Counties ID’d as refusing ICE detainers

Bernalillo, San Miguel appear on list ordered by Trump

WASHINGTON — Bernalillo and San Miguel counties in New Mexico were among dozens of U.S. counties identified by the Department of Homeland Security on Monday as failing to comply with federal orders to detain immigrants who are arrested for crimes and eligible for deportation.

The list, which Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials said was not comprehensive, was compiled in response to President Donald Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order aimed partly at identifying jurisdictions that offer “sanctuary” to people who are in the U.S. illegally. The order also directed the U.S. attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that such jurisdictions be deemed ineligible for most federal grants. The list reported 206 instances nationwide in which local law enforcement agencies declined an ICE request to detain someone for deportation from Jan. 28 to Feb. 3.

“When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect the public safety and carry out its mission,” acting ICE Director Thomas Homan said in a statement.

Officials in Bernalillo County and other jurisdictions around New Mexico have argued that it is inappropriate to detain suspects who have been deemed eligible for release by a judge, or those who qualify for bail. They also contend that ICE sometimes takes days to pick up the detainees, but local jails foot the bill for the incarceration. In 2014, Bernalillo County, New Mexico’s most populous county, announced that it would no longer honor requests from immigration authorities to hold on to jail inmates who, while booked on unrelated charges, are suspected of having entered the country illegally. The DHS report says that “all county jails in New Mexico” will not honor an ICE detainment order as of October 2014.

The use of ICE detainers in New Mexico dropped sharply from 2011 to 2015. ICE issued 409 detainers in fiscal 2015 in New Mexico, down from 3,170 detainers issued in fiscal 2011, according to data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The data do not show how many of those individuals were deported. The peak came at the height of the “Secure Communities” program, which encouraged local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE through the use of detainers and other methods — a program that local New Mexico law enforcement broadly rejected and that Trump has said he wants to revive.

Sixty percent, or 244, of the detainers issued last year by ICE in New Mexico were connected to individuals with no criminal records, according to the TRAC data.