San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Texas sheriff may be key for ‘humane’ ICE
Biden’s nominee to lead agency seen as reformer
Rogelio Ernesto La O Muñoz spent eight months in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody suffering what he described as psychological and environmental abuse.
The Cuban epidemiologist arrived in Texas in December 2019, seeking asylum amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, when ICE officers targeted anyone in the country illegally, not just those guilty of serious crimes.
It was also the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, much of which he would spend in the Joe Corley Detention Facility in Conroe. He described it as a grim place where detainees with respiratory symptoms were forced to go without medical assistance and where more than 30 people were crammed in dorms, making social distancing impossible.
“We were seeing people next to us taken out of the units in wheelchairs, some of them looking unresponsive, but they wouldn’t follow up with testing or isolating the rest of us,” said La O Muñoz, who was granted asylum and released from custody at the end of July.
Those are the sort of conditions that advocates say were common under the Trump administration — and which President Joe Biden has vowed to end as he pushes for what he calls a more “humane” immigration system.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez could soon be a key player in that effort.
Gonzalez has been tapped to lead ICE, the agency that was in many ways the face of former President Donald Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration. He’ll be instrumental in setting its course under Biden, a difficult task as ICE has become one of the most politicized agencies in the federal government.
Reaction to his nomination last week illustrated that.
While many said he was a solid pick with the law enforcement background needed to run the agency, immigration activists said they feared he wouldn’t do enough to rein it in. Conservatives, meanwhile, see the nomination of Gonzalez — who has been a vocal critic of ICE — as the beginning of the end of the agency.
“He might be — if they have their way — the last ICE director,” said Mike Howell, senior adviser for executive branch relations at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. “This guy’s going in there to turn off the lights, board up the windows and send everyone home. The only people he’s going to deport are the ICE agents.”
While Biden resisted calls to abolish ICE throughout the 2020 campaign, the agency Gonzalez will be leading — if confirmed by the Senate — is already far from what it was under Trump.
In Biden’s first month in office, the number of ICE arrests dropped more than 60 percent.
The balancing act at ICE
Though arrests and deportations under Trump never reached the peaks they hit during the Obama administration, Trump expanded the agency’s targets to virtually anyone in the country illegally. In a series of high-profile cases, ICE agents arrested people in their front yards, at their kids’ schools and in courtrooms. In 2017, an acting director of the agency warned: “You should look over your shoulder, and you
need to be worried.”
Since then, ICE arrests have plummeted — dropping from an average of 6,800 monthly arrests in the last three months of the Trump administration to 2,500 in February, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Detention of noncitizens has plummeted by two-thirds, as well, from an average of nearly 6,300 monthly bookins from October to December to an average of 2,000 in February and March, according to MPI.
The declines have put ICE in a place it hasn’t been in years — since well before former President Barack Obama’s aggressive enforcement policies led critics to label him “deporterin-chief,” and perhaps back to even the George W. Bush administration when ICE was created, said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at MPI.
“The system is just much smaller now, and it’s much more focused, and there are more restrictions on ICE activities than there ever have been,” Capps said.
But Gonzalez will be under pressure to do much more to tame ICE as advocates push the Biden administration to completely rethink the agency. Advocates said there is little trust between immigrant communities and ICE after the last four years. There are calls to
shut down detention facilities, further narrow the agency’s targets and remove its agents from jails — including the one Gonzalez now oversees.
“It needs to be a total shift in framing,” said Anita Gupta, an attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit group focused on expanding immigrants’ rights.
Gonzalez will likely face an uphill battle winning over many Republicans, as the GOP has slammed the Biden administration for moving to end some of Trump’s strictest immigration policies and Republican states such as Texas have sued to prevent its efforts to narrow ICE’s mission.
“The reality is he has to maintain the rule of law, as he has in Houston,” said Ken
Oliver, senior director of engagement at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, noting there’s “a tremendous amount of cooperation” between local law enforcement agencies such as the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and ICE — something many Democrats want to see changed.
‘Opportunity for change’
Immigration experts and advocates are divided on whether Gonzalez is the right man for the job.
Some say he’s a smart and creative pick to lead the agency — a lawman who could potentially win over ICE’s workforce while making some of the bigger changes advocates have sought. Gonzalez was a vocal critic of Trump’s approach to immigration enforcement and will likely fit the direction Biden has taken the agency, they said.
His appointment “is a very important opportunity for change,” said Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council.
“The agency was at the forefront of many of the worst of Trump’s abuses on immigration, so Mr. Gonzalez will be very well positioned to not only reverse the trends at ICE under Trump, but also to hopefully build a system that is more fair, to reduce ICE detention levels, to close ICE detention facilities, and also to adopt and implement generous prosecutorial discretion guidelines to help
protect people as well,” he said.
But others worry picking a law enforcement officer to lead the agency is a signal the president doesn’t plan to reform ICE as much as many had hoped. They note that Harris County still leads the nation in ICE arrests, most of which are a result of transfers from the jail Gonzalez oversees to the agency, an indication of “deep-seated entanglement between the sheriff’s office and ICE.”
“There is confusion in the community about what role Gonzalez is going to play,” said María Hernández, co-director of Unidad 11, a community protection network that, among other things, provides notice of local ICE raids and provides assistance to those who may be targeted.
“I’m glad that they nominated a Latino,” Hernández said. “But in reality, our community is equally affected whether or not it is a Latino because what is needed is to change the laws, to have an immigration reform that provides some relief to our communities.”
Gonzalez was not available to comment for this story.
A test for partnerships
Among Gonzalez’s first tests could be what to do with a controversial ICE partnership with local communities that he ended when he took office in Harris County, drawing national attention. The partnerships, commonly referred to as Section 287(g), had Harris County deputies screening jailed suspects to find those in the country without legal permission.
Gonzalez called it “illegal racial profiling” that was also dangerous and expensive. Counties across the country have ended similar partnerships in recent months, as well. Biden on the campaign trail vowed to end the program altogether. But his administration has yet to do so.
Gonzalez’s
approach
to
287(g) partnerships could signal how ICE under his leadership will work with local communities and law enforcement agencies. With states and cities passing sanctuary laws limiting immigration enforcement, while others — such as Texas — take the opposite approach, Gonzalez could set a new course at ICE by essentially telling cities and states he will send agents to their communities if they want them, but stay out if not.
Such an approach “might be a good political way to do what is otherwise an impossible job,” said Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney in Washington, D.C.
Gonzalez would also take over as the Biden administration’s plan to narrow enforcement targets — to only those convicted of violent felonies or seen as threats to national security — are being challenged in court by Texas state officials.
Gonzalez would likely play an important role in setting the administration’s targets for the long term — and defending those goals against lawsuits from his own state.
But first Gonzalez has to clear the Senate, where he’s likely to face stiff opposition from Republicans, including Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz. Neither has said whether he will support Gonzalez’s nomination.
“I have some concerns,” Cornyn said. “Law enforcement officers are not supposed to be policymakers or pick and choose which policies they want to enforce.”
Cornyn specifically pointed to Gonzalez’s move to end the 287(g) partnership in Harris County as cause for concern.
“I know he has been very critical of immigration enforcement in the past, so I’ll have a lot of questions,” he said. “Right now I’m going to proceed with an open mind.”