Local DAs like Willis have become a key GOP target this year, as Republicans go after prosecutors who they think are standing in the way of their political or policy ambitions. New laws in Georgia and Texas give courts and state officials more authority to discipline DAs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the GOP’s presidential nomination, has over the last 18 months removed two Democratic prosecutors from office, angry over their policies like not prosecuting abortion. 

The presidential election is also pulling sheriffs into its orbit. Far-right sheriffs have allied with election deniers, using local law enforcement to amplify Trump’s lies about 2020, ramp up investigations, and even threaten election officials. One such sheriff, Pinal County’s Mark Lamb, is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, leaving his office open. Over in Texas, Tarrant County (Fort Worth) Sheriff Bill Waybourn inspired a new task force that will be policing how people vote while he runs for reelection next year.

With roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the 2024 ballot, voters will weigh in on county offices throughout the nation next year, settling confrontations over the shape of local criminal legal systems while also choosing the president and Congress.

Bolts today is launching its coverage with our annual overview of which counties will hold such races and when: Find our full list here.

Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors and Sheriffs in 2024?

Learn whether your county is hosting a prosecutor or sheriff race next year.

These offices often get overshadowed since the criminal legal system is so decentralized, but that’s also what makes these offices so powerful: DAs exert a great deal of discretion within their jurisdiction, choosing what cases to prosecute and how harshly, as do the sheriffs who run their county jails like fiefdoms. 

Most of the counties choosing their prosecutors and sheriffs in 2024 last elected these officials in 2020, a tumultuous year defined by the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and amplified attention to racial injustice.

Many candidates broke the traditional mold of law-and-order campaigning that year, making the case instead that punitive practices haven’t delivered on safety even as they’ve ballooned prisons. Reform-minded prosecutors were elected or reelected in the counties that contain Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Tucson, and Ann Arbor, among others; voters also elected some new sheriffs who interrupted immigration detention. But progressives fell short in high-profile races in the contain Houston, Detroit, Fort Worth, and Phoenix.

Those offices are all back on the ballot in 2024. Criminal justice reformers are defending more incumbents than ever but also hope to gain some new ground where they’ve faltered in the last cycle, with the future prospect of policies that would ramp incarceration up or down on the line.

To kick off our coverage of criminal justice in 2024’s local elections, here is an early guide to storylines to watch.

1. The reform-minded prosecutors seeking second terms

Los Angeles County’s size (ten million residents) and the tensions around George Gascón’s reelection bid are enough to make LA the marquee DA race of 2024. After Gascón ousted his tough-on-crime predecessor in 2020, he faced an internal revolt from staff prosecutors unwilling to implement his reforms and survived several efforts by his critics to force a recall. (One of the loudest champions for recalling Gascón, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, was ousted by voters in 2022.)

Gascón, who has dubbed himself the “godfather of progressive prosecutors,” now faces a very crowded field to secure a second term. While he’s also faced criticism from the left for not delivering on some of his promises, his opponents are largely running to his right, promising to roll back his sentencing reforms.

Other first-term progressive incumbents are also up for reelection. They include former labor organizer José Garza in Texas’ Travis County (Austin), Eli Savit in Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Deborah Gonzalez in Georgia’s Clarke County (Athens), and Laura Conover, who went from protesting the death penalty as a youth activist to promising to never seek it as the chief prosecutor of Pima County (Tucson).

Police groups have taken note and are already involved in these races. In Austin, police groups have tried to drum up complaints against Garza, who used his first term to prosecute police officers accused of violence, breaking with usual norms of impunity in a way that has made him a target for the national right. Last week, though, Garza dismissed the felony assault charges he had brought against 17 officers for their actions against protesters in 2020. 

Other new prosecutors who’ve clashed with police include Mike Schmidt in Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), whose challenger Nathan Vasquez has a closer relationship with the police, and Mimi Rocah in New York’s Westchester County. Rocah, who won her DA race in the wake of a major police scandal, vacated convictions that were tied to the testimony of a disgraced police officer. She won’t seek reelection next year, sparking an open race.

2. Clashing visions of public safety 

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is retiring in 2024, eight years after ousting Chicago’s chief prosecutor and starting to implement some reforms. So far, the Democrats running to replace her are walking a line between promising to keep Foxx’s changes and vowing to work more closely with law enforcement; a GOP candidate, meanwhile, has denounced Foxx for turning the office into a “social service agency instead of the prosecuting arm of the people.” 

However hyperbolic, that statement underscores the clashing visions of public safety in many of these prosecutorial races. Reform-minded candidates often make the case for strengthening a broader array of public services as an answer to crime, while their critics want to keep the focus on the more conventional tools of policing and incarceration. 

In Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati), for instance, Republican incumbent Melissa Powers hopes to prevail in a county that’s trending leftward by stroking fears about the effects of a Democratic takeover. She recently said her loss would turn Hamilton County into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” naming two of the nation’s big cities with the highest share of Black residents. To prevail in November, Powers would need to perform strongly in the county’s populous suburban areas, which are far whiter than its urban core of Cincinnati.

But many of next year’s most intriguing elections will be decided within the Democratic Party. Incumbents with a record of fighting local criminal justice reforms, and who beat back progressive challengers in 2020 or 2022, may choose to seek new terms in 2024.

These incumbents include: San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, who has embraced harsher policies and dropped police prosecutions since replacing Chesa Boudin, a progressive who was recalled in 2022; Harris County (Houston) DA Kim Ogg, a fierce critic of local bail reforms whose clashes with reform-minded Democrats have escalated this year; Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, known for the frequency with which he seeks death sentences; Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has defended punitive practices toward minors; and Albany County DA David Soares, who is a leading voice among New Yorkers demanding more rollbacks to the state’s recent bail reforms. 

