Cold as ICE: How Local Sheriffs Are Driving Trump’s Deportation Agenda
And it’s terrifying immigrant communities.
STORY BY SETH FREED WESSLER · DATA ANALYSIS BY SINDUJA RANGARAJAN AND TAYLOR ELDRIDGESEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 ISSUE
For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.
Carolina Ciru told herself it was going to be okay when she saw the flashing blue lights in her rearview mirror on a Friday afternoon in February. Ciru, a 42-year-old Honduran immigrant, had been stopped before while driving near her home in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The last time, she’d told the officer she didn’t have a driver’s license, and he wrote a ticket and told her to find someone to drive her home. But this time was different. Ciru was arrested for driving without a license, a misdemeanor. She was handcuffed, put in the back of a police cruiser, and delivered to the Gwinnett County Jail in Lawrenceville. Her 22-year-old daughter, Valerie, tried to pay bail but was told her mother would not be allowed to leave.
Three days later, Ciru was driven three hours south to the Irwin County Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. In May, she told me over a video call that she was certain ICE would release her. “They have to let me out of here,” she said. “I think they will.” Ciru, who has diabetes and a pacemaker for a heart condition, had arrived at Irwin just as the pandemic was approaching; by the time we talked in May, the coronavirus was spreading inside the facility. Her health conditions put her at clear risk. “I should not be here during this,” she said. “I should not be here at all.”https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.htmlAdvertise with Mother Jones
Ciru lived with her partner and her five children about 30 miles east of Atlanta. She had been in the United States for 25 years, most of them in Gwinnett County. “Gwinnett is my home,” Ciru said. “It is where everything in my life is.” Her 13-year-old twins and teenage son were at home with her partner, as was her 20-year-old son, who is autistic and prone to seizures. “Nobody else can keep him safe,” she said. “I am the one who cares for him.”You can also listen to this story read aloud:https://audm.herokuapp.com/player-embed/?pub=mojo&articleID=cold-ice-trump-deportation
For more articles read aloud: download the Audm iPhone app.
Inside Irwin, Ciru had befriended a group of women from Gwinnett County who had also been detained by ICE after being arrested by local police. Monica, who was born in Uruguay, had been picked up on a domestic assault charge, even though she said she was defending herself from her abusive husband. Camila, a Dominican woman, had been charged with credit card fraud and turned over to ICE as she awaited trial. (I have changed their names at their request.)
All of them were in immigration detention not because federal agents had staked out their homes or caught them in a workplace raid, but because Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway had sent them there. For more than a decade, Conway has deployed his deputies as de facto immigration agents and turned his jail into a depot for undocumented immigrants headed for deportation. In the last decade, Conway’s agency has identified more than 21,000 people to hand over to ICE. Since 2017, Gwinnett, Georgia’s second-most populous county, has helped to detain more immigrants than any other county except five counties in states along the US-Mexico border.
“Honestly,” Ciru said, “my issue isn’t with ICE, not my first issue. My issue first is with the cops up there. The police up there they treat us like we’re nothing.” Camila told me, “Up in Gwinnett, they hunt for immigrants.”
SIGN UP FOR OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.Email
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners.
About 267,000 noncitizens were deported by ICE last year. That number was driven in large part by local sheriffs like Conway; 70 percent of ICE arrests originate in the criminal justice system, mostly in jails. And as President Trump’s war on immigrants has expanded, sheriffs have become some of its most enthusiastic foot soldiers. In Gwinnett and more than 140 other counties, ICE has authorized and trained sheriff’s deputies to assist it. In most of these counties, local officers use federal databases to check the immigration status of people booked into local jails and then place warrantless immigration holds on noncitizens who may be deportable. Since 2017, the number of sheriffs who have agreed to participate in this program, known as 287(g) for the section of the federal code that created it in 1996, has spiked. Most are in rural counties across the South and Southwest. In addition, hundreds of other sheriffs comply voluntarily with ICE’s requests to keep immigrants in custody for up to 48 hours until agents pick them up. Texas now requires its jails to do so, and lawmakers in several states, including Georgia, have barred counties from imposing “sanctuary” policies that curtail ICE’s access to local detainees.
While cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE has grown, so have efforts to frustrate these initiatives. Civil rights activists and advocates for immigrants say sheriffs’ collaboration with ICE encourages racial profiling, discourages immigrants from using public services, and turns any interaction between noncitizens and the police into a potential conduit to deportation. Since Trump took office, hundreds of counties and several states have passed ordinances prohibiting jails from complying with ICE requests unless presented with a warrant signed by a federal judge to detain a person. California’s 2017 “sanctuary state” law set new limits on ICE’s ability to use local jails to identify and detain noncitizens. At a 2018 meeting with California mayors and sheriffs, Trump described it as “a law that forces the release of illegal immigrant criminals, drug dealers, gang members, and violent predators into your communities.” In June, the Supreme Court declined to hear the administration’s challenge to the law.“I believe that the goal of the current sheriff and others is to keep out immigrants, to keep Gwinnett County homogeneously white and conservative.”
Jails’ role in detaining immigrants has increasingly become a local political issue. Amid public pressure, more than 20 law enforcement agencies, mostly in urban counties, have ended their 287(g) programs in the past three years. In 2018, voters in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes Charlotte, kicked out a sheriff who’d participated in the program. In June, the sheriff in Athens, Georgia, who had honored warrantless detainer requests even without a 287(g) agreement, lost to a primary challenger who had described the effects of local ICE collaboration on immigrant communities to the Appeal as “almost a level of terrorism when people are living in fear to the point that they will not ask for help.” Now, in several other counties, sheriffs who have stood behind 287(g) agreements or otherwise assisted ICE are facing credible challenges in November. The fight has also come to Gwinnett County.
