BREAKING: Camden (DE) Police Department Cuts Deal With ICE
Several Delaware civil rights organizations are calling for the town of Camden and its police department to withdraw from a recently adopted agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which allows local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.
ICE records show the Camden Police Department signed onto the federal agency’s 287(g) program on April 29. As of May 6, Camden was the only Delaware law enforcement agency to do so.
Neither the town’s mayor nor its police chief immediately responded to Delaware Online/The News Journal’s questions about how the agreement came about or why it was joined now, given the program has been around for decades.
According to ICE records, Camden’s agreement uses the 287(g) “task force model,” which allows local agencies to enforce “limited immigration authority with ICE oversight during their routine police duties.”
It’s not immediately clear how the partnership will work, given the lack of information provided by Camden officials.
This must not stand. To the Governor and the General Assembly–this warrants an emergency response from you.
To all who are concerned about this, please do what Joe Connor in his comment in the Open Thread urged you to do–sign this petition from the Delaware ACLU.
I know our readers will step up. Several already have. It is now up to our public officials.
Jonathan Tate pointed out that this bill would address this directly:
https://legis.delaware.gov/BillDetail?LegislationId=141895
It’s currently been buried in the House Judiciary Committee, which is what happens when an asshole ex-cop like Franklin Cooke can join with the Rethugs to bury a bill there.
Thanks, Madame Speaker.
Reading the bill, I don’t see the consequences for a police officer who would violate the law by asking. Is there a penalty imposed for violation?
This is not Mimi’s fault. Rep. Lynn asked for it to be tabled when it was brought up in committee. My efforts to find out why, including asking multiple co-sponsors, have been fruitless thus far. Perhaps, as Nick Beard alluded to, it needs more enforcement mechanisms?
There is a major issue with that bill. While clearly well-intentioned, it would prohibit law enforcement from asking questions in human trafficking investigations. Human traffickers frequently exploit their victims by taking advantage of their immigration status- seizing their passports, threatening them with deportation, etc.
So it is pretty clearly (I think, at least) necessary for law enforcement to be able to ask trafficking victims about their immigration status in order to build a case against the traffickers. But under this bill, that would be prohibited- in fact, a trafficker might be able to argue that a violation of this statute justifies suppression of the evidence obtained.
I think the intent of the bill is clear and it is definitely laudable. But the bill needs to be re-drafted with an exemption for law enforcement conducting trafficking (and probably all labor law-related) investigations, or the tragic and unintended consequence will be that the bill shields the worst exploiters of immigrants in the interest of protecting those same immigrants from federal law enforcement.
(I should also mention that trafficking victims are already protected from deportation under a number of available options- continuing presence visas, T visas, and U visas come immediately to mind. But most of those require some level of cooperation with the law enforcement investigation. So the other unintended consequence of the bill would be that the human trafficking victims would still be subject to deportation because they can’t cooperate with a law enforcement investigation that isn’t allowed to talk to them about the conditions of their exploitation. In the narrow context of human trafficking, the bill actually makes things worse for the people it’s supposed to be helping.)
Deal has been cancelled per CoastTV! https://www.facebook.com/61553532344066/posts/pfbid02b7niTr5UYhD6Ny4DtS3su4KVz1PrL8RA35D2KhPucYiFs4bwL8WK3dh8U1J2rBERl/?mibextid=wwXIfr
That’s great! Something tells me that some state officials put some pressure on here.