In March, police in Phoenix stopped a man for a minor traffic violation. He now faces deportation as a result of the stop, the head of an advocacy organization told the Phoenix New Times.
Phoenix’s new police chief has said he believes his department shouldn’t be involved in immigration enforcement. “As far I’m concerned, if we have a community member that’s scared to call the police based on their immigration status, whatever it might be, we’ve failed,” Chief Matt Giordano told KJZZ.
Neither the Phoenix Police Department, nor the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office — which runs the jail where the man was booked after the traffic stop — currently has a formal agreement with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to aid in arresting immigrants.
However, an ICE agent stationed at the jail screens people booked into the facility, and the jail notifies ICE prior to releasing anyone with a detainer — a request by ICE to hold someone until the federal agency takes them into custody. The Arizona Republic identified more than 100 people who were charged with federal immigration offenses after being held at the jail.
All of this demonstrates how contact with local law enforcement can lead to an immigration arrest, detention and deportation, even in jurisdictions where leaders try to put distance between police and immigration enforcement.
Under the second Trump administration, participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which allows police to enforce immigration law and share information with ICE, has expanded from about 130 agencies to more than 700. This week, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would pay the salaries and benefits of eligible local 287(g) officers.
As the program has expanded, some states have passed laws that criminalize the presence of undocumented immigrants, or even giving aid to them. Political pressure has also reversed policies that limited the role of local police. Following the administration’s move to take over the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., Chief Pamela Smith allowed officers to notify ICE about undocumented people they encounter during stops.
Florida has more agencies participating in the 287(g) program than any other state. In late July, an officer from one of those agencies stopped Carlos Arturo Jimenez Morales for illegally changing lanes. The officer contacted ICE, arrested Jimenez Morales and his passenger, and held them in the county’s jail on a detainer. Jimenez Morales’ initial charges included violating a Florida law that makes it illegal to enter the state as an undocumented person, despite an injunction from a federal judge that temporarily prohibits enforcement of the law.
Jimenez Morales’ case is among a surge of arrests since the start of the second Trump administration. From February through late August, federal immigration authorities booked more than 188,000 people into detention, ICE statistics show. Available data doesn’t reveal precisely how many arrests started with encounters with local law enforcement. However, reports of local stops and arrests show the often-subtle ways local and state police participate in immigration enforcement. They include:
Non-immigration task forces lead to immigration arrests
The task force model — in which officers from local, state and federal agencies work together as a unit — is by far the most common way law enforcement participates in the 287(g) program, but local agencies often collaborate with federal agents in other ways.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department, responsible for Arizona’s second-most populous county, is no longer part of the 287(g) program. “That’s not what we’re here to do,” Sheriff Chris Nanos told KJZZ. However, the border county is part of task forces that include officers from U.S. Border Patrol.
In a video of a Tucson traffic stop recorded by local groups who monitor immigration enforcement and reported by the news organization Arizona Luminaria, a sheriff’s deputy was asked why the federal agency had detained someone after the traffic stop, and the deputy referred to Border Patrol as cross-deputized task force officers. The ACLU of Arizona has sued the sheriff’s department for records of communication between deputies and federal agencies.
When Alexander Zwinck, a sheriff’s deputy in Mesa County, Colorado, pulled over 19-year-old college student Caroline Dias Goncalves in June, for a suspected traffic violation, he let her off with a warning. However, Zwinck also messaged a Signal group that included federal immigration agents, even while Colorado law restricts local law enforcement from participating in immigration enforcement.
ICE agents arrested Dias Goncalves and put her in a detention facility. Dias Goncalves came to the U.S. when she was 7, and eventually received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that allows some protection from deportation for people who moved to the U.S. along with their parents without legal status. The Trump administration has arrested and detained some DACA recipients and encouraged them to leave the country.
She has since been released on bond, and the sheriff’s office disciplined Zwinck and four other deputies with penalties ranging from weeks of unpaid leave to mandatory counseling. Zwinck later resigned, the AP reported.
Electronic data sharing among agencies often includes ICE
Even when local officers don’t explicitly communicate with federal immigration authorities, they can still share information that leads to an immigration arrest.
