Chesterfield County will no longer honor requests to hold illegal immigrants at the request of the federal ICE unit.
Chesterfield County will no longer honor requests to hold illegal immigrants at the request of the federal ICE unit.
The Chesterfield Observer reported that the county’s sheriff’s office made the call after recent federal court cases have suggested localities could get sued for holding detainees past legal limits.
The higher courts said the “immigration detainer” from ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency which handles boarder patrol, deportations, detaining illegal immigrants, etc., were just administrative requests, and not mandatory.
ICE immigration detainers were used to keep those arrested in custody 48 hours beyond the legal limit so the federal agency could run background checks, confirm a person’s immigration status, and transfer the arrested person into federal custody if they turn out to be here illegally.
Details via Chesterfield Observer:
According to an opinion issued earlier this year by the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Pennsylvania in reference to a lawsuit in Pennsylvania, “immigration detainers do not and cannot compel a state or local law enforcement agency to detain suspected aliens subject to removal.”
By enforcing the detainer, the court said, the local government involved in the lawsuit “cannot use as a defense [the claim] that its own policy did not cause the deprivation of [the prisoner’s] constitutional rights,” and therefore the prisoner may be entitled to sue the local government over his detention.
Chesterfield’s policy now is simply to put the detainer into the prisoner’s file and stay in communication with ICE, Jones said.
“Recent federal court decisions have made clear that detaining individuals on warrantless ICE detainer requests is a violation of the detainee’s Fourth Amendment and due process rights,” said the ACLU’s Aisha Huertas Michel. The civil liberties group had sent a letter to Chesterfield county earlier this summer asking them to no longer honor the ICE detainers.
The ACLU said Virginia law already requires local jurisdictions to check someone’s immigration status when they are arrested, and when that status is checked via finger-print scan, ICE immediately flags the person for a detainer.
“It does not mean that the person being investigated is here without authority and is subject to deportation, or that there is probable cause to think they are,” clarified Huertas Michel. “It does not mean that they’ve committed a criminal violation of immigration laws or a civil violation like overstaying a student visa.”
ICE has come under fire for a number of issues related to how they treat detainees, to deportations, to how they handle protests.
Federal level immigration has seen a boost in the last decade, with their budget doubled from 2006 to $2.8 billion a year in 2013.
The use of private prison companies, and putting the detainees to work for dollars a day, has put a spotlight on the broader issue of immigration in the US.
