By Andrea Bruner, White River Now
The city has agreed to press “pause” on an agreement with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
On Wednesday, Oct. 23, the Batesville City Council’s Public Safety Committee met with representatives from ICE, including Shane Ober, program manager with the ICE 287(g) Program, who covers all of the state of Arkansas, and Doug Fithen, Little Rock office supervisor, to learn more about the agreement.
From the city, those attending included Mayor Rick Elumbaugh and the three Public Safety Committee members, including Aldermen Lackey Moody, Julie Hinkle, and Scott Fredricks. Also in attendance were Aldermen Robb Roberts and Fred Krug, as well as Batesville Police Chief John Scarbrough, Capt. Fred Friar and Lt. Rob Leonard.
The Public Safety Committee does not meet on a regular basis like most of the city’s other commissions and committees, but can call meetings as needed. All council members are welcome to attend.
Established by Congress in 1996, the 287(g) Program authorizes ICE “to delegate state and local officers the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions under the agency’s direction and oversight,” according to ice.gov. “The 287(g) program enhances the safety and security of our nation’s communities by allowing ICE Enforcement and Removal 287(g) Program Operations (ERO) to partner with state and local law enforcement agencies to identify and remove criminal aliens who are amenable to removal from the U.S.”
Ober explained there are three different models: the Jail Enforcement Model, Task Force Model and Warrant Service Office program. According to ICE:
- The Jail Enforcement Model is designed to identify and process removable aliens — with criminal or pending criminal charges — who are arrested by state or local law enforcement agencies.
- The Task Force Model serves as a force multiplier for law enforcement agencies to enforce limited immigration authority with ICE oversight during their routine police duties.
- The Warrant Service Officer program allows ICE to train, certify and authorize state and local law enforcement officers to serve and execute administrative warrants on aliens in their agency’s jail.
Ober said the Jail Enforcement Model is more intense and permits officers to question anyone where they were born or their citizenship. If the person is determined to be a U.S. citizen, the encounter is documented but goes no further, he said, while someone who is in the U.S. lawfully may wind up before an immigration judge to ask for permission to stay here. If a judge orders removal, Ober said the individual may appeal the decision.
Independence County has signed up for the Jail Enforcement Model, Sheriff Shawn Stephens said, adding that this model allows his deputies to serve papers on detainees who have federal warrants. “It allows us to serve that paperwork … on the ones that are in the detention center.”
He explained that his office will not know when a person’s name is run through databases whether they are wanted by ICE – until ICE contacts the local sheriff’s office or jail.
“From my understanding when we book them and they’re fingerprinted, it notifies them (ICE) that they’re in custody and then they contact us with the purpose (to serve federal warrants),” Stephens said.
He also said the ICE 287(g) agreement could possibly provide some funding for housing those images, but said the county was required to sign up because of a law enacted earlier this year by the state Legislature requiring all Arkansas counties with a detention center to partner with ICE. The law that mandates that these counties apply for either the Warrant Service Officer model or the Jail Enforcement Model.
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Meanwhile, Scarbrough said Batesville Police Department would fall under Task Force Model, which authorizes law enforcement agencies to enforce limited immigration authority with ICE oversight during their routine police duties.
“They send us a target list of people they’re looking for,” Scarbrough said. “It saves them from coming all the way from Little Rock or wherever they’re coming from; our officers here know the people, they know who they’re looking for when they get the list. It’s a force multiplier for them, but the benefit to us is it removes criminals from our area. It also gives us training we wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s a potential for equipment.”
Ober said if an officer in the field stops someone with no driver’s license or a foreign ID, that constitutes probable cause to pursue additional authority and question the person. Ober said ICE will be setting up a “command center” in which task force partners can call to run records, verify information, etc. Decisions to arrest would be made by ICE, he noted.
The Warrant Service Officer model authorizes deputies at the jail to serve warrants on inmates and “allows deportation officers to be out on the street looking for fugitives, for criminals,” Ober said.
During the meeting last week, Roberts asked Ober for clarification regarding liability and compensation, and Ober said that could be requested in writing.
“In summary, contrary to what the contract says, you feel that we can ask or have a reasonable expectation that … you’re going to reimburse us for all expenses and have zero liability?” Roberts asked, and Ober said yes.
Scarbrough said the Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police had contacted police agencies about possible participation in the program.
“The chiefs association didn’t condone or condemn – they just said it’s available,” Scarbrough. “I read the program and I thought it sounded like a good thing for us. I asked several officers if they wanted to participate in this, and they said yes.”
ICE requires participating officers to have two years of police experience and not all of his department has that, Scarbrough said, but most of the ones who met the criteria indicated they wanted to take part. “In all, 15 out of 27 wanted to participate and the majority of the rest weren’t eligible.”