In March, Los Angeles police arrested Jose Juarez-Basilio and released him without filing any charges. However, Juarez-Basilio’s time in police custody set in motion his deportation, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Court records show that ICE Deportation Officer Jose Cervantes-Zamora noticed an electronic notification about Juarez-Basilio’s fingerprints. The officer said in an affidavit that he matched the fingerprint information and found that Juarez-Basilio had been previously deported, making his reentry into the U.S. a federal crime. ICE agents took Juarez-Basilio into custody after a hearing in federal court. The LA Times said ICE identified dozens of people based on the sharing of fingerprints.
While the Colorado deputy’s Signal message skirted restrictions on sharing information with ICE, it’s unclear how LAPD’s sharing of fingerprint information interacts with restrictions like Special Order 40. The 1979 police order prohibits stops to investigate someone’s immigration status, but mandates notifying immigration authorities when a person is booked with certain misdemeanors, a felony, or an offense for which they’ve previously been arrested.
Police in Chelsea, Massachusetts, said they were not collaborating with ICE, but that fingerprints added to an FBI database and shared with immigration authorities could have alerted the federal agents who arrested three teenagers after they were released by police in May.
Fingerprint data is not the only way that a shared database can lead to an immigration arrest after police contact. While Houston police say they do not ask about immigration status during stops, they do check for warrants using the National Crime Information Center, and will notify federal agencies, like ICE, that created an entry for the person in the database. This led ICE to detain a man after a traffic stop by Houston police.
Traffic stops return as a key pipeline for ICE arrests
It is not surprising that so many of these arrests involve local traffic stops, which are a key strategy aiding immigration enforcement. In some cases, a traffic violation is the deported person’s only offense.
In late July, a three-hour “traffic blitz” by the police department in Avon, west of Indianapolis, resulted in ICE detaining 20 people. The department said the blitz followed ICE’s offer to help identify people giving false or misleading information to officers. While ICE’s latest list of 287(g) agencies does not include the Avon police, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun in January issued an executive order encouraging local agencies to participate in the program. Braun also announced in August that three state law enforcement agencies would be entering into agreements with ICE.
“Indiana is not a safe haven for illegal immigration,” Braun said.
Such agreements expand the ways in which traffic stops can place someone in immigration detention. The Dalton Police Department in northwest Georgia, which pulled over Ximena Arias Cristóbal in May, didn’t have an agreement with ICE, but the Whitfield County Jail, where police took the 19-year-old college student, did.
The teen spent more than two weeks in a detention center before being released on bond. Dashcam footage revealed the officer had pulled Arias Cristóbal over instead of the truck that had actually made the illegal turn for which she was charged. The city dropped her charges and the officer resigned. She still faces deportation proceedings.
Traffic stops have also led to the arrest of a U.S. citizen by federal immigration authorities. Florida Highway Patrol pulled over a van carrying 18-year-old Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio and other passengers on their way to work. Border Patrol officers arrived and arrested Laynez-Ambrosio and his companions. In a video that Laynez-Ambrosio recorded, he can be heard telling the officers he was born in the U.S. Despite this information, Border Patrol held him in a cell for hours, The Guardian reported. The video also recorded an officer saying they are facing more resistance during arrests, and another officer replying, “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”
Laynez-Ambrosio faced a misdemeanor charge for obstructing an officer without violence. Officials ultimately declined to prosecute the case.
State and local police who assist immigration enforcement have long faced criticism that they target certain racial or ethnic groups with traffic stops. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona remains under federal monitoring after a notorious history of discriminatory stops under the leadership of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He was in office in 2010, when the state’s controversial “show me your papers” law went into effect, requiring local police to ask for proof of citizenship even during routine traffic stops.
Discriminatory stops tied to immigration enforcement don’t just happen in places with a high-profile history like Maricopa County. A 2018 ProPublica investigation found that a Pennsylvania state trooper, Luke Macke, dramatically increased the number of traffic citations he gave to people with Hispanic surnames over the course of three years. Macke turned over 19 people to ICE in 2017, even though his agency had no agreement to help with immigration enforcement. The investigation found dozens of other state and local officers who also disproportionately ticketed Hispanic drivers relative to the local population.
Local police taking on immigration enforcement, whether a decade ago in Maricopa County, during the first Trump administration in central Pennsylvania, or in recent months, like Arias Cristóbal’s traffic stop, risks racial profiling, critics say. Holding someone for their immigration status requires asking about their nationality, Arias Cristóbal’s attorney Dustin Baxter told the Washington Post. “The first reason you question that, in most cases, is the skin color or the way they talk.”
