NIT – Many of Iowa’s largest jails are no longer honoring requests by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold individuals taken to jail that are suspected of being illegal aliens, the Iowa ACLU said Monday.
The ACLU claims that 22 Iowa county jails have told the organization that they have decided against holding people at the request ICE simply because they are suspected of not having proper immigration authorization.
Cerro Gordo county and most surrounding counties routinely hold arrested persons for up to 48 hours or sometimes longer until ICS can come and pick the person up and ascertain his or her status as a citizen. The ACLU says that when a person is brought into custody to a county jail, ICE sometimes flags that person because he or she is suspected of not having proper documentation to be in the U.S. ICE then asks the counties to hold that person for 48 hours (excluding weekends and holidays, so detainers can sometimes stretch into 5 days) to give ICE time to decide if they want to pursue immigration proceedings.
The counties that are not honoring ICE detainer requests include some of Iowa’s most populated cities. Allamakee, Benton, Cass, Clinton, Dubuque, Franklin, Fremont, Ida, Iowa, Greene, Jefferson, Johnson, Linn, Marion, Monona, Montgomery, Polk, Pottawattamie, Sioux, Story, Wapello, and Winneshiek counties have all indicated that they will no longer detain those suspected of being undocumented unless a judge has approved the move with a probable cause warrant.
ICE detainers, as they are called, “have resulted in the illegal imprisonment of countless individuals—including U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and Latinos in particular—often without any charges pending, sometimes for days or weeks after they should have been released from custody,” said Erica Johnson, Immigrants’ Rights and Racial Justice Advocate of the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa.
Nationally, other local law enforcement offices have been backing away from complying with ICE requests to detain people without any judge’s oversight.
Johnson pointed out one recent case in Colorado when a victim of domestic violence was jailed for three days at the request of ICE after contacting police for assistance and even after a judge ordered her released. She successfully sued the county. In another case, a woman in Rhode Island who is a U.S. citizen brought a lawsuit after she was kept an additional 24 hours without a judge’s authorization.
[poll random]
Just send them back where they came from and we won’t have to pay to jail them.