WASHINGTON, DC – With Congress failing to pass any significant immigration reforms, state legislatures are increasingly taking up the issue. But some police officials and immigrant rights advocates say the strictest of these laws will further overwhelm police and push many immigrants even further into the shadows.
Last week, speaking at the National Immigration Forum’s annual Leading the Way conference, leaders said that while it may seem common sense to let local law enforcement determine who can be here without authorization, the reality is much more complicated.
According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Texas and West Virginia There are already laws in place forcing local law enforcement to participate in the deportation of non-citizens. He adds that in many other countries, lawmakers want to join them. After that, federal courts significantly narrow enforcement of these laws Last year, Texas passed Senate Bill 4which challenges such a 2012 US Supreme Court ruling repealed most of Arizona’s law which was intended to place immigration law enforcement in the hands of state authorities.
Limited staff, resources
In April, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, signed it Senate File 2340which would make illegal immigration a crime under state law, give local law enforcement the power to enforce it, and allow state judges to order the deportation or imprisonment of undocumented people. As with SB 4 in Texas, federal courts have suspended the law.
In a speech at the National Immigration Forum conference in Marshalltown, Iowa, Police Chief Michael Tupper cited a number of reasons why the law is bad for local police and their communities. One is a straightforward lack of resources.
“Every police department and sheriff’s office in the United States is now hiring,” he said. “There has been a constant struggle to retain staff over the last five years.”
Tupper said he needs 50 officers and the 27,000-employee city’s budget calls for 42, and he can’t even keep them staffed as the department struggles to respond to more than 750 calls a week.
SF 2340 “would put local law enforcement on the front lines of immigration enforcement in Iowa, and if you’ve looked at a map lately, we’re a long way from the border,” Tupper said. “We just don’t have the time and we don’t have the resources for it. We all have concerns about what this legislation will accomplish and what non-financial mandates it will impose on local governments.”
Sheriff Sean Casey in Alexandria, Virginia, agreed that law enforcement agencies nationwide are understaffed and said it wasn’t helpful when Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed bills that would have given police chiefs and sheriffs the power to hire non-citizens, such as such as lawful lasting residents and those covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“Why wouldn’t you trust local chiefs and sheriffs to make their own employment decisions?” – Casey asked. “I thought we did a really good job of putting together some pretty good legislation, but unfortunately politics got in the way. I heard: “How can a foreigner tell a citizen what to do?” “I really think it’s counterproductive and, frankly, I don’t think it’s in the best interest of public safety.”
Life in the shadows
Perhaps even more harmful to public safety than excessive apply of meager law enforcement resources would be to deter enormous swaths of the community from interacting with police officers for fear of deportation, officials said.
Iowa may seem like a foreign, lily-white state, but Tupper said his city is officially 25 percent Latino and he believed that group made up about 40 percent of the city’s population. Moreover, refugees from Southeast Asia make up a growing portion of the population, and the chief added that 50 languages are spoken in Marshalltown public schools.
Tupper said the fear of any part of this community to contact the police makes society as a whole less protected.
Criminals exploit these fears, for example, domestic violence perpetrators tell their victims: “You can’t call the police because if you do, they will deport you,” Tupper said. “We can’t put local law enforcement in the role of federal immigration enforcement if we want to keep our communities safe, because it actually does the opposite.”
Reyna Montoya is a DACA recipient herself, whose family fled Tijuana, Mexico, for Arizona after Mexican police kidnapped her father in 2003. She founded and runs it Breaththat supports and advocates for undocumented and mixed-status families.
She said that when former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was racially profiling residents in an attempt to improperly enforce immigration law, immigrants were texting each other reports about where the police were so that people could avoid them.
“That meant my mother and I decided not to go to the grocery store,” Montoya said. “If it was Sunday, it meant not going to church. We didn’t want to risk initiating deportation proceedings. This usually happens during our first direct interaction with law enforcement.”
She said she knew many people who did not report crimes committed against them for fear that police would initiate deportation proceedings.
“The reality is that trust has been completely broken,” Montoya said. “There were many illegal immigrants who did not report the crimes that affected them out of fear that they would be deported.”
Legal problem
Tupper and Casey, both law enforcement officers, expressed concern that if necessary to enforce immigration law, they did not know how to prevent their officers or deputies from engaging in harmful practices such as racial profiling.
“We don’t know and haven’t received any guidance from the state of Iowa on how to enforce this law,” Tupper said.
There is also the prospect of a patchwork of inconsistent immigration laws from state to state.
“I also worry that in the United States we may have 50 different ways of dealing with immigration. Each state will do it a little differently,” Tupper said. “Do I, as chief of police in Marshalltown, Iowa, need to engage with the governments of Mexico and Central America because if we are forced to arrest people, we will also be forced to bring them back home? country of origin? Are local taxpayers responsible for all this?”
SF 2030 may not enter into force, but its adoption has already caused solemn damage, the chief said. This discourages immigrants and puts them in the shadows, and it gives the impression among the majority of the public that Iowa cops are now de facto Border Patrol agents, Tupper said.
“Even if federal courts strike down Iowa’s law, people in my community already believe there is such a law and these types of conversations will continue,” he said. “I’m not a politician. I was not involved in writing this law, but I am convinced that the Iowa Legislature and Governor Kim Reynolds never expected this law to actually become law. “I think it was presidential campaign politics and was intended to rile up the base.”
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