There’s a two-story high razor wire fence separating the current Nassau offices for Immigration and Custom Enforcement and where Nassau County Executive Laura Curran wants them relocated.
Curran says she wants to show the immigrant community that they shouldn’t fear reporting crimes, and that the county is in compliance with a recent court decision. Moving the offices from the jail campus to an obscure part of a public medical complex a few hundred yards south will accomplish that, she says.
“It’s not obscure,” says Pat Young, program director for the Central American Refugee Center.
He’s parked in a lot across from ICE’s future offices watching dozens of cars take the shortcut back entrance to the hospital.
“If you have ICE vehicles coming through here, ICE agents wearing their jackets, uniforms, they will be seen by people coming to the hospital.”
Young and others who work on behalf of immigrants are left wondering how moving ICE’s offices from one side of the fence to the other materially changes anything for people afraid of ICE. They say moving ICE to the hospital is almost worse.
“One of the tools of enforcement has not simply been arresting people, but sowing fear in immigrant communities. Taking away the community’s confidence in its primary healthcare provider will make it difficult for immigrants to even continue to live, let alone live in this particular area.”
In the past, if ICE wanted to deport someone it could issue what’s called a detainer request. That’s an alert both Suffolk and Nassau police and sheriffs received asking them to detain a person for 48 hours so ICE can collect them. Nassau and Suffolk handed over hundreds of people a year.
But that stopped in November when a state appellate court ruled state law does not permit local law enforcement to honor most of ICE’s detainer requests.
“Obviously, with the court decision in Suffolk, illegal detainers are not happening. That is the change,” Curran said at a Thursday news conference.
Curran was then pressed. Other than moving ICE’s offices from one side of the fence to the other, has anything materially changed in the relationship between ICE and Nassau?
“Absolutely not, police procedures are still the same as they ever were.”
According to Nassau, Suffolk and ICE officials, all three are still sharing intelligence. ICE is still conducting interviews in both county jails. Joint investigations and operations are still moving forward. ICE still has access to databases for the jails. Importantly, ICE is still sending detainer requests. Officers are supposed to ignore them.
Nassau confirms that its policies and procedures manual has not yet been updated. Nassau is instead relying on verbal instructions to officers not to comply with the detainers.
“That’s surprising,” says Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law who has litigated similar detainer cases.
She says it’s not just regulations that have to be updated, but also training materials and written guidance.
“It’s critical for a police department that large how to implement the court’s decision, how they have to change their practices. And frankly, the consequences of them not knowing the law and arresting someone without authorization are significant.”
On top of legal liability for detaining someone without cause, Nash says, there’s the erosion of trust between immigrants and police, which, according to County Executive Curran, was a main reason for removing ICE from the jail campus.
Suffolk County has been tight-lipped about how its policies and training materials have changed because of the recent court decision. Both the sheriff’s office and police say they comply with the new ruling, but haven’t yet said how.
