As President Donald Trump attempts to fulfill a campaign promise to deport millions of individuals in the country without legal status, Arizona Republicans want to force state and local authorities to help out.
They’ve introduced legislation like the Arizona ICE Act at the state Capitol that could strengthen existing programs designed to facilitate cooperation between states and the federal government.
Republican lawmakers at the Arizona Capitol are pushing a handful of bills that would force agencies and officials across the state to support federal immigration efforts.
“And right now, the goal, of course, is to focus on the 700,000 criminal illegal aliens that have been identified and helping with that effort,” Senate President Warren Petersen (R-Gilbert) said.
Petersen initially sought to require sheriffs, local police and the state prison system to sign cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs enforcement to participate in the agency’s 287-g program.
Under 287-g programs, local and state law enforcement officers are trained by ICE and authorized to participate in certain immigration enforcement functions.
“This is about removing the most dangerous illegal immigrants from our streets,” he said.
Petersen ultimately stripped the 287-g requirement out of his Arizona ICE Act, but it would still require sheriffs and prison officials to honor requests from ICE to hold onto people already in their custody.
“And then the second thing is simply just not passing any ordinance or doing anything to obstruct the federal government from executing the law. It's really that simple,” he said.
That worries critics like Sen. Analise Ortiz (D-Phoenix), who argues the bill will disproportionately affect minority communities, including US citizens and others in the country with legal status.
“And that is not just an assumption of what would happen under this bill. That is, Arizona's history, our sordid and shameful history. No one should fear that living their normal everyday life could lead to being pulled over and questioned about whether you belong here,” she said.
Ortiz was referring to the situation in Maricopa County over a decade ago, when the federal government terminated a 287-g agreement with the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. That came after a federal judge found the department engaged in a pattern of racial profiling.
Attorney Louis Moffa represented a defendant who successfully sued the sheriff’s department after he was arrested during an immigration raid despite being in the country legally. He said the evidence in the case showed that then Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office was disproportionately targeting Hispanic people with its immigration raids.
“Well, people were living in fear,” he said.
Moffa said the situation in Maricopa County shows how the 287-g program can go wrong. His case showed Maricopa County wasn’t complying with rules governing the program, such as keeping up with required training for deputies.
“The issue that we argued through the court was that the Sheriff's Department was abusing the program, that it was taking the program way beyond its boundaries and that it was using the program to profile, racially profile,” he said.
That fear isn’t a hypothetical one for Phoenix resident, Jose Patiño.
“Growing up in West Phoenix, I didn’t see police as the heroes. I always saw them as, you keep your distance, and you don’t want to have police coming around,” he said.
Patiño was born in Mexico and he’s been in Arizona since he was a kid. Today, he’s the vice president of education and external affairs with the immigrant advocacy group Aliento, and a DACA recipient.
The Obama-era DACA program gives some young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children temporary deportation protection and a work permit. But it didn’t exist until Patiño was in his 20s.
Before that, he was completely undocumented. Growing up, Patiño says he didn’t know 287-g by its name.
“I just knew individuals … within my community who had been pulled over by Phoenix police, and then the next thing we knew, they were in detention in Eloy or Florence, or a few months later, that they were deported,” he said.
Patiño says as a result, immigrant families didn’t distinguish between local departments and federal immigration authorities like ICE. And they hesitated to make emergency calls for things like break-ins or other crimes, for fear of being asked about their immigration status.
“To this day, I still get little goosebumps, like when you see the sheriff’s office, when you see the vehicle. You still have this reaction,” Patiño said.
He says the memories he has of 287-g are tied to SB 1070. The 2010 state law compelled local law enforcement to conduct immigration-related arrests before it was largely struck down as constitutional in the Supreme Court.
“Just seeing then Sheriff Arpaio having checkpoints outside of schools, conducting workplace raids, and pulling people over, because they suspected them to be in the country undocumented — which ultimately led to hundreds of millions of dollars of lawsuits, but also led to hundreds of thousands of families separated,” he said.
Now, with bills like the Arizona ICE Act making their way through the legislature, he’s watching younger community members face the same fears his family once did. Over the last two months, he’s talked with U.S. citizen teenagers with undocumented parents who are afraid to go to work or even take out the trash.
“Those kinds of thoughts and commentary — I remember living through them in 2009, '10, '12. And I’d hoped we’d moved past them, but this is a familiar feeling of people afraid to live their lives,” he said.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office’s 287-g agreement was Arizona’s most infamous, but police departments, sheriffs offices and other law enforcement across the state have entered into various versions of the agreement over the years. A handful of jurisdictions still have them in place today.
“What we know from the past experience in Arizona and other jurisdictions again is that these agreements incentivize racial profiling, because of course local police don’t know from looking at somebody whether they’re undocumented,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director with the American Immigration Council.
Gupta says the Trump administration likely seeks to activate pending 287-g agreements across the country to be used as “force multipliers” for a mass deportation plan. The federal government can’t force states into those agreements or to collaborate on immigration enforcement under the 10th Amendment.
“But states and localities absolutely can tell their own jurisdictions how to use resources when it comes to policing and public safety,” she said.
Gupta says legal questions remain about what happens if and when local jurisdictions go against state plans.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series looking at the Arizona Legislature's efforts to increase local involvement in immigration enforcement. Read Part 2 here.