The American sheriff holds a peculiar office. Most of the country’s more than 3,000 sheriffs are elected and often not accountable to a county executive and thus have no real oversight beyond voters who typically keep reelecting them. (As of 2014, one-third of the sheriffs who had overseen the nation’s 200 largest jails had held office for 15 years or more.) In some jurisdictions, deputies make arrests. But their main job is running local jails and they have overseen vast expansions of the pretrial detention system. They often operate jails with near impunity; reports of abuse, negligence, and unchecked violence abound. Some big-city sheriffs oversee budgets of more than $1 billion. Amid calls for systemic shifts in policing and incarceration, sheriffs are now facing long-overdue scrutiny.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.htmlAdvertise with Mother Jones
Butch Conway, whom voters have elected six times over a quarter-century, has played the role of the iron-fisted good-old-boy sheriff with relish. In 2000, he created a riot control team for the county jail; according to a lawsuit filed by 83 former detainees, the unit was used to viciously punish rulebreakers. In January, a former deputy on the riot control team was indicted for allegedly punching a detained woman in the head. When a woman complained about poor medical care inside his jail, Conway posted on Facebook, “If you don’t like the way we run the Gwinnett County Jail, stay out of it.” In 2018, the Department of Justice ordered him to repay nearly $70,000 in asset forfeiture funds he’d used to buy himself a muscle car.
But Conway’s signature feat has been wholly extracurricular; detaining suspected undocumented immigrants is not part of his job description. Conway even let ICE set up its own office inside the jail to supervise and streamline its work. At a 2018 visit to the White House, Conway boasted about the tens of thousands of “illegal aliens” that had been identified inside his jail. “We’ve cooperated with our partners with immigration the 20-plus years I’ve been sheriff,” Conway told Trump. “We’ll continue working with ICE and we certainly appreciate everything that you folks are doing for us. We need the help.” Even the coronavirus hasn’t slowed Conway’s commitment to detaining immigrants. Earlier this year, ICE limited its detention operations, picking up fewer people inside the country, including from Gwinnett County Jail. Nevertheless, Conway’s deputies flagged more detainees than ICE could pick up.
Conway has said that his goal in cooperating with ICE is to ensure public safety. “The only interest I and this agency have had in immigration is when someone commits a crime,” he told reporters at a press conference in January. Two months later, he re-upped his cooperation agreement with ICE for the third time. This one had no expiration date. “I would deport citizens if I could,” he said earlier this year. “A lot of the illegal aliens that we identify and hold for ICE, they’re preying on their community.”
The data doesn’t bear that out. Forty-five percent of the 4,200 people whom Conway’s jail helped detain for ICE between January 2017 and July 2019 were arrested by local police for driving without a license, or other traffic violations such as failure to use a blinker, or running a stop sign. An additional 7 percent of the county’s ICE detentions stemmed from DUI charges, according to our analysis of county data. The remaining 48 percent were charged with, but often not convicted of, other misdemeanors and felonies; rather than going through the criminal court system, which may have meant bonding out before trial, they were moved to ICE detention.
GET OUR AWARD-WINNING MAGAZINE
Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.Subscribe
Conway has insisted that his zeal for detaining immigrants is not racially motivated. “I’m not racist. Never have been,” he told reporters earlier this year. Yet he has made no secret of his views on race, policing, and politics. In 2015, he said anti–police violence activists were “domestic terrorists” who advocate murdering cops. The following year, he signed on as a leader of Trump’s Georgia campaign team. In July 2019, Conway invited an anti-immigrant activist named D.A. King to a panel discussion about the 287(g) program. (King, the founder of a Georgia organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a hate group, was reported to have once said that undocumented immigrants are “not here to mow your lawn—they’re here to blow up your buildings and kill your children, and you, and me.”) In 2019, a reporter for the online magazine Filter found that Conway had “liked” the Facebook page for the New Confederate Army, which promotes Southern secession.
For generations, Gwinnett County has been a bastion of white conservative political power. But that is changing—just as Conway is moving on. After a quarter century as sheriff, Conway announced early this year that he would not run for reelection, citing personal reasons. He tapped his chief deputy, Lou Solis, to succeed him. (Solis’ bio notes that he served as the Georgia State Patrol’s Spanish-speaking hostage negotiator.) Neither responded to requests for an interview, but Solis recently called the 287(g) program “priceless” and argued that deporting immigrants keeps residents safe.
In 2016, Conway ran unopposed and won 97 percent of the vote. Yet the easy path to the sheriff’s office that Conway long enjoyed may no longer be open to Solis. Due to immigration from Asia and Latin America and a growing Black population, Gwinnett has gone from being 90 percent white in 1990 to 36 percent white today. Flags from more than 100 countries hang in the lobby of a local high school, one for each country its students’ families immigrated from. “We are the most diverse county in the southeast United States,” the head of the local Chamber of Commerce recently told Georgia Trend Magazine. “We are the prototype community for the future.”
Two Democrats, both Black police officers, are running against Solis. Curtis Clemons and Keybo Taylor have pledged to end the county jail’s collaboration with ICE. “I believe that the goal of the current sheriff and others is to keep out immigrants, to keep Gwinnett County homogeneously white and conservative,” Clemons told me. He also said he’d immediately disband the riot control team and try to shrink the jail’s population by limiting the use of cash bail. “There’s no evidence that the 287(g) program has done anything good, anything to affect crime, anything to keep anyone safe,” Taylor said. “It has created an atmosphere of severe distrust and made immigrants less safe.” If Gwinnett County’s demographic and electoral trends are any indication, the winner of the Democratic primary runoff in August will likely succeed Butch Conway.
Eslkevin's Blog 