The Battle to Stay in America by Michael Kagan

Author:Michael Kagan [Kagan, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948908511
Publisher: University of Nevada Press

in the last part of the Obama administration and the first part of the Trump administration, most arrests were conducted through [programs that link local arrests to immigration enforcement]. However, the proportion of arrests that resulted from the collaboration of local incarceration authorities experienced a noticeable spike under the Trump administration.10

The main engine for this, the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), accounted for 41 percent of ICE arrests in the first year of the Trump administration—up from 34 percent in the last year under Obama.11

The role of local police in ICE arrests is even more pronounced in Las Vegas than nationally. In fiscal year 2018, in Clark County, there were only 167 at-large arrests in the community by ICE. That means ICE officers made direct arrests on their own, in the field—what people normally think of when they think of an immigration raid—only a dozen or so times a month. In the same year, CAP, which operates at the Las Vegas City Jail and which likely doomed Fernando, accounted for 457 “arrests” by ICE.12

An even bigger number of ICE “arrests” came from the Clark County Detention Center, which is run by Clark County sheriff Joe Lombardo. That system operated under a different name—the 287(g) Program. Under this program, Las Vegas Metro police officers in the jail were deputized to work as federal ICE officers. They even wear ICE uniforms. They interview detainees and start their deportation paperwork. With the 287(g) Program, the local jail does more than just follow a request from ICE to hold a person. The local police officers actually make and process the requests themselves, in the name of ICE. They do ICE’s work for them. In Clark County, the 287(g) Program accounted for 676 ICE “arrests” in 2018.13

Together, CAP and the 287(g) Program accounted for 83 percent of all of the “arrests” that ICE made for the year in the county. That’s in line with national patterns. According to a 2019 study, four out of five deportations from the interior of the United States resulted from the person being transferred directly to ICE from another law enforcement agency. Basically, everyone who has been focused on ICE knocking on people’s doors in their homes has been looking in the wrong direction. ICE was taking people out of view, just like the President said.14

In 2014, my former co-director at the UNLV Immigration Clinic, Fatma Marouf, began threatening to sue the Clark County sheriff—at the time, Doug Gillespie—for illegally detaining people to hand them over to ICE. She worked with the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), which is based in California. They sent letters threatening a lawsuit. They found a law firm to handle the case. They were ready to go. Then, in July 2014, Sheriff Gillespie announced that his department would no longer hold people based on ICE detainers. That didn’t address the city jail, but it was a big deal. We thought we had blocked part of the deportation pipeline before Donald Trump even announced he was running for president.

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