How