to arrest that individual was wrong, so it’s beyond the law. 

Sheriff Gualteri has also championed local cooperation with ICE. He helped design a new form of agreement for ICE to pay sheriffs for immigrants they detain and turn over. Separately, Gualtieri has joined ICE’s 287(g) program, which enables deputies to fulfill some of the capacities of federal immigration agents. If elected sheriff, would you maintain your office in either of these relationships?

Those contracts will immediately be ended. I will not have my deputies be agents of ICE. I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community. These types of agreements are hurting our community, are destroying the family, and it’s anti-American. I am going to advocate strengthening our families, keeping our community safe and eliminating this type of agreement that makes our deputies ICE agents. 

In 2018, Florida legislators passed a constitutional amendment that expanded the right to vote to most people who complete their felony sentence. Last year, state Republicans adopted a law to require repayment of court debt before people’s voting rights are restored. What is your reaction to the resulting situation? After all, the people affected won’t be able to vote in your own election.

Our state legislators, led by the majority Republicans, have betrayed the will of the people. I as a citizen voted to make sure that they’re able to have the rights restored. And for them to turn around and negate that is a betrayal of the will of the people, and I will personally make them accountable, the legislators, when I go to the ballot box on November the third.

If you’re elected sheriff, people detained in the jail for misdemeanors or pretrial will still retain the right to vote. What will you do to ensure that they can exercise their voting rights, and are you going to allow groups access to the jail to help register people or give them information about their rights? 

Absolutely. I am a member of the League of Women Voters, and I served as the vice president for the League of Women Voters in this county for several years. That’s my core value. If somebody is in a jail facility, and they have not been convicted, and it’s Election Day, they have full rights to be able to vote, and we will see whatever we need to do to ensure that they’re able to cast their vote.

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Explore the Political Report’s coverage of other prosecutor and sheriff elections in Florida this year.

The post The Sheriff Candidate Who Is Challenging “The Poster Child for the Trump Administration” appeared first on Bolts.

When Keybo Taylor started working as a narcotics detective in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in 1986, the suburban county northeast of Atlanta was more than  90 percent white, and fewer than 2 percent of the residents were Hispanic.  

In the coming decades, though, Gwinnett transformed into a majority-nonwhite county. The change was driven by Latinxs; in the 2018 midterms, Gwinnett was required by federal law to offer ballots and other election materials in Spanish, becoming the first county in Georgia to help its residents vote in a language other than English. By 2019, the Hispanic population had reached more than 20 percent.

That change has made the county a focal point for federal immigration agents. Sheriff Butch Conway, who is retiring this year, has pushed a federal partnership with ICE called 287(g)  that has landed more Gwinnett immigrants in detention than any other county that isn’t on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now, after years of rising through law enforcement ranks, Taylor is running for Gwinnett County sheriff and the program is central to his campaign. Taylor has promised to end the office’s participation in 287(g), which is used to funnel undocumented people who are arrested, often for traffic violations and other non-violent crimes, into the nation’s deportation system. His Republican opponent, Lou Solis, is Conway’s chief deputy and is campaigning to keep the county in the program.

About 40 miles west, the sheriff’s race in Cobb County, another populous county in the Atlanta suburbs, includes the same dynamic. Republican incumbent Neil Warren wants to continue 287(g), while Democratic candidate Craig Owens has promised to withdraw from it. 

These races are mirroring other sheriff elections where immigration played out as a central issue—including in the Georgia primaries in June, which saw the Athens sheriff lose his re-election bid—and communities have used local electoral organizing to curtail ICE’s reach.

Ending 287(g) contracts with ICE would shake the federal agency’s grip on Cobb and Gwinnett and serve as a milestone for immigrant rights. “We’re not a border community, but we see the impact of ICE on a daily basis,” said Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, a nonprofit organization in Gwinnett. “Family separation has been happening right here in Gwinnett for a really long time,” she added, referring to the federal agency’s decade-plus presence in the sheriff’s department.

But ICE is already threatening to retaliate, even as advocates like Mahmood are intent on pushing the next sheriffs to also end other forms of ICE cooperation. 

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For Taylor, “it is the human factor of what 287(g) does” that troubles him. He said the program erodes trust in law enforcement, especially in immigrant communities, and he was concerned about the department engaging in profiling. 

Conway entered Gwinnett’s sheriff’s department into a 287(g) agreement with ICE in 2009, after Cobb became the first Georgia county to do so in 2007. The program authorizes and trains local deputies to act on behalf of federal immigration agents, helping ICE identify, detain, and deport undocumented arrestees.

The program has been sold by Conway and Solis as a way of getting violent criminals off the street and out of the country, even though data has historically shown that people who commit violent crimes make up a negligible fraction of the number that ICE has detained. 

In a phone interview, Taylor pointed to the total number of 287(g) detainers ICE has sought in Gwinnett during the Trump administration. “There’s a jump,” he said. Those numbers have risen from 547 in 2016 to more than 2,000 each of the last three years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University that requests and analyzes federal data and publishes it online. Taylor also pointed to the lack of data supporting the notion that the program is a valid public safety tool.

The end result, Taylor said: “There’s all kinds of crimes being committed in these neighborhoods that are not being reported because people are afraid they’re going to be deported as well.”

