Local Sheriffs Voice Frustration With ICE

On January 21, ICE agents in Portland, Maine, arrested Emanuel Landila, an asylum seeker from Angola, legally working as a corrections officer recruit. “Good afternoon.” Hours later, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce publicly defended the officer in training, whom he’d vetted and hired a year ago. “In fact, he was squeaky clean. Squeaky clean.” Sheriff Joyce then delivered one of the most scathing critiques of ICE tactics by local police. “In the three minutes, they got out, they pulled a guy from the car, handcuffed him, put him in the car. They all took off, leaving his car with the windows down, the lights on, unsecure and unoccupied. Folks, that’s bush league policing.” “This guy, I knew, was not a criminal alien.” We caught up with Joyce in Washington, D.C., days after he criticized ICE operations in Maine. He’d come for the National Sheriffs Association annual conference. – “How are you?” – “Good day, Kevin Joyce.” And to share his concerns with lawmakers. “They came at him like storm troopers. The tactics. I called them bush league because it is. This is not professionalism, but it’s meeting a quota. And you can’t set quotas in law enforcement because bad things are going to happen.” To carry out mass deportations, ICE needs the cooperation of local law enforcement, mostly in the form of access to local jails. But sending thousands of masked ICE and Border Patrol agents into American cities has frayed those relations. At the gathering in D.C., hundreds of sheriffs from around the country came for trainings and meetings. “They haven’t stopped one million pounds of cocaine, enough to fill 24 or 42 dump trucks.” And to meet with government officials. Many called for better communication from ICE and more respect. “The communication is worst of the worst. We still can work together, but it takes cooperation. You simply just can’t come in our cities, overshadow us, and then expect us to respond to you.” “It creates a division within my own profession, and there’s a right way to do our job. And there’s also a wrong way to do the job. So what you’re seeing is this type of enforcement that is not making us safer. It’s dividing us.” Whether and how police cooperate with immigration enforcement has long been controversial, but especially now. “Give us access to the illegal alien public safety threat in the safety and security of a jail. Get these agreements in place. That means less agents on the street.” Over the past year, more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies have signed partnership agreements with ICE. Many hold jail inmates for ICE to pick up. “They’re already in custody. It keeps them from having to go out and arrest them in the field. They just come to our jail, pick them up, take them away.” An increasing number of states are barring or restricting some police from working with ICE. Other states have done the opposite and now require police to cooperate with ICE. “My personal opinion, I like it. We get rid of them. If we’re getting rid of the people that don’t need to be here, then it’s great.” “What was the longest that ICE held somebody at your jail?” “I want to say one was 100 days.” Many sheriffs rent out jail space for ICE detention as a way to bring in revenue. “They paid $150 per inmate, per day.” “And about how much did that come to a year?” “About $3 million. For 33 years, we’ve held ICE inmates at the Cumberland County jail. Two hours after my press conference, they pulled their 50 inmates.” In a statement to The Times, a D.H.S. spokesperson said ICE withdrew its detainees from the Cumberland County jail over the hire of illegal aliens and subpoenaed the Sheriff’s Office for its employment records. Joyce said he vetted Landila appropriately. After three weeks in detention, a federal judge ordered Landila released on bond. Sheriff Joyce is assessing whether his office can still employ him. “Kind of wanted to stop by and thank you for your efforts on the increase in immigration issues that we had a couple of weeks ago.” After the conference, Sheriff Joyce met with Maine lawmakers on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are threatening to block funding for D.H.S. if immigration agents are not held to higher policing standards. “So one of the reasons we’re holding up the Homeland Security bill is to talk about adding this kind of criteria that we expect of our own police officers: not wearing masks, requiring body cameras, having actual judicial warrants before they bust down the doors of your house or haul you off somewhere. So things that people have come to expect from law enforcement and that are critical to the ability for citizens to trust law enforcement.” “We have to go back to our cities with a message of things are going to get better by the summer. If we don’t, it’s going to be a long summer. What I worry about is law enforcement fighting with federal government.”