ACLU wants more records on Pima County Sheriff Department's interaction with Border Patrol, ICE

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona is suing the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, arguing it's repeatedly broken Arizona's Public Records Law by failing to produce documents about its dealings with federal authorities.

The brief, filed this month in Pima County Superior Court, is the latest legal action to stem from a request the ACLU’s state chapter made last summer, asking for copies of incident reports in which sheriff’s deputies called or otherwise interacted with ICE and Border Patrol.

John Mitchell, immigrants’ rights attorney with the ACLU of Arizona, says up until the spring of last year, the Sheriff’s Department’s own policy was to make note of incidents involving federal immigration authorities.

“And then, we learned through this litigation that they stopped tracking such records, even though it was their policy to do so,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell says his organization received a trove of records through 2024 after they filed suit last summer, but are still missing more recent records — including those from last year, even though the Sheriff’s Department’s policy to keep those records was still in place.

Mitchell says the department doesn’t appear to engage in immigration enforcement themselves.

“What they have done instead, at least it appears according to these reports, is to, if they suspect somebody lacks lawful status, to continue an encounter with them and, in the meantime, alert Border Patrol,” he said.

Limited records already released to the ACLU show deputies calling Border Patrol. In one incident report, from 2021, a deputy responds to a 911 caller’s suspicious person sighting outside Tucson and calls Border Patrol after encountering three Spanish-speaking men wearing camouflage and walking on the side of the road. The deputy says he calls agents to the scene after searching the men’s bags and determining they aren’t suspected of any crime.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos has repeatedly said his department does not call immigration agents during traffic stops.

Mitchell says the Sheriff's Department's policy of tracking communications with Border Patrol quietly came to an end last year. The next stage of the group's lawsuit looks to get the most recent records in order to better understand interactions with federal law enforcement.

“This was something that their own policy told them to track, they admit that they did not do that according to the policy, and there are potentially very important findings about the constitutionality of deputies’ communications with Border Patrol,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Department said Nanos would not comment on pending litigation and did not respond to questions about the department’s policy on tracking Border Patrol interactions.

A hearing for the new filing is scheduled for April 3 in Tucson.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated to clarify the latest legal action is a brief in an existing lawsuit.