Scarbrough said shortly after there was a backlash in the community with people who didn’t agree with the program, and Elumbaugh told him to put the program on pause.
“According to the mayor, he had received some phone calls from people that were concerned about it, and he wanted to pause the program until they had a better understanding of how it worked,” he said.
The city had already signed an agreement with ICE in September and is listed as a participating agency, but Scarbrough said the ICE website is not being regularly updated due to the government shutdown.
Scarbrough said being part of the program would have given his officers specialized training they wouldn’t have otherwise to know what to look for and help determine people who are undocumented, unauthorized, or without lawful status.
He said none of his officers had completed any of the mandatory training to take part in the program before the city suspended the program.
Scarbrough said he still sees value in the 287(g) Program.
“At any point that I can find a way to remove criminals from this city, I’m going to do it,” Scarbrough.
Under the program, his department would receive a list of people with federal pickup warrants. Scarbrough said right now his officers could run a person’s information through state and national crime databases, and if they had federal warrants those might not appear. However, under the 287(g) Program the officers could run the person’s information through an ICE database to determine whether they have federal warrants.
“It would give us access to things we don’t have now,” Scarbrough said.
For instance, if a person has a criminal history in another country, that will not show up on state and national crime databases, but ICE would have access to that.
Scarbrough said the program has become a hot button topic in political circles, “but that wasn’t the aspect we were looking at. … I think it’s too emotional-driven.
“People think we’re going to go out and do all these raids, but that’s not the intent. We’re not going to go out and shut down the poultry industry. We want to get the bad guys or bad girls out,” Scarbrough said.
“Our job is to protect the citizens of the city of Batesville,” he said. “I think the part people forget is our intentions are to make the city safe.”
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Roberts said he and the other council members were not made aware that Scarbrough had entered into the agreement with ICE until after the fact. He said it was actually brought to his attention by “concerned citizens” as well as social media, and it was that public response that prompted the mayor and council to review the agreement.
“We have notified ICE in writing that we have temporarily suspended the agreement again pending further review,” he said.
“We need to study this, we need to understand what is involved in terms of control issues with our police department, what is involved in terms of cost,” Roberts said. “The agreement has some language in there, in fact six instances where it basically says that in ICE-related engagements that our police force or any police force that is part of this program will report under direct supervision and guidance of ICE officials. So we have to think about that very carefully and what that means, and what is the impact to our police department and more importantly, all our residents. …
“That is the control issue. The second issue, to me, is we need to understand the costs that are involved. Within the agreement itself, it makes mention two times that there is absolutely no guarantee of federal reimbursement for the program whatsoever,” Roberts said.
Costs could include overtime, transportation, interpreters, and more, he said. “It’s a host of issues from personnel to equipment that have to be answered and we simply don’t have the answer at this point in time. …
“In the right circumstances, there may be a time where this would be a useful tool for our police department to go after hardened criminals. No one wants those people here. Public safety is our primary concern, but for a person who has committed no crime in this community who is not a danger, we need to understand what the social and economic impacts are to our community by partnering with ICE. As of a couple weeks ago, we were one of five communities in the state of Arkansas who had signed up for this program. We are second in size only to Texarkana, although there may have been others who have signed up since then.”
Besides Batesville and Texarkana, the others are Fordyce, Hampton and Osceola.
Roberts said citizens raised concerns such as, “Are our police department going to target law-abiding individuals whose only offense may be that they are here illegally but are otherwise raising a family, perhaps owning a business, paying taxes. These are people they go to church with, whom their kids are going to their kids’ birthday parties. Without exception, everyone wants to see the bad elements go away – it doesn’t matter if they are white, black, brown, or purple with orange polka dots. We want those bad people to go away.
“We need to know if, at the direction of ICE, this agreement would force our police department to target law abiding residents whose only offense is being here illegally, being targeted by ICE, and we have to be really careful if that target is in any way facilitated by our police department,” Roberts said.
“But in our efforts to ensure public safety, we shouldn’t do anything to cause an entire segment of our population to live in fear of being pulled from their families while living peaceful and law-abiding lives. I believe we’re a better community than that.”
Roberts said his primary concern is that the agreement “clearly puts BPD under ICE control for immigration actions. I don’t believe that BPD would target individuals unless ICE instructs them to do so as allowed under the agreement.”
He said he has concerns that having the city’s police department under federal control for immigration enforcement “could take us in a direction we don’t want to go as a city.”
Fredricks told the ICE representatives that the Public Safety Committee would like have the city attorney, Tim Meitzen, look at the agreement and “clean up the language” before proceeding further, and the committee approved a motion to that effect.
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