Forcing sheriffs to work with ICE is bad for sheriffs - and taxpayers | Opinion

Over the last four years, North Carolina’s Republican legislators have twice tried — and failed — to require local sheriffs to work with U.S. Immigration and Customer Enforcement (ICE) to identify, detain and deport local undocumented residents.

Now, they’re trying again, and thanks to their new Senate supermajority they’re likely to be able to override a veto from Gov. Roy Cooper. They’ve introduced two bills (House Bill 10 and Senate Bill 50). Both would require sheriffs to report the immigration status of people they arrest and subject many immigrants to 48-hour “ICE holds,” even if detained on trivial charges.

That might sound reasonable: Why shouldn’t police officers detain undocumented immigrants who break the law? But some N.C. sheriffs — including sheriffs in Wake, Durham, Orange, Mecklenburg and Buncombe counties — strongly oppose the legislation. They say it would jack up costs for taxpayers and make it harder to protect our communities.

Studies show that immigrants are generally more supportive of law enforcement than native-born Americans — except when local officers start trying to enforce federal immigration laws. In places where cops work with ICE, for instance, Latino residents, regardless of their immigration status, are much less likely to view the police as helpful or to report crimes committed against them.

It’s clear why. First, county-level immigration enforcement breaks up local families. Well over 200,000 citizens in North Carolina, including over 170,000 American children, have at least one undocumented family member. These communities are not eager to see their parents and breadwinners deported, so they keep mum even when the police might be able to help. Second, when local officials start cooperating with ICE, they tend to overreach. Back in 2008, when former Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison worked with ICE, two-thirds of the local residents who were deported were never convicted of any crime.

Worse, it’s not just immigrants (undocumented or otherwise) who suffer when ICE recruits local law enforcement. A 2018 report suggested that around 20,000 U.S. citizens have been improperly detained under ICE holds. In one case, a U.S. citizen was improperly held for three years before he was finally able to prove his citizenship status and regain his freedom.

In 2021, the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that ICE officials weren’t required to record evidence that detainees might be U.S. citizens, and that dozens of U.S. citizens had been improperly deported by the agency.

These proposed laws are equally bad for local sheriffs and taxpayers. They leave our officers open to legal liability. Take Arizona, where a Department of Justice investigation found Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s police department guilty of systemic constitutional violations, including racial profiling and other discriminatory practices. The DOJ ultimately had to stop working with Maricopa County, and the state paid well over $70 million in related legal fees and court costs.

In Tennessee, 100 Latino meatpacking workers were just awarded a $1 million settlement after ICE and local police officers joined forces for a raid that saw virtually all the plant’s non-white workers rounded up and detained on spurious immigration charges.

Our hard-working local police and sheriff’s deputies have enough work and stress. They know that North Carolina already has the laws it needs to detain and incarcerate people who commit serious crimes. They know this Republican effort isn’t designed to make us safer — it’s simply an unnecessary exercise in raw political power.

Immigration enforcement matters. I’m not asking to defund the police, abolish ICE, or throw open our borders. But federal laws should be enforced by federal agents and sheriffs should remain free to keep their communities safe without interference from lawmakers. The best way to keep our communities safe and strong is to forcefully reject HB 10 and SB 50.

This story was originally published March 14, 2023 at 9:22 AM with the headline "Forcing sheriffs to work with ICE is bad for sheriffs - and taxpayers | Opinion."