Owens, the challenger in Cobb County, told The Appeal: Political Report that 287(g) “often turns into profiling, looking at Africans, Latinos, Muslims and other immigrants. It causes all types of problems, is expensive to maintain and I don’t see why the county should be involved in it.” His opponent, Warren, did not reply to a request for comment.

TRAC has historically compiled detailed data for the hundreds of thousands of detainers ICE has sought from law enforcement departments across the nation every year. But in 2016, ICE began withholding much of that information. Now the database only has aggregate numbers of detainers, without information on individuals and the circumstances that led to their arrest. TRAC’s resultant lawsuit against ICE is ongoing, said Susan B. Long, the project’s co-director. But the organization’s data between 2003 and 2015 shows that, out of 14,659 detainers ICE requested in Gwinnett, 5,520 were for people who were not convicted of a crime and 2,816 were for people arrested for traffic offenses. Most of the rest were for people charged with nonviolent crimes such as DUI, shoplifting, “fraud – false statement,” and “failure to appear.” 

All told, that’s 92 percent of all the people ICE asked Gwinnett to hand over to them. Violent crimes, such as assault, robbery, and murder, accounted for less than 8 percent of the total. 

When asked about the rise in ICE detainers since 2017, Solis said, “That’s an ICE, presidential policy.” Unwilling to discuss the data, he told an anecdote about three men who he said were undocumented immigrants and were arrested several weeks ago for stabbing and killing a teenager. “Those are three people locked up. Those are the things we’re going after. After they do their sentence in the U.S., they can be deported,” he said. 

When confronted with data showing the low share of violent crimes among the thousands ICE had flagged over the years, Solis told an anecdote about letting two undocumented people go after they were arrested for driving without a license. Finally, when asked whether data is the best way to determine the program’s effectiveness, he said, “That’s your opinion.” 

Solis also said the department’s agreement with ICE did not allow him to release numbers or data from the program, or even speak in general terms about them.

The large numbers of people caught up in deportations after getting arrested for driving without a license—an arrestable offense in Georgia—have led community organizations like the Asian American Advocacy Fund to push the state legislature to legalize driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, said Mahmood. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have this in place. 

Mahmood’s organization has requested arrest data from the 287(g) program from Gwinnett, but she said “they’ve not been forthcoming. … They don’t want information to be accessible.” Her organization is offering voters information on sheriff candidates that focuses on 287(g) in Korean, Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, and Bangla. 

Solis also told the Political Report that ending 287(g) would bring negative consequences in the form of ICE retaliation. The deputy sheriff said he met with ICE Atlanta field office director Thomas P. Giles several months ago. “[He] told me if they’re thrown out, they will assign five senior agents to Gwinnett and target businesses, job sites, and apartments.” He said ICE would then deport whoever they find, and not just those they are seeking. “There are a lot of hard workers, staying out of trouble. It’s not right,” said Solis. 

ICE did not respond to requests for comment.

A similar event occurred in North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County in 2018, after Garry McFadden defeated the incumbent sheriff and ended 287(g). ICE immediately launched raids  resulting in at least 200 arrests statewide, mostly of people with no criminal charges or convictions. These events were revealed graphically to a national audience in the recently released Netflix documentary “Immigration Nation.” 

Solis repeated the retaliation warning in a recent virtual debate with Taylor. Afterward, Taylor said, “It’s almost like an ultimatum: either I cooperate with ICE or I’m going to be responsible for what they do in my neighborhoods,” he said. “I take issue with them conducting raids simply because I refuse to participate in 287(g),” he added. “At the end of the day, I still won’t participate.” 

ICE retaliation against local officials is not unusual, according to Oliver Merino, who in 2018 was a Mecklenburg-area community activist and now works at the Washington, D.C.-based Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “One of the things we’ve seen over the last few years is, even when communities end partnerships, it’s been the federal government—ICE—that steps in to almost force them to maintain the relationship,” said Merino. 

What’s more, Merino said, ending 287(g) doesn’t stop ICE and local sheriffs from other forms of collaboration, such as sharing information regarding arrestees and continuing to honor ICE detainers, which are requests sent by ICE asking that local law enforcement keep detaining people beyond their scheduled release. “One thing we’ve learned is [to ask] … What happens next?” he said. 

Georgia sheriffs can decide whether to comply with these requests, and state organizers have targeted this form of discretionary cooperation as well.

Taylor has not committed to cutting ties with ICE in Gwinnett County beyond ending the 287(g) program. He suggested that his department would still work with ICE if he were elected. “I still believe people committing major crimes, if they’re here in the country illegally, they shouldn’t be here anymore,” he said. “ICE should be notified and then they should be deported.”

Owens, the Cobb challenger, committed to not honor ICE detainers in a candidate questionnaire published by the ACLU of Georgia. In his interview with the Political Report, he noted that federal policies enable other forms of cooperations, such as ICE’s Secure Communities program.

Merino pointed out that Black Lives Matter protests have drawn renewed focus on the broad relationships between local government spending, law enforcement, and social programs. “You hear that getting rid of 287(g) will strengthen the relationships between immigrant communities and police,” he said. “But one thing we understand through Black Lives Matter is that trust has never existed in Black communities and communities of color. … Even if 287(g) ends, there’s more work to be done locally to make communities feel safe.”

This article has been updated with information about Owens’ position on detainers.

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