• Slug: News-Immigration Enforcement Sheriffs, 1120 words.
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By Emma Paterson
Cronkite News

WASHINGTON – Arizona sheriffs haven’t been ordered to help yet with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, and many would like to keep it that way.

“We’re not going to go out and actively try to hunt people down,” said Graham County Sheriff Preston Allred. “We have never done that. We don’t do that type of stuff.”

“There’s just nowhere in my duties or responsibilities as the sheriff here that I should be involved or engaged” in migrant round-ups, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos said. “That’s not what we’re here to do.”

Trump’s vow to detain and deport everyone in the country without valid documents – at least 11 million people, including 273,000 in Arizona, according to the Migration Policy Institute – thrilled supporters during the campaign.

“If you have laws, they shouldn’t be there and be ignored,” Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff, said by phone Tuesday. “When I was sheriff, I enforced all of the laws.”

Once known as “America’s toughest sheriff,” Arpaio, now 92, received the first pardon Trump issued, in August 2017, for a misdemeanor that carried 6 months in jail. His crime: disobeying a federal judge’s order to stop racial profiling in detaining “individuals suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.”

Migrant advocates say Trump’s deportation pledge has fueled distrust of local law enforcement, whether they’ve been enlisted in the effort or not.

“We already have enough need for them to protect property and individual humans,” said José Patiño, vice president of education and external affairs at Aliento, an immigrant advocacy group. “To me it’s another way for distrust in local communities and police to boom.”

Some sheriffs, including Coconino County’s Bret Axlund, share that concern. Through an aide, the sheriff said he is “extremely concerned” that community members will be afraid to report crimes or interact with law enforcement if the department enforces immigration law.

Republicans in the Arizona Legislature are taking steps to force police departments and the 15 county sheriffs to help with federal enforcement.

Last week, state Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, proposed a bill that would require every law enforcement agency in Arizona to sign agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and to “use its best efforts to support the enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

Only four Arizona departments have such agreements, known as 287(g), according to ICE: Yavapai, Pinal and La Paz counties, and the city of Mesa. Each jurisdiction has agreed to house detained migrants and have ICE-trained detention officers identify inmates who might be subject to deportation.

None agreed to another available option – for ICE to train their officers on enforcing federal immigration statutes.

“We are going to agree to house individuals for ICE if they’re determined to be detained and deported,” said La Paz County Sheriff William Ponce.

“I will always work with my federal partners,” said Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple, who noted that ICE doesn’t need to use his jail because it has “plenty of beds” at its own nearby detention facility.

Sheriffs don’t answer to the White House or Congress, but they do answer to the Legislature.

“Law enforcement officials are state entities,” said Angela Banks, vice dean at the Arizona State University law school. “The federal government cannot direct state and local agencies … unless there are agreements between both sides.”

In Pima County, which spans more of the border than any other in Arizona, the sheriff said his department has no problem providing backup when the Border Patrol needs it. But that’s as far as he’ll go.

“We will assist them, of course,” Nanos said. “But we’re not doing their job.”

He and other Arizona sheriffs said their departments are already stretched thin, and don’t want their deputies saddled with immigration enforcement.

That workload is likely to expand anyway, under Proposition 314.

The measure, approved nearly 2 to 1 by Arizona voters in November, makes it a crime under state law to cross the border illegally. It also lets state judges order deportation – traditionally a federal authority.

Those provisions are on hold pending a ruling from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a similar Texas law known as SB 4.

A number of Arizona sheriffs opposed Prop. 314 and many said they’d struggle to enforce it. The current president of the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association, Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes, said sheriffs recognize the frustration that led voters to approve it, though.

“It mandates local law enforcement to do a federal job because the federal government was not doing it. They were flat out not doing it,” he said.

The ACLU of Arizona, which also opposed Prop. 314, predicted that the measure “will incite the discrimination and harassment of immigrants.”

Several sheriffs interviewed by Cronkite News noted that Prop. 314 allows them to be selective about enforcement – leeway they may not have if they’re required to enforce federal immigration law.

On Monday, the state House Public Safety & Law Enforcement Committee approved a bill that would provide $50 million to help beef up border security and immigration enforcement by state and local agencies.

With or without fresh funding, though, Nanos said he wants no part of immigration enforcement.

But finding, detaining and eventually deporting 11 million people will require more resources than the federal government has.

“The Trump administration knows full well that ICE doesn’t have that capacity to accomplish the plan that the administration wants,” Patiño said.

To achieve Trump’s goal in the next four years would certainly require cutting corners, he added: “They would have to engage in racial profiling.”

Tactics of that sort when Arpaio was sheriff prompted a class action lawsuit in 2007 in Maricopa County where Arpaio, elected six times, served from 1992 to 2016. He gained national renown for implementing labor chain gangs, erecting the infamous “tent city” and making prisoners wear demoralizing outfits.

The department has been under court supervision since 2013, and has been barred since then from enforcing immigration law.

The new Maricopa County sheriff, Jerry Sheridan – elected last fall after 40 years with the department, including service as Arpaio’s chief deputy – has distanced himself from Arpaio’s legacy. He promised a community advisory board that he doesn’t plan to enforce Prop. 314.

Arpaio, a Trump ally, defended the hardline approach as the best deterrent.

“I put tents up. It was a popular program,” he said. “Half a million, including illegal aliens, went in those tents. … If there is a will, there is always a way to get the job done.”

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.