18 Texas sheriffs fill void for ICE
Deportation push going strong after county bows out
The program is booming — thanks largely to Texas sheriffs.
Ed Gonzalez, Harris County’s newly-elected sheriff, has ended a special enforcement partnership with federal immigration officials, but at least 18 other mostly rural and suburban Texas sheriffs have now proposed to help the Trump administration aggressively deport immigrants in the country illegally.
Gonzalez announced last month that he no longer would fund a team of 10 specially trained deputies at a cost of about $675,000 a year who worked at the Harris County Jail helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement identify detainees who might be subject to deportation. He said he will continue cooperating with federal immigration authorities and maintain an office and ICE computers for its continued use.
But even as he ended the contract program known as “Secure Communities,” sheriffs in Galveston, Brazoria, Tarrant, Waller and other counties have expressed interest in the same type of enforcement partnership under section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Harris County had relinquished.
Under President Barack Obama, that ICE partnership program had shrunk from 70 participating agencies to 37 in 16 states. Harris County had been one of the last remaining urban sher-
iff’s departments in that mix.
But other Texas sheriffs have responded enthusiastically to an executive order President Donald Trump signed five days after taking office aimed at revitalizing Secure Communities and authorizing the hiring of an additional 10,000 immigration officers to “enhance public safety in the interior of the United States.” That order promised to dramatically widen the net of people ICE would deport without exempting “classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”
“All lawful means” would be employed to enforce U.S. immigration laws, the order says. Since then, ICE says more than 3,730 “convicted criminal aliens” have been removed.
Secure Communities began in 2008 as a way to build stronger alliances between police and immigration agencies away from the border. The goals were to identify “criminal aliens” through modernized information sharing, to prioritize enforcement actions and to transform the program to achieve lasting results, according to a report ICE presented to Congress in 2009. Program revitalized
In law enforcement agencies with 287(g) contracts, a streamlined process exists for determining the immigration status of criminal defendants or others being held in jails. Once a trained deputy identifies inmates as potentially deportable, they can be held temporarily under what is known as an immigration detainer for up to an additional 48 hours beyond the time they would be released. The program has been controversial because of its cost and civil rights concerns. The American Civil Liberties Union, among other legal and advocacy organizations, have opposed it, arguing that holding people any time beyond their normal release date is unconstitutional.
The Obama administration ended Secure Communities in November 2014. But it continued ICE 287(g) partnerships with local jails under a new name: the Priority Enforcement Program. Under PEP, agents were asked to use new forms designed to help ICE agents target “individuals convicted of significant criminal offenses or who otherwise pose a threat to public safety.”
But in the wake of Trump’s executive order revitalizing Secure Communities, an ICE spokesman confirmed that the program is booming — thanks largely to interest from the Texas sheriffs. The agency reviewed six partners in February and could add 10 more by April. If all are approved, the number of Secure Communities partners will expand from 37 to 55.
ICE does not name departments that have applied for 287(g) contracts. The Chronicle compiled a list of 18 Texas departments that have applied or are in negotiations with ICE using a variety of sources, including Jackson County Sheriff A.J. “Andy” Louderback, a longtime member of the Sheriff ’s Association of Texas, media reports and the ACLU, which monitors applications.
Louderback’s coastal prairie county has a total population of about 14,500, which is only slightly larger than Harris County Jail’s capacity. In early March, Louderback had 64 inmates locked up in the Jackson County Jail. Four had been identified as potentially deportable.
But Louderback hopes the ICE partnership will help him make sure that no dangerous immigrant is ever released by mistake in the future. Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office and Carrollton Police Department in suburban Dallas are the other two current Texas partners.
Nationwide, picking up detained immigrants within 48 hours of their scheduled release has been a logistical problem for ICE — especially in farflung jails outside urban areas. On average, about 50 percent of potentially deportable immigrants were picked up from U.S. jails in fiscal years 2014 and 2015, according to data collected by the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. But the Obama administration had directed ICE agents to prioritize inmates based on their offense, which is now no longer the case under Trump.
Louderback said he’s part of an alliance of a dozen sheriffs in Coastal Bend counties lining the U.S. Highway 59/Texas 71 corridor that connects Houston with the Eagle Ford shale play and the Mexican border beyond. All are working together to figure out how to contract with ICE to screen jail inmates to identify those who are deportable and try to facilitate pickups, he said.
In each county’s case, that means coming up with money to send staff to ICE training to learn how to question people booked into jail about their immigration status and how to check ICE databases. ICE provides that training and computers so that jail inmates’ fingerprints can be cross-checked with ICE databases, but each county must cover staff salaries and provide office space, as Harris County did.
By working together, Louderback said the group likely will generate enough potentially deportable jail inmates to support the creation of a regular ICE deportation bus route to serve their mostly rural jails.
Meanwhile, in the more populous Houston suburbs, Galveston County’s sheriff and its commissioners also have voted to join up with ICE. Montgomery County, which already is home to a jail that operates as a privately run immigration detention center, is considering a contract but has not yet applied, a sheriff’s spokesman said. Waller and Brazoria counties are in the pipeline too. Abuses feared
Chris Rickerd, of the ACLU, which monitors applications and opposes the program, said the group is concerned that a sudden influx of new jail partnerships could lead to widespread civil rights abuses. He said he believes that more immigrants will be deported even if they are jailed only for traffic tickets and the surge in deportations could keep lawabiding immigrants from reporting crimes or cooperating with police.
“The role of a 287(g) program in a jail environment is going to mean a very direct participation in Trump’s deportation efforts by these sheriff ’s departments,” said Rickerd, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney for the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department.
In response to the recent increase in applicants, the ACLU in February sent a letter to ICE protesting six potential partners. “The proposed jurisdictions discussed in this letter have records clearly demonstrating that they are unable to assume this responsibility in a manner that would avoid constitutional and civil rights violations,” wrote Ronald Newman, the ACLU’s director of strategic initiatives.
The group cited alleged civil rights abuses, racial profiling and discrimination complaints about three Texas counties, including Waller, Victoria and Smith. Both the Waller County Sheriff ’s Office and its county jail were at the center of a civil rights firestorm last year when Sandra Bland, an African-American who’d moved back to Texas to start a new job, committed suicide in a cell after being unable to post bail set after a traffic stop. The ACLU urged ICE to reject Waller as an ICE partner, alleging that jail officials violated Bland’s rights.
Sheriff R. Glenn Smith did not respond to a request for comment.
Rickerd said that while the ACLU considers Secure Communities unconstitutional, it is advocating a more open application process so that community members can learn in advance if their sheriffs are considering applying for the program and discuss the costs — and any civil rights implications in advance. He said the ACLU received no response to its letter of objection to potential partners.
Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Justice ended partnerships with two counties because of “a pattern and practice” of racially profiling or unlawfully detaining and arresting Latinos. The Alamance County Sheriff ’s Office in North Carolina had set up checkpoints at entrances to Latino neighborhoods. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in the Phoenix metro area, under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, had routinely conducted “sweeps” in Latino neighborhoods.
Nationwide, other departments have dropped the program because of cost or civil rights concerns raised by citizens in federal courts.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and several other agencies ended their contracts after a U.S. magistrate judge found in 2014 that Clackamas County Oregon officials had unlawfully used an immigration detainer against immigrant Maria MirandaOlivares, who had been arrested in 2012 for allegedly violating a restraining order. Although her family was able to post $5,000 bail, she was held for two weeks because of her immigration status. The judge found that possible immigration law violations did not amount to “probable cause” and that county officials violated Miranda-Olivares’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable detention. 42,000 detained
Together, Texas agencies supplied more deportees away from the border from October 2013 to 2015 than any state in recent years, according to ICE detainer data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. More than half of the 267,548 people identified as potentially deportable in that period came from Texas, according to TRAC data on ICE detainers.
The Harris County Jail has been one of ICE’s top sources of Texas deportees.
Former Sheriff Adrian Garcia, Harris County’s first Hispanic sheriff, who resigned to run for mayor in 2015, supported the ICE partnership for eight years. But Garcia said he demanded statistical updates and spotted what seemed like unfair punishments and inconsistencies. Some people who were arrested for only traffic offenses or fines were deported while others convicted of more serious offenses weren’t always picked up in the 48-hour time limit, he found. Garcia said in some cases people charged with serious crimes were deported apparently in lieu of prosecution.
Of more than 42,000 people detained under the program in Harris County Jail, most had done time or been arrested for a variety of crimes like marijuana or cocaine possession, larceny, assault and traffic offenses, according to TRAC data on ICE detainees that spans 2008-2016. The most common serious charge was driving while intoxicated. But more than 7,000 had no reported conviction, data collected by TRAC shows. The most common deportation destinations were Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — followed by Nicaragua, Colombia, Nigeria and Vietnam, the same data shows.
It’s unclear how Gonzalez’s decision to end the ICE contract will impact inmate deportations in 2017 since Gonzalez has pledged to continue to work with immigration agents.
The percentages of detained immigrants picked up by ICE agents for deportation within 48 hours have generally been higher in Harris County than the U.S. average. ICE has a major regional office here and three large detention centers in Houston and Conroe. But there have been glitches.
In 2013, federal agents failed to show up in time to pick up a Harris County inmate, Alfonso “Poncho” Diaz Juarez, who had been tagged upon release for deportation to Mexico.
Diaz Juarez, a violent pimp, had served jail time that year on a domestic violence charge, having kidnapped a baby to threaten the mother. He was indicted in federal court only a few weeks after his release as a major player in a human trafficking ring.
He remains one of ICE’s most wanted fugitives today.