State looks at county contracts with ICE

The number of counties in the Bay State that have contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dwindled to one this year — and the sheriff wants to keep it as legislators on Beacon Hill grapple with how best to address the relationship between law enforcement and ICE.

“I don’t want to be the one who releases one of these people who are here illegally back into the community and then have them commit a more serious crime,” said Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings, who presides over the sole county with a contract with ICE still in place.

Cummings further elaborated on the relationship between his department and ICE, an agreement called 287(g) — one of only two in all of New England. The Massachusetts State Department of Corrections also has its own agreement in place.

He said his department is not picking suspected undocumented immigrants off the street. Instead, the person has to already be arrested by local or state police. When they come from the court and are held without bail, the booking sheet asks detainees where they were born. If it’s not the U.S., they’re run through a computer program to determine their immigration status. Cummings estimates that about a dozen people per month are foreign-born, and only two of those are in the country illegally.

Of those people, whom he said come from all over the world, some have overstayed a visa, while others have crossed the border illegally. Many have been deported before and are back in the country again. The county has the right to hold these people until ICE picks them up.

Although he said he’s faced pressure from immigrant rights groups and state Rep. Antonio Cabral to end the program, Cummings argued that it’s actually keeping the immigrant community in Barnstable County safer.

“Most of the crimes that we deal with are assault and battery on a family member, meaning in most instances, the victim of their crimes … is in fact the immigrant community,” he said. “We’re actually making it safer for them.”

Daniel Pereira, communications director of Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition, disagrees with that assessment, arguing that these agreements create a “chilling effect,” he said, where immigrants “feel they can’t go to law enforcement to deal with with the crimes they are victims of” over fears of being deported.

Bristol County was the most recent one to cut ties with ICE — though not voluntarily. The Attorney General’s office found that detainees’ civil rights were violated after the sheriff ’s office used excessive force, including pepper spray and canines against them, which ultimately factored into the terminated contract by ICE.