\n<\/p>\n
On January 21, ICE agents in Portland, Maine, arrested Emanuel Landila, an asylum seeker from Angola, legally working as a corrections officer recruit. \u201cGood afternoon.\u201d Hours later, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce publicly defended the officer in training, whom he\u2019d vetted and hired a year ago. \u201cIn fact, he was squeaky clean. Squeaky clean.\u201d Sheriff Joyce then delivered one of the most scathing critiques of ICE tactics by local police. \u201cIn 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\u2019s bush league policing.\u201d \u201cThis guy, I knew, was not a criminal alien.\u201d We caught up with Joyce in Washington, D.C., days after he criticized ICE operations in Maine. He\u2019d come for the National Sheriffs Association annual conference. – \u201cHow are you?\u201d – \u201cGood day, Kevin Joyce.\u201d And to share his concerns with lawmakers. \u201cThey came at him like storm troopers. The tactics. I called them bush league because it is. This is not professionalism, but it\u2019s meeting a quota. And you can\u2019t set quotas in law enforcement because bad things are going to happen.\u201d 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. \u201cThey haven\u2019t stopped one million pounds of cocaine, enough to fill 24 or 42 dump trucks.\u201d And to meet with government officials. Many called for better communication from ICE and more respect. \u201cThe communication is worst of the worst. We still can work together, but it takes cooperation. You simply just can\u2019t come in our cities, overshadow us, and then expect us to respond to you.\u201d \u201cIt creates a division within my own profession, and there\u2019s a right way to do our job. And there\u2019s also a wrong way to do the job. So what you\u2019re seeing is this type of enforcement that is not making us safer. It\u2019s dividing us.\u201d Whether and how police cooperate with immigration enforcement has long been controversial, but especially now. \u201cGive 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.\u201d 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. \u201cThey\u2019re 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.\u201d 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. \u201cMy personal opinion, I like it. We get rid of them. If we\u2019re getting rid of the people that don\u2019t need to be here, then it\u2019s great.\u201d \u201cWhat was the longest that ICE held somebody at your jail?\u201d \u201cI want to say one was 100 days.\u201d Many sheriffs rent out jail space for ICE detention as a way to bring in revenue. \u201cThey paid $150 per inmate, per day.\u201d \u201cAnd about how much did that come to a year?\u201d \u201cAbout $3 million. For 33 years, we\u2019ve held ICE inmates at the Cumberland County jail. Two hours after my press conference, they pulled their 50 inmates.\u201d 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\u2019s 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. \u201cKind 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.\u201d 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. \u201cSo one of the reasons we\u2019re 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.\u201d \u201cWe have to go back to our cities with a message of things are going to get better by the summer. If we don\u2019t, it\u2019s going to be a long summer. What I worry about is law enforcement fighting with federal government.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On January 21, ICE agents in Portland, Maine, arrested Emanuel Landila, an asylum seeker from Angola, legally working as a corrections officer recruit. \u201cGood afternoon.\u201d Hours later, Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce publicly defended the officer in training, whom he\u2019d vetted and hired a year ago. \u201cIn fact, he was squeaky clean. Squeaky clean.\u201d Sheriff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44394,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[12508,2466,2755,12212,8229],"class_list":{"0":"post-44393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-frustration","9":"tag-ice","10":"tag-local","11":"tag-sheriffs","12":"tag-voice"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}