Police chiefs’ group opposes Trump plans

Deputizing officers, federal grant holds top list of concerns.

A group of 63 police chiefs and sheriffs from around the country, who formed a Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force in 2015, has issued a letter saying they do not want their officers acting as federal immigration officers and they do not want to lose federal funding if their cities and counties are defined as immigrant “sanctuaries.”

The letter is a response to President Donald Trump’s executive order in January on “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” which called for increased use of the deputization of local law enforcement to perform immigration checks and threatened to withhold federal grant money from so-called sanctuary cities and counties.

The letter is not addressed to the president but rather to members of the Senate, and is signed by the chiefs of Orlando, Fla., Houston, Boston, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles County, Calif., as well as smaller jurisdictions such as Marshalltown, Iowa, and Garden City, Kan.

“We believe,” the letter states, “that we can best serve our communities by leaving the enforcement of immigration laws to the federal government. Threatening the removal of valuable grant funding from jurisdictions that choose not to spend limited resources enforcing federal immigration law is extremely problematic. Removing these funds ... would not fix any part of our broken immigration system.”

The chiefs’ task force was launched and is supported by the National Immigration Forum.

The letter discusses issues similar to those raised in January by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing more than 1,400 cities with populations over 30,000, and the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which represents 63 large police departments. It notes that federal courts have found that federal immigration detainers calling on cities to hold prisoners for pickup by immigration authorities are unconstitutional. The letter also pointed out that “there is no set definition of what comprises” a sanctuary city, and contends that the term “is often defined much too broadly.”

The letter emerged after members of the chiefs’ immigration task force met with members of Congress in early February, according to J. Thomas Manger, chief of the Montgomery County, Md., police and head of the Major Chiefs.

“We just wanted to make our position clear,” Manger said Wednesday. “We do believe we should be working with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and identifying folks in our community who are dangerous.”

Manger met with House Speaker Paul Ryan and said he “was encouraged by the conversation we had with him. I think he’s fairly supportive of what we were talking about.”

Chiefs and sheriffs of jurisdictions with larger immigrant populations “have to be concerned about ... fear and the panic in the immigrant community” that makes undocumented immigrants unwilling to cooperate with authorities, Manger said. The letter says that compelling state and local law enforcement “to carry out new and sometimes problematic tasks undermines the delicate federal balance and will harm locally-based community-oriented policing.”

“I believe we can help influence this to go in a direction that’s better than the extremists who say, ‘Deport them all,’ “Manger said.

BRYAN COX/ICE A group of police chiefs opposes policies that have their officers acting as federal immigration officers.