Nominees to lead ICE, Border Patrol signal sharp departure from Trump administration
WASHINGTON — Ed Gonzalez, sheriff of Harris County, in Texas, made ending a partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement one of his first decisions on the job because, he said, the program encouraged “illegal racial profiling.”
Chris Magnus, police chief in Tucson, Ariz., has taken pride in his city’s boast of “being welcoming to immigrants.” It is also home to one of the busiest sectors of the Border Patrol, an agency rarely praised for its hospitality.
The two men have been nominated by President Joe Biden to run the federal government’s immigration enforcement agencies, an abrupt shift from rough-justice immigration chiefs in the Trump administration. If they are confirmed by the Senate — Gonzalez at ICE and Magnus at Customs and Border Protection — they would be responsible for delivering on Biden’s promise to return compassion to the immigration system after the roundups, zero tolerance, wall-building and family separations of the last administration.
A confirmation hearing for Magnus has not yet been scheduled. But Gonzalez testified Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, whose Republican members pressed him on the surge of migrants arriving at the southern border
In the past three weeks, Border Patrol agents have encountered migrants crossing into the country illegally nearly 6,000 times a day on average, according to recent government data. Republicans have branded it as a crisis of Biden’s own making.
And since the spring, a record number of migrant children and teenagers arriving at the border, mostly from Central America, has been sent to government shelters awaiting to be united with a family member or other sponsor in the United States. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-wis., said most of the children are teenage boys and raised the prospect that the Biden administration was allowing dangerous people into the country.
“Isn’t that what the reality of the situation is with this flood?” Johnson said. “We are letting in people that are potentially gang members. We’re letting in people that are going to be trafficking drugs or human trafficking?”
Gonzalez replied, “I’m always mindful of not profiling and developing any stereotypes in my work, so I try to look at the facts,” adding, “At the end of the day, they’re still teenagers.”
His response provided a hint of the fresh perspective that his background in local law enforcement, like that of Magnus, could bring at a time when Americans are demanding changes in how the police treat communities of color. But it could also become their greatest challenge, as Gonzalez and Magnus try to gain the trust of agencies they have interacted with as distinct outsiders. Local law enforcement leaders tend to see working with their communities as a paramount responsibility. Federal law enforcement has rarely operated that way.
“The job of local law enforcement is pretty significantly different from the role that these immigration enforcement policing agencies play, in part because there’s no way to build trust between ICE and CBP and immigrant communities,” said Shaina Aber, deputy director of the Center on Immigration and Justice at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York. ICE and the Border Patrol, she added, “really start with this kind of specious notion of immigrant guilt.”
Within the ranks of immigration law enforcement, officers are already wary. Brandon Judd, president of the Border Patrol union, suggested that Magnus, who loudly criticized the Trump administration’s policies, was sympathetic to people who enter the United States without legal permission. “That’s a concern,” he said.
And anti-immigrant groups are girding for a fight. “In the midst of the current border crisis, ICE needs a strong leader at the helm — not an open-borders apologist opposed to the enforcement of our immigration laws,” Preston Huennekens, a government relations manager for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said of Gonzalez’s nomination.
The sheriff, whose tenure in Harris County, which includes Houston, began weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, is no stranger to ICE, an agency that makes a lot of arrests in the area. In 2019, he shared his objections to raids conducted by ICE agents and made clear his department did not participate in them. “I do not support #Iceraids that threaten to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom do not represent a threat to the U.S.,” he posted on Twitter. “The focus should always be on clear & immediate safety threats. Not others who are not threats.”
On Thursday, Gonzalez assured senators that if he was confirmed to lead ICE, he would uphold the law and that he believed in having enforcement priorities so that officers and agents could focus on the most serious public safety and national security threats.
In Tucson, Magnus limited the reach of the federal immigration authorities by narrowing the scope of the situations deemed appropriate for one of his officers to call ICE or Border Patrol.
But if conservatives are leery of the nominees, local immigrant groups are skeptical of their good-cop images.
“Our communities in Texas have witnessed firsthand how Sheriff Gonzalez has worked with ICE to transfer immigrants to ICE detention facilities and perpetuated the pain and trauma of our communities,” said Norma Gonzalez, a lead organizer in Texas for United We Dream, which represents young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Some pro-immigration activists in Tucson are equally skeptical of Magnus. After a 2017 protest against Trump’s immigration policies, a video of a Tucson police officer pushing an 86-year-old woman went viral. Another woman, in her 60s, was pepper-sprayed by police when she reached down to help her. At the time, Magnus said his officers managed the situation, which he described as a peaceful protest that escalated to “a safety and logistical challenge.”
Still, the outspoken opposition of Magnus and Gonzalez to using local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law is a sharp departure from the past four years, when Trump often threatened to cut off federal funding to cities that did not assist in his crackdowns.
The Trump administration sought to expand a program, created in a 1996 law, that teamed federal immigration agencies with local law enforcement. Biden has said he did not believe that local police should turn over immigrants living in the U.S. illegally to ICE to be deported.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has started a review of such agreements. In May, he ended agreements with two county jails, in Georgia and Massachusetts, which had been under investigation over whether they had mistreated immigrant prisoners. Other agreements could also be terminated in the coming months.
“For several decades now, immigrant leaders have been demanding total disentanglement of local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement,” said Simon Sandoval-moshenberg, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Justice Center. “I think the nomination of these two individuals gives a lot of people hope that we might actually see some real concrete action on that front.”
If anything, liberal groups appear ready to impose unrealistic demands on Biden’s nominees for ICE and Customs and Border Protection, using the loftiest of language to lay down their visions.
“The entire federal immigration system must be re-imagined to lead with the concept that migration is a human right and a commitment to replace the deportation-centric immigration system with one that embraces equity, diversity and fairness,” said Laura Peña, a lawyer with the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Customs and Border Protection and ICE were at the center of some of the most contentious policies under the Trump administration, accused of racial profiling, excessive force and inhumanely handling people in custody. The agencies were among a dozen Trump turned to last summer in his bid to “dominate” demonstrators protesting police brutality.
Those are also issues Magnus and Gonzalez have faced in their own departments.
Last year, Magnus offered to resign after two Latino men died in his department’s custody. One of the men was naked, handcuffed and face down on the ground, and said he could not breathe. When the mayor refused to review the department’s practices, the chief brought in an outside group to do so. Some groups have criticized Magnus’ handling of the situation, saying he took too long to release relevant footage.
In 2018, Gonzalez fired a deputy who shot and killed an unarmed man, which violated the department’s policy on use of force.
“You’ve got two really innovative police executives who have been tested and know what the challenge of changing organizations and culture — they’ve been there,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.
Even Judd, the Border Patrol union chief, said some cultural change was necessary. In 2019, a group of Customs and Border Protection employees, including the chief of Border Patrol, participated in private Facebook groups and other social media platforms with posts that included obscene images of Hispanic lawmakers as well as threats to members of Congress.
Biden has unveiled an immigration overhaul that Democrats introduced in the House in February. The proposal adds a path to citizenship for most of the 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. But it does not include a significant focus on increasing border security, which is a departure from previous bills. It faces an almost impossible climb in the evenly divided Senate, where at least 10 Republican votes would be needed for passage.
Trump has largely united his party behind his punitive hardline approach, and since Biden took office, congressional Republicans have tirelessly charged that the situation at the border is out of control.
With the parties in Congress in no mood to cooperate on legislation, it will be up to the chiefs of the immigration enforcement agencies to lead any changes. And that will mean navigating very conflicting demands.
According to ICE data, arrests are down about 65%. There have been just over 13,000 arrests from February through June, compared with nearly 40,000 over the same period in 2020. The pandemic has had a significant effect on the situation. In April 2020, ICE arrested 5,792, which was a 44% decrease from a month earlier.
The decrease this year can also be attributed to Biden’s guidance requiring ICE to focus on violent offenders. The average daily population in its detention facilities, however, has increased in recent months, as more migrants have arrived at the southwestern border.
Liberals in Congress have also denounced the Biden administration’s enforcement priorities, arguing, for instance, that its definition of a public safety risk — anyone convicted of an aggravated felony — is “a relic of the racist war on drugs.”
“Immigration enforcement is inherently problematic in this country,” Wexler said. “The workforce has heard different messages over the years, and certainly, coming on the heels of the Trump administration, there’s going to have to be finding the right balance.”