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By: Marty Schladen – Ohio Capital Journal

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With Congress failing to pass any meaningful immigration reforms, state legislatures are increasingly taking up the issue. But some police officials and immigrant-rights advocates say the harshest of those laws will further overstretch police and drive many immigrants further into the shadows.

Speaking last week at the National Immigration Forum’s annual Leading the Way conference, the leaders said that while it might sound like common sense to task local law enforcement with determining who might be here without authorization, the reality is a lot more complicated.

According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Texas and West Virginia already have laws on the books forcing local law enforcement to participate in deporting noncitizens. It adds that legislators in many others are seeking to join them. The federal courts have sharply limited enforcement of those laws after Texas last year passed Senate Bill 4, which challenges a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned much of an Arizona law that sought to put immigration enforcement into the hands of state authorities.

Limited personnel, resources

In April, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, signed Senate File 2340, which would make unauthorized immigration a crime under state law, give local law enforcement the power to enforce it, and allow state judges to order deportation or incarceration of the undocumented. As with Texas’s SB 4, that law has been stayed by the federal courts.

Speaking at the National Immigration Forum conference, 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 simple lack of resources.

“Every police department and sheriff’s office in the United States right now is hiring,” he said. “For the last five years it’s been a constant battle to try to maintain staffing.”

Tupper said he needs 50 officers, the city of 27,000 budgeted for 42, and he can’t even keep those filled as the department scrambles to respond to more than 750 service calls each week.

SF 2340 “would put local law enforcement on the front lines enforcing immigration law in Iowa and we’re a long ways from the border if you looked at a map lately,” Tupper said. “We just don’t have the time to do that and we don’t have the resources to do that. We all have concerns about just what this legislation will do and the unfunded mandates it will place on local governments.”

Alexandria, Va., Sheriff Sean Casey agreed that law enforcement agencies across the country are understaffed, and he said it wasn’t helpful when Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, vetoed bills that would have allowed police chiefs and sheriffs the authority to hire noncitizens such as lawful permanent residents and those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — or DACA — program.

“Why wouldn’t you trust your local chiefs and sheriffs to make their own hiring decisions?” Casey asked. “I thought we did a really good job crafting some pretty good legislation, but unfortunately, politics got in the way. I heard, ‘How can a noncitizen tell a citizen what to do?’ I really found that to be unproductive, and I don’t think it’s in the best interest of public safety, to be honest.”

Living in the shadows

Perhaps even more harmful to public safety than stretching scarce law enforcement resources would be to scare large swaths of the community from interacting with cops for fear of deportation, the officials said.

Iowa might sound to outsiders like a lily-white state, but Tupper said his city was officially 25% Hispanic — and he thought the group made up closer to 40% of the city’s population. On top of that, refugees from Southeast Asia are making up growing share of the populace, and the chief added that 50 languages are spoken in Marshalltown’s public schools.

To have any part of that community afraid to approach the police makes the entire public less safe, Tupper said.

Criminals are exploiting those fears, for example with domestic abusers telling their victims, “‘You can’t call the police because if you do, they’re going to deport you,’” Tupper said. “We cannot put local law enforcement in the shoes of federal immigration enforcement if we expect to keep our communities safe, because it actually does the opposite.”

Reyna Montoya is herself a DACA recipient, with her family fleeing from Tijuana, Mexico to Arizona after Mexican police kidnapped her father in 2003. She founded and runs Aliento, which supports and advocates for the undocumented and mixed-status families.

She said that when former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was racially profiling residents in an improper attempt to enforce immigration law, immigrants would text each other reports of where police were so people could avoid them.

“It meant for me and my mother deciding not to go to the grocery store,” Montoya said. “If it was on a Sunday, it meant not going to church. We weren’t going to risk getting a deportation proceeding. Typically, that’s what would happen in our first face-to-face interaction with law enforcement.”

She said she knew many who didn’t report crimes against them for fear that police would initiate deportation proceedings.

“The reality is that the trust has been completely broken,” Montoya said. “There’s been so many undocumented immigrants that didn’t report crimes that they were impacted by because of the fear that they would get deported.”

Legal quandary

Tupper and Casey, the law enforcement officials, said they feared that if required to enforce immigration law, they didn’t know how to keep their officers or deputies from engaging in noxious practices like racial profiling.

“We do not know and we have not received any direction from the state of Iowa about how this law should be enforced,” Tupper said.

Then there’s the prospect of a patchwork of inconsistent immigration laws across the states.

“I also worry that we could end up having 50 different ways of dealing with immigration in the United States. Every state will do it a little bit differently,” Tupper said. “Do I, as the police chief of Marshalltown, Iowa, have to establish relationships with governments in Mexico and Central America because — if we’re forced to take people into custody — are we also going to be forced to get them back to their country of origin? Are local taxpayers going to be responsible for all of that?”

SF 2030, might not be in effect, but its passage has already done serious damage, the chief said. It’s scared immigrants into the shadows, and it’s created the impression among much of the public that Iowa cops are now de facto Border Patrol agents, Tupper said.

“Even if the federal courts strike down the Iowa law, people in my community already think it exists and those kinds of conversations are going to continue,” he said. “I’m not a politician. I was not involved in the writing of this law, but my belief is that the Iowa legislature and Gov. Kim Reynolds never expected that this law would actually take effect. I think it was presidential campaign-year politics and it was designed to rile up the base.”

Marty Schladen

Marty Schladen has been a reporter for decades, working in Indiana, Texas and other places before returning to his native Ohio to work at The Columbus Dispatch in 2017. He’s won state and national journalism awards for investigations into utility regulation, public corruption, the environment, prescription drug spending and other matters.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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