Some of these races will be slow to take shape since the filing deadlines are still months away. But in Houston and Cleveland, the primaries are already around the corner. On March 5, Ogg faces Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office whose platform is more muted than some of Ogg’s prior opponents but who has support from some of her progressive critics. On March 19, O’Malley faces law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn, who has pledged to never seek the death penalty and decrease pretrial detention. 

Bolts will keep an eye on these and many more races next year, with prosecutor elections still taking shape all around the nation, from Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) and Maricopa County (Phoenix) to Milwaukee and Honolulu.

3. Can criminal justice reformers even run for local prosecutor in certain red states?

When DeSantis suspended Tampa prosecutor Andrew Warren over policy disagreements in 2022, Bolts writer Piper French pondered how to take future Florida elections seriously in light of that abrupt move. “What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss?” she asked. Since then, Warren’s DeSantis-appointed replacement has rolled back some of his reforms, and DeSantis has since fired a second prosecutor, Monique Worrell, in Orlando. (Worell is still contesting her ouster in state court.)

Nearly all Floridians will vote on their prosecutor in 2024. That means that in Hillsborough (Tampa) and Orange (Orlando) counties, residents will get to weigh in for the first time since DeSantis summarily dismissed the officials they’d elected in their last local elections. 

But the atmosphere created by DeSantis will make it tricky for there to be real policy choice in those elections. In Tampa, Orlando, and everywhere else in the state, candidates will know that their win may be overturned by the governor if they run on a vision that differs from his.

A similar dynamic exists, to a lesser extent, in Georgia, where the GOP adopted a new law that makes it a removable offense for local DAs to propose certain policies that progressives have prized, as well as in Texas, where some DAs are facing similar efforts to oust them. Conservative critics of Garza, Austin’s DA, filed a complaint seeking to remove him from office this month over his approach to prosecuting lower-level offenses.

4. Who will speak up against gruesome jail conditions?

Aggravated by routinely poor health care, jail deaths are a crisis all over the country—including in states such as Georgia, Michigan, Texas, and West Virginia that will be electing all of their sheriffs in 2024. 

Sheriff Bill Waybourn, for instance, has overseen a startling string of deaths in Tarrant County, Texas, though that didn’t stop the Republican incumbent from narrowly securing reelection in 2020. 

Patrick Moses, one of Waybourn’s two Democratic challengers next year, promised to step up investigations into jail deaths when he launched his bid last week. “I view the 60 in-custody deaths at the Tarrant County Jail since 2018 as 60 individual reasons to run for office,” he says on his new website. 

Other counties with sheriff races are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for conditions in their local jails, including Fulton County (Atlanta) and parts of South Carolina. 

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat, a Democrat, is facing heavy fire and calls for his resignation due the many people who’ve died under his custody in Atlanta and due to his flailing response. Asked by Atlanta News First last week if Labat should step down, the chair of the county board pointed to the upcoming elections: “In the final analysis, it’ll be up to the voters come 2024.”

5. The rise of the far-right sheriffs

After Kansas’ most populous county, Johnson County, voted for Joe Biden by eight percentage points in 2020, Republican Sheriff Calvin Hayden went on a crusade claiming that elections are marred by widespread fraud and ramping up investigations, echoing Trumpian conspiracies.

Hayden is just one of the many sheriffs who have linked up with election deniers and other far-right organizations, using the power of the badge to push their agenda. And now he’s already facing an opponent in what’s likely to be a tough reelection bid next year. 

Many sheriffs with similar politics represent far redder territory, though recent examples show they may still lose against fellow Republicans or independents. The GOP primary to replace Mark Lamb in conservative Pinal County will be especially noteworthy if it yields a new sheriff who won’t see his role as propping up so-called constitutional sheriffs all around the nation. 

6. Immigrants’ rights will define more sheriff elections

Several Southern counties in 2020 interrupted their history of anti-immigration policies. In Charleston County, South Carolina, and Cobb and Gwinnett counties, Georgia, voters elected Democratic sheriffs who terminated their counties’ so-called 287(g) contracts—agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to arrest and detain people they suspect to be undocumented immigrants.

These sheriffs are all up for reelection in 2024, all in counties that may be competitive in a general election.

It may be hard for immigrants’ rights activists to break up more of these contracts through the polling booth in 2024, though. Per Bolts’ analysis, there are almost 90 counties presently in the 287(g) program that hold sheriff’s races, but they’re mostly in staunchly conservative areas. The exceptions are largely in Florida, due to a recent law signed by DeSantis that mandates that sheriffs join 287(g) whatever their own preferences. Outside of Florida, only one Biden-carried county has a 287(g) contract and is voting for sheriff in 2024: Bill Waybourn’s Tarrant County. 

But collaboration with ICE extends far beyond 287(g). Many sheriffs rent out jail space to ICE, or seek out federal grants to police immigrants. And come 2024, sheriff races in Arizona—a border state with a long history of anti-immigrant practices—may be the central battleground for those debates, especially with yet another unpredictable election taking shape in Maricopa County. 

Home to Joe Arpaio, one of the nation’s most visible far-right politicians, Maricopa County in 2016 saw Democrat Paul Penzone oust Arpaio and end some of the county’s most aggressive practices against immigrants. But Penzone also severely disappointed immigrants’ rights activists by maintaining close ties with ICE and keeping federal agents in his local jails.

Penzone announced this fall that he’ll resign in January, making the race unpredictable at this stage. In early 2024, the county board will need to replace him with a new Democrat, who’d then decide whether to seek reelection; already in the running is Penzone’s 2020 Republican rival, Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy. In this county of 4.4 million, the race may present an opportunity for local immigrants’ rights activists to gain a stronger ally, though it also opens the door for one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies to swing back to the far right. 

7. The many other elections that will matter greatly for criminal justice policy 

Sheriffs and prosecutors are just slices of the vast institutional edifice that runs the nation’s criminal legal systems. In 2024, big cities such as Baltimore and San Francisco will elect their mayor—an office that often, though not always, exerts direct control over the police department.

Ten states will elect their attorneys general, a role with broad authority over law enforcement. At least 33 will elect supreme court justices, who’ll shape local policy and individual criminal cases. 

And all of these races are bound to be overshadowed by a presidential campaign likely to pit President Biden against his predecessor. Trump is again playing up a strongman image, proposing the death penalty over drug sales and outlining a vast deportation infrastructure for which the collaboration of local sheriffs could prove critical. 

The post The Thousands of Local Elections That Will Shape Criminal Justice Policy in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

When President Donald Trump ramped up his campaign against cities that adopt sanctuary policies to protect immigrants from ICE, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office found itself on the front lines.

Larry Krasner, a former public defender and civil rights lawyer who was elected DA in 2017, worked with the office of Mayor Jim Kenney to expand the city’s existing sanctuary protections. In 2018, they cut ICE’s access to a local law enforcement database. Within his office, Krasner instituted policies to curb immigration consequences such as deportation for some immigrants accused of crimes.

But Philadelphia officials and the Trump administration continued battling. The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain attacked the officials for their sanctuary policies, drawing a rebuke from Krasner, and the Department of Justice tried to withhold grant funding from the city. A judge struck down the attempt. Despite Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, cooperation with ICE still looms large in local politics, and it has emerged as a campaign issue in the DA election this year.

In the Democratic primary on Tuesday, Krasner faces Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor who is running with the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, Philadelphia’s police union. 

In a televised debate on May 5 hosted by the city’s NBC affiliate, the candidates sparred over ICE and a DA’s responsibility in upholding Philadelphia’s sanctuary status. 

“We want a prosecutor, not a social worker,” Vega said in the course of his answer.

“This is a sanctuary city,” Krasner said. “The mayor declared that.”

Whoever wins the Democratic primary will face Republican Chuck Peruto, who has also taken issue with Philadelphia’s sanctuary policies, in November.

“Worst case scenario, a lot of these measures get rolled back and we’re gonna see a spike in deportations again,” said Miguel E. Andrade, an activist and the former communications director of Philadelphia based immigrants’ rights group Juntos.  

In the May 5 debate, the two Democratic candidates were asked how they would use prosecutorial discretion regarding immigration laws. 

“We set up the first ever unit to make sure we could protect victims who are undocumented, witnesses we needed who are undocumented, but also in appropriate cases defendants whose criminal violation was minor but who faced unreasonably large consequences from immigration,” Krasner said. He noted that his office had helped break a 10-year contract “in which the city would immediately expedite information to ICE.”

Vega said in response that Krasner was harming the city “in terms of his dealing with undocumented people who have committed crime” by reducing charges on some immigrants who are “violent predators.” He added he would not share information with ICE regarding victims of crimes who may be immigrants. “Those people who are unleashed on my community, they are going to be prosecuted,” he added, “and if the federal government comes in and lends a helping hand, then so be it.” 

Asked in a follow-up if he would share information when ICE asks, Vega responded, “If it’s the information as to a defendant, yes.” He added, “But they don’t have to ask for that: That is in the computer banks of the police department.” 

“But if they want you to give it to them, you will?” the moderator asked once more. 

“Yeah, I have to, I have to follow the law,” Vega replied.

ICE does have robust data-gathering pipelines that penetrate sanctuary protections across the country. Law enforcement agencies put information such as biometrics and other data into networks that feed into ICE databases and alert the agency to information that it can use to target immigrants, such as people with outstanding orders of removal.

Still there are plenty of policies and decisions that local officials are making that limit the amount of data ICE is able to extract. Those are guardrails that new officials could lift. 

“Just because they have access to other databases doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do the work to limit their access,” said Andrade. “Why would you not … force ICE to use their own resources instead of Philadelphia municipal resources to do their dirty work for them?”

Vega’s campaign did not answer requests for comment on his views on immigration policy. The FOP, which has endorsed him, also did not reply to requests for comment.

Krasner moved to restrict the data that ICE can see soon after taking office. In August 2018, he worked with Mayor Kenney to block ICE from Philadelphia’s Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System (PARS). PARS is a database that records information about people arrested in the city. 

Through PARS, ICE was going after people arrested by the Philadelphia police who it suspected of breaking immigration laws, regardless of whether they ended up being accused or convicted of crimes. PARS does not list immigration status, but it does reveal whether an individual was born outside the United States. ICE is known to investigate foreign-born individuals caught in the nets of law enforcement as an alternative to knowing their legal statusa replacement, even though many foreign-born people are citizens or have legal status; movements in other places have tried to to stop law enforcement from asking about people’s birthplace or sharing that data. 

As of 2017, nearly 13 percent of Philadelphia’s population was born outside the United States. And the city’s ICE field office was arresting immigrants with no criminal convictions at a rate significantly higher than that of any other region. 

“Many immigrants are scared to participate in our criminal justice system because they are fearful that they or their loved ones will be deported,” the DA’s office said at the time to justify its decision to end PARS access. 

“Quite frankly, cooperating with ICE at this time makes our city less safe,” the statement added.

During his first term, Krasner also created an immigration counsel position in the DA’s office to protect some defendants from being deported as a result of a criminal conviction. 

The counsel’s job, as reported by WHYY in 2019, is to consider swapping charges and tailoring plea agreements to avoid triggering immigration consequences for some offenses including shoplifting, soliciting prostitution, or assault. 

Criminal convictions can prompt deportation proceedings, even for people with legal status. But whether they do will hinge on the sentence (jail terms can have immigration consequences if they last at least 365 days) and the exact charges prosecutors use. Most Pennsylvania theft statutes are grounds for deportation, for instance, but not all. This gives prosecutors the option to pursue charges and sentences that either shield noncitizens or threaten them with removal.

Krasner hired Caleb Arnold, an attorney who previously worked for an immigration law firm, to fill the role. When deciding whether to intervene in a case, Arnold weighs a number of factors, including the severity of the allegations, time spent in the U.S., dependent family members, and criminal records. 

High-level crimes like murder aren’t eligible for Arnold’s consideration. “When people are charged with low-level offenses and pose no risk to public safety, they should not face a threat of deportation,” Brandon Evans, Krasner’s campaign manager, said in an email exchange with The Appeal. 

Krasner said during his debate with Vega that “there are cases where it is appropriate for someone to be deported, because the crime is serious. And that’s fine.” 

Vega often draws a connection between his opponent’s approach to criminal justice and increased violence, pointing to the spike in shootings and homicides in Philadelphia in 2020. And during the debate, he did this in the course of his answer on ICE and immigration laws. “I’m here to protect people. You can’t even go to Macy’s on a Sunday morning without being raped,” he said. 

Evans said it would be “absurd” to suggest a link between the shootings and the DA’s sanctuary initiatives. “The office isn’t cutting plea deals where people charged with homicides receive misdemeanor convictions to avoid collateral consequences,” he said. 

Studies have shown that there is no detectable causal relationship between the presence of undocumented immigrant populations and crime.

And immigrants’ rights activists make the case that it is cooperation with ICE that endangers safety. Andrade fears that losing sanctuary protections could harm public safety as communication further breaks down between undocumented people and the police. 

Katia Pérez, an activist with Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive organization in the city, echoed those worries, mentioning her own experiences. Her mother was undocumented for the first eight years that she lived in the United States. And Pérez’s stepfather was abusive.

“The police weren’t called,” Pérez said. “She was afraid they would ask questions. And situations like that are not unique.” 

Pérez says Krasner is off to a great start. But she would like to see the DA’s office and other city officials push reform further.

“The threat of deportation should never be on the line,” Pérez said.

The post Philadelphia D.A. Candidates Debate ICE Cooperation Ahead of Election Day appeared first on Bolts.

Growing up in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in the northeastern Atlanta suburbs, Jonathan Zuñiga remembers the fear his parents felt driving to the grocery store.

In 2009, the Gwinnett County sheriff’s office, under Sheriff Butch Conway, started turning over hundreds of Latinx immigrants in its custody to ICE—including many who only landed in jail after police arrested them for minor traffic violations. Zuñiga says his parents, who are undocumented immigrants from Mexico, had to leave their construction jobs for lower-paying factory jobs that required less driving. But running errands continued to pose a threat.

“Driving even small amounts of time was unsafe,” Zuñiga said.

The county sheriff’s office was making these transfers because it had joined ICE’s 287(g) program, which allows local officers to directly enforce federal immigration policies, including screening immigration status and detaining residents until ICE takes custody. Gwinnett County operates one of the largest 287(g) programs in the country: this year, it ranks fourth in the nation for the number of ICE detainer requests, in which local jails hold people in custody longer in order to hand them over to federal agents. Detainers in Gwinnett peaked in 2012 and then steadily declined throughout Barack Obama’s second term as president. But they soared again after Donald Trump took office in early 2017 with new enforcement priorities, including having ICE arrest noncitizens more frequently for minor crimes. A Mother Jones investigation found that between 2017 and July 2019, the primary charge for nearly half of the people held for ICE at the Gwinnett County Jail was for driving without a license or another minor traffic violation.

But in November, voters in Gwinnett and nearby suburban Cobb County chose Democratic sheriffs for the first time in decades, electing candidates who made campaign promises to end the 287(g) programs. A Democratic candidate who opposed 287(g) also won in Charleston County, South Carolina; altogether these wins mirror a string of progressive sheriff victories in 2018 that were driven by immigration issues.

Cobb County’s longtime sheriff, Neil Warren, lost to challenger Craig Owens. In Gwinnett County, Sheriff-elect Keybo Taylor won with 57 percent of the vote against Republican candidate Lou Solis, the second-in-command to Conway, who didn’t seek re-election. In 2016, by contrast, Conway ran unopposed and won 97 percent of the vote.

That upset, and the emphasis on 287(g) as a central campaign issue in both counties, resulted in large part from the work of local immigrants’ rights organizers who have grown their operations under the Trump presidency and activated communities of color. Their organizing also contributed to Georgia electing a Democrat presidential candidate for the first time since 1992. 

Leading up to the November elections, Zuñiga joined Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) Action Network as a canvasser focused on the sheriff races in Gwinnett and Cobb counties. Working as part of the “Take Action, Get Power” coalition with Southerners on New Ground (SONG) Power, and Mijente, Zuñiga and other canvassers were able to reach more than 125,000 residences—primarily Latinx and Black voters—by door-knocking (with COVID-19 precautions), according to GLAHR. Their work paralleled groups like the Asian American Advocacy Fund, whose outreach helped to nearly double voter turnout among Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

Zuñiga found that many residents were aware of 287(g) but not of how to change it. “They didn’t know the formal name of that policy, but they knew what could happen if [you didn’t have] a license,” he said. “A lot of people thought it was something coming down from the federal level. They weren’t aware that changing a sheriff could actually change that policy.”

Founded nearly 15 years ago, GLAHR is the largest Latinx grassroots organization in the state. Under the Trump administration, GLAHR, SONG, and other long-established Georgia-based nonprofits have joined a nationwide trend of changing liberal activism by creating 501(c)(4) arms—organizations that are also exempt from federal income tax but can lobby and do political work—in order to be more aggressive political players, rather than solely focused on litigation, educational work, or providing services.

Kevin Joachin, an organizer with GLAHR Action Network, says the organization’s priority has become “building the political consciousness of our community”—helping inform Latinx residents about specific policies and their ability to change them at a scale that has little precedence in Georgia, particularly for a down-ballot race. That organizing began early in the election cycle; GLAHR lead organizer Carlos Medina says that activating Latinx voters for the sheriff primaries helped push Democratic candidates in both counties leftward, leading to promises to end the 287(g) program.

Zuñiga says he found that many Latinx and Black voters in the suburbs—particularly in the more rural areas of Cobb and Gwinnett counties—never before had an interaction with a canvasser, despite the influx of political spending and organizing that’s accompanied Georgia’s demographic change in recent years. “We try to get that small, little conversation with people because we feel like that actually matters,” Zuñiga said. 

Although Hillary Clinton won Gwinnett County in the 2016 presidential election, and Joe Biden won the county and state this year, more than a third of Latinxes in Georgia voted for Trump, according to exit polls. Canvassers with Take Action Get Power found that some Latinx voters in Gwinnett supported Solis for sheriff partially because of his Latinx identity. Joachin says GLAHR Action Network’s in-person approach was pivotal: Canvassers would see pro-Solis signs in some stores and talk to the owners or employees about Gwinnett’s high rates of deportations. The next time canvassers drove by, Joachin said, the signs were gone. Compared to hyperpolarized debates about presidential candidates, Zuñiga says he was able to have “more in-touch conversations [about the sheriff’s race] because it was something that was affecting their communities, and they could see that firsthand.”

SONG volunteer coordinator Tayleece Paul says door-knocking yielded contact or conversations with 32 percent of residences, versus just 2 percent with phone banking. Paul grew up in Gwinnett County and remembers a friend’s father who was deported through the 287(g) program. Many of the coalition’s canvassers met people who had similar experiences with the program, she says. “Each person had their own unique story.”

Joachin says that engaging the entire Latinx community—including those who cannot vote, like undocumented immigrants—is central to GLAHR Action Network’s strategy of empowerment. “We’re not always concerned if the person who we’re looking for is at home, because maybe their family member who is undocumented will benefit from the conversation by being included,” he said. “We’re not telling them to vote—that’s voter fraud—but what we’re doing is creating a culture of voting.”

Along with teenage and college-age Latinx people, who’ve become politically engaged around issues that affect their parents or family, undocumented community members in Gwinnett and Cobb have influenced the votes of others in their families or neighborhoods, and they’ve joined the movement as organizers. Gwinnett has an estimated 69,000 undocumented immigrants, and Cobb has a little more than half that, according to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute based on federal census data. “What definitely needs to be considered is the powerhouse that is the undocumented community mobilizing,” Joachin said.

For GLAHR Action Network, the focus now turns to ensuring the new sheriffs follow through with their promises to end cooperation agreements with ICE, and watching next year’s legislative session to see what kind of blowback from the Republican-controlled state legislature might emerge.

There’s also more that the sheriffs could do to stop cooperating with ICE. Even without 287(g) on the books, ICE can request detainers, seek access to jails, and rent detention space in collaboration with local sheriffs. Both Owens and Taylor have said they won’t work with ICE in those ways, though Taylor also told the Appeal in September that, if elected, his office would cooperate with ICE in cases involving “major crimes.” Medina says that GLAHR will be working to hold both sheriff’s offices accountable. “We’re also a lot more powerful now. I think no one can deny that,” Joachin said. “We’re going to be continuing to build power at the local level, knowing that ICE will still be in these areas, regardless if the county departments are collaborating with [them].”

Now, GLAHR is canvassing for the two U.S. Senate runoffs happening in Georgia next month. Joachin says it’s important to make sure the Biden administration’s immigration plans “don’t just involve negotiating with Republicans.”

“We need our demands to be fully heard, which is putting a moratorium on deportations and family separation, reuniting families and keeping them outside of detention, abolishing ICE,” he said. “We know from having these conversations with people at the doors that people are tired of compromise, of only having crumbs given to the community. … We can’t negotiate our parents, and we can’t negotiate our lives.”

Paul echoes the need for continuing to raise awareness about specific policies that sheriffs can change or influence. Beyond 287(g), the use of cash bail in pretrial detention and the criminalization of petty charges are on her list. “It’s not just about electing a new sheriff so that 287(g) can go away, because there’s still going to be a lot of atrocities that continue to happen so long as these policies stay in place,” she said.

Zuñiga believes the recent demonstration of Latinx organizing power is here to stay. “That comes down to people here actually living the experience of knowing what it’s like to be pulled over, and how immigration actually works here in the state,” he said. “You’re not just voting for what’s best for you and your family. You’re also voting for what’s best for your community.”

The post How Immigrant Communities Beat Back ICE and Helped Flip Georgia appeared first on Bolts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These same conversations are resonating far beyond New Jersey. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

This system has grave implications for immigration enforcement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explore other Political Report coverage of local cooperation with ICE.

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

The presidential race and control of the U.S. Senate is still in limbo at this moment, grabbing much of our collective attention. But when it comes to elections relevant to mass incarceration and criminal justice, Tuesday’s elections have already delivered major verdicts that will upend drug policy, immigration enforcement, and prosecutorial norms in significant chunks of the nation. 

Here’s what we know so far.

You can explore all of our coverage of these 2020 battlegrounds for criminal justice with our interactive tool.

A banner election against the war on drugs

Oregon voters approved a groundbreaking initiative to decriminalize drugs. This is something that no other state has done, and it could reset conversations around drug reform nationally. 

Inspired by policies implemented in Portugal, Oregon’s Measure 110 makes low-level drug possession a civil offense, punishable by a fine, rather than jail time. Zachary Siegel wrote for The Appeal: Political Report that the result marks “a momentous shift in favor of a public health-focused approach to substance use, and a turn away from longtime policies that incarcerate people.” Advocates warn more work is needed to reduce law enforcement and inequalities, and vow to press further around the country.

The movement to legalize marijuana made sweeping gains on Election Day as well, with four states passing referendums to allow recreational cannabis. 

These measures passed by double-digit margins in Arizona, Montana, and New Jersey, and by a smaller margin South Dakota. As a result, there are now 15 states, in addition to Washington, D.C., where marijuana is legal. 

But when it comes to making amends for racial injustice, Kaila Philo laid out in the Political Report, this year’s marijuana legalization measures vary. 

There’s more: Oregonians supported a measure to legalize psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic purposes, while Washington, D.C., mostly decriminalized psilocybin. And Mississippi legalized medical marijuana; its initiative succeeded despite lawmakers’ attempts to derail it by adding a stricter alternative measure to the ballot. 

Candidates for prosecutor also won elections on promises to implement far less punitive policies toward drugs. 

José Garza, who won the DA election in Travis County (Austin), Texas, vowed to overturn the county’s approach to substance use. “Using our resources to prosecute these offenses increases the likelihood that people will commit future crimes, and that makes our community less safe,” he told the Political Report in June. He has gone a step further than other progressives who have recently run for DA, extending their commitment to not prosecute drug possession to sales as well. Meanwhile, in Jefferson County, Colorado, Alexis King, a Democrat who flipped the DA’s office from the GOP on Tuesday, favors not prosecuting drug possession. “The criminal justice system has become the catchment basin for public health issues,” she told the Political Report. 

Mixed reforms on referendums that address mass incarceration and police accountability

In California, voters contended with a slew of other referendums concerning the criminal legal system. They rejected Proposition 20, a measure that would have rolled back past sentencing reforms and ramped up incarceration by reclassifying certain misdemeanors as felonies. 

They also turned down Proposition 25, a measure that divided criminal justice reform advocates on the issue of cash bail. Prop 25 would have upheld a 2018 law that eliminated the cash bail system and replaced it with algorithm-driven risk assessments. The bail bond industry opposed the measure, and in an unusual twist, so did many advocates. They warned that the new system would perpetuate racial disparities in pretrial detention, as Lauren Lee White reported. Some who shared this concern supported the measure anyway, calling it a step toward better reforms. 

Elsewhere, too, referendum results brought a mix of strides and setbacks on issues that can affect mass incarceration. 

Nevada passed Question 3, a measure that will make the parole process a bit easier. It changes the rules of the state’s Board of Pardons Commissioners by ending the mandate that the governor approve a pardon supported by a majority of the board, and addressing a backlog of requests. 

Oklahoma rejected Question 805, which would have prevented prosecutors who have charged someone with a nonviolent offense from seeking a harsher sentence based on the defendant’s prior nonviolent convictions. The measure was trying to build on other recent successful initiatives that have helped reduce the state’s record prison population. The measure’s failure will deny relief to Oklahomans who are serving staggeringly long sentences via such enhancements. 

In Kentucky, voters approved Marsy’s Law, a “victim’s rights” measure that 10 states have adopted despite criticism from the ACLU and others that it undermines due process. This could turn out to be a repeat of 2018, when Kentucky voters passed another version of Marsy’s Law but it was overturned by the state Supreme Court.

The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the ensuing protests pushed many city councils to put measures related to policing on the ballot. Bloomberg reports that in cities nationwide, from Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, to San Diego, voters approved plans to create police oversight boards, expand the powers of existing oversight bodies, divest from law enforcement, and impose requirements such as body cameras.

In Los Angeles, voters approved Measure J, a county-level ballot initiative that will “ redirect 10 percent of unrestricted county funds toward community investment,” as Piper French reported.

And in San Francisco voters approved Proposition E, overturning a law that required the city to maintain a minimum number of full-time police officers. 

California joins the wave of pushback against felony disenfranchisement 

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of citizens were newly able to vote this fall thanks to a wave of recent state reforms that have expanded the voting rights of people with felony convictions.

Throughout 2020, The Appeal talked to people impacted by these reforms who were looking to register to vote, or who helped bring them about.

California just added to this wave. Voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 17, a ballot initiative that restores the right to vote to anyone who is not presently incarcerated.

“This is a victory for democracy and justice,” Taina Vargas-Edmond, executive chair of the Yes On Prop 17 campaign and co-founder and executive director of Initiate Justice, an organization that has championed ending felony disenfranchisement, told the Political Report. “For far too long, Black and brown Californians have been excluded from our democracy.” 

California becomes the 19th state, alongside Washington D.C., to enfranchise all adult citizens who are not in prison. 

Read more from Kira Lerner and Daniel Nichanian about this ballot measure, and what’s next in the fight against felony disenfranchisement in California.

Progressives score major wins in DA and sheriff races—but suffer some setbacks as well

In recent years, elections for prosecutor and sheriff have upended criminal legal systems around the country. Fueled by local organizing, this shift has brought into power public defenders, civil rights attorneys, and other candidates who are running on reducing incarceration. 

This fall was no exception. 

Importantly, the full scale of the results is not yet available as of publication due to outstanding ballots in counties with some of the year’s most important prosecutorial races. But here’s what we know so far.

Progressives who vowed to fight mass incarceration win key prosecutorial races

In Austin and Orlando, José Garza and Monique Worrell each vowed during their campaigns to advance reforms and reduce the prison population. And on Tuesday, they each secured decisive victories against candidates who attacked them over these positions.

Garza, a former public defender who works as a labor and immigrants’ rights attorney, won in Travis County (Austin), Texas, four months after beating the incumbent DA in a heated Democratic primary. In the backdrop of Garza’s win is the intense organizing for decarceration and immigrants’ rights by Austin advocates who are vowing to keep him accountable. 

Garza’s own organizing background extends the streak of candidates like Larry Krasner who are upending long-held expectations of who can win a prosecutorial election, and on what platform. 

Worrell, a former defense attorney, prevailed in Florida’s Ninth Judicial District, home to Orange (Orlando) and Osceola counties, against Jose Torroella, an independent. She will replace Aramis Ayala, the prosecutor who did not seek re-election after clashing with state Republicans but who endorsed Worrell.

“Garza and Worrell were elected because their messaging around public health, public safety and the fact that we cannot prosecute and incarcerate our way out of society’s problems resonated with voters,” Tiffany Cabán, who lost the DA race in Queens in 2019 and has since worked with the Working Families Party to help progressives, told the Political Report in an email. 

Garza and Worrell will be joined by other progressive candidates who ran on similar platforms. 

In Oakland County, Michigan, Karen McDonald, a Democrat, prevailed on Tuesday over a former Republican prosecutor who defended punitive practices, 3 months after ousting a carceral incumbent in the Democratic primary. During the campaign, McDonald pledged to cut incarceration, not seek cash bail, and not invoke prior convictions as a way to increase sentences. In Colorado, Democrats Alexis King and Gordon McLaughlin won two DA races in populous suburban jurisdictions that include Jefferson and Larimer counties; they will flip these offices from GOP control. Their races featured clear contrasts on the role that a prosecutor should play in targeting the size of the jail population, and in the criminalization of lower-level offenses, as the Political Report laid out in September.

Elsewhere, reform candidates who won heated primaries this year were running unopposed in the general elections. Nov. 3 formalized their victories. In Arizona’s Pima County (Tucson), former public defender Laura Conover will replace a prosecutor who implemented punitive practices. In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, Alonzo Payne ousted a sitting DA in a primary and he emphasizes that fighting poverty is indispensable to ending mass incarceration. In New York’s Westchester County, Mimi Rocah won a primary against the backdrop of explosive reporting that the incumbent was relying on police officers who were framing defendants. And in Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Eli Savit ran on never requesting cash bail, amid other decarceral commitments. 

“This is a movement,” Savit told the Political Report after his win. He cheered the collapse of the expectation that “the only way” to win these county elections “was to be tough on crime.” 

But reform-minded challengers fell short in some key general elections around the country as incumbent prosecutors in Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Ohio, Charleston and Berkeley counties in South Carolina, DeKalb County, Illinois, and Shawnee County (Topeka), Kansas, prevailed.

Ohio and Georgia, though, saw the defeats of a pair of prosecutors whose decisions have raised major concerns about racial justice. In Franklin County (Columbus), voters ousted Ron O’Brien, who is known for aggressively pursuing the death penalty and flouting police accountability. In Georgia’s Brunswick Judicial Circuit, Jackie Johnson, who came under national fire over her handling of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, lost; local officials had accused Johnson of advising police not to arrest the white men who shot the young Black jogger, and of taking further steps to undermine the investigation. 

Voters oust a series of punitive, pro-ICE sheriffs

Tuesday saw historic wins for immigrants’ rights advocates who have decried and organized against sheriffs’ punitive and anti-immigrant practices in populous Southern counties.

Longtime Republican sheriffs Neil Warren and Al Cannon lost in Cobb County, Georgia, and Charleston County, South Carolina. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, a sheriff’s office with notoriously aggressive policies toward immigrants also flipped to a Democratic candidate.

Each of these counties is part of ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents within county jails. Membership in these counties falls under the sheriffs’ discretion.

The incoming Democrats—Kristin Graziano in Charleston, Keybo Taylor in Gwinnett, and Craig Owens in Cobb—have all vowed to terminate the 287(g) contract and severely restrict cooperation with ICE, which would be a major blow to the federal agency. (See also: Timothy Pratt wrote on what has driven these shifts in Georgia.)

Also central to these campaigns were the allegations that the Cobb County and Gwinnett County jails were denying people adequate care. Just in October, a judge ruled that Warren was illegally refusing to disclose information about two deaths in the Cobb County jail.

These same themes also resonated in a third Georgia county, Athens-Clarke, which also elected a candidate who ran on breaking the incumbent’s cooperation with ICE. But for John Williams, the hard work came in the June, when he beat Sheriff Ira Edwards in this staunchly blue jurisdiction’s Democratic primary; he easily prevailed in the general election on Tuesday. Besides vowing to reject ICE’s requests that he detain people, Williams ran as a supporter of bail reform and during the primary pledged to not accept donations from the bail bond industry.

Elsewhere in the country, reform-minded candidates scored victories in at least two other important sheriffs races.

In Norfolk County, Massachusetts, Patrick McDermott, a Democrat, ousted the Republican incumbent who had championed a ballot initiative to enable closer cooperation with ICE and  who spoke up against a police reform proposal. 

And Charmaine McGuffey will be the next sheriff in Hamilton County, Ohio. McGuffey prevailed over Sheriff Jim Neil, a Democrat who has attended a Trump rally, cooperated with ICE, and backed the construction of a bigger jail, in an April primary. On Tuesday, she beat a Republican who said he wanted to ramp up enforcement of low-level offenses. McGuffey, by contrast, has signaled her support for reducing the incarcerated population, and she has vowed to no longer assist ICE in detaining people.

“The solution to the problem of mass incarceration is certainly not more mass incarceration,” McGuffey explained to the Political Report in April about her opposition to building a larger jail.

On the other hand, three GOP sheriffs who positioned themselves as allies of President Trump won re-election in key races that the Political Report was watching. 

In Tarrant County (Fort Worth), Texas, Republican Sheriff Bill Waybourn has overseen a jail mired by gruesome deaths and contracted with ICE; on Tuesday, he prevailed over Democratic challenger Vance Keyes, who ran on reducing the jail population and ending the partnership with ICE. In Oakland County, Michigan, Sheriff Mike Bouchard, a prominent Republican politician in the state who has honored ICE requests that he detain immigrants, prevailed. In Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), Sheriff Bob Gualtieri prevailed over Elio Santana, his Democratic challenger, even as Joe Biden carried the county handily. The sheriff’s conservative politics—he has helped ICE gain a deeper foothold in the state, advocated for arming teachers, and been a staunch proponent of the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law—have made him a national figure. 

Reform-minded incumbents prevail

Some prosecutors and sheriffs who have advanced criminal justice reforms, and faced attacks over it in the general election, won their re-election bids.

In Harris County (Houston), Democratic Sheriff Ed Gonzalez beat a Republican challenger who denounced the county’s bail reform, which Gonzalez supported. Farther south, in Nueces County (Corpus Christi), Democratic DA Mark Gonzalez prevailed over a Republican rival who signaled he would be harsher toward low-level offenses like drug arrests. In Florida’s Hillsborough County, State Attorney Andrew Warren prevailed over a Republican who criticized sentencing for not being harsh enough. 

Kim Foxx and Kim Gardner won second terms as the chief prosecutors of Cook County (Chicago) and St. Louis, as expected in these heavily blue jurisdictions. Both won tough Democratic primaries to get here.

We don’t know everything yet

In many other DA races, the results are not yet conclusive at this time. In Colorado’s most populous judicial district, a reform-minded Democrat, Amy Padden, leads by narrow margin as of the most recent count. In Maricopa County, Arizona, the election remains too close between Republican incumbent Allister Adel and Democratic challenger Julie Gunnigle.

And in Los Angeles County, the year’s biggest prize, some local media outlets have indicated that the progressive challenger George Gascón is likely to oust DA Jackie Lacey, but final results are not yet available. The same is true in the Maricopa County sheriff’s race, where Joe Arpaio’s former deputy is trailing in available returns. 

Of note: Two important elections are going to runoffs. In New Orleans, where local activists have focused on the DA race as an opening for change, the DA race will be decided in December. In Athens, Georgia, reformer Deborah Gonzalez, a Democrat, faces a runoff against independent James Chafin in a race that almost did not happen; the acting DA was eliminated.

The movement extends to many other local offices, besides prosecutors and sheriffs

DA and sheriff candidates—a longtime focus of the Political Report—were, of course, not the only ones who ran on criminal justice reform. The Appeal reported on the congressional and legislative victories of Athena Hollins and Esther Agbaje in Minnesota, Cori Bush in Missouri, Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman in New York. It also reported on Holly Mitchell’s win for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. In Washington State, Tarra Simmons became the first person with a felony conviction to be elected to the state legislature.

And a striking pattern across the country is the growing number of even more local offices that are becoming hotspots for conflicts around criminal justice, fueled by the grassroots organizing against the many forms that mass incarceration takes.

In Vermont, proponents of criminal justice reform are reimagining the function of the unusual office of high bailiff to make the case for civilian oversight on law enforcement. Bobby Sand in Windsor County and David Silberman in Addison County (Middlebury) won on Tuesday with a stated goal of harnessing the office’s platform for progressive change.

Some school board elections became a fulcrum on issues of policing and racial disparities that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline. In Prince George’s County Maryland, the local school board deadlocked over a proposal to remove police from schools in the wake of the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and the issue burst into the fall’s elections, as Rachel Cohen reported in October. The candidates who ran on ending police presence in schools appear to have swept the five seats in play, though the results are not yet definitive. “I believe that we need to end the school-to-prison pipeline and that includes removing armed officers from schools,” said one of the candidates who is in the lead.

In New Orleans, a concerted effort to “flip the bench” delivered wins for two public defenders running to become criminal court judges. Angel Harris and Nandi Campbell were part of a slate of seven current and former public defenders vying for local judicial offices on platforms that included ending cash bail and seeking alternatives to incarceration. Though the majority lost, their candidacies—and these two victories—buck the norm of former prosecutors overwhelmingly filling judicial seats.

The post How Criminal Justice Reform Fared at the Ballot Box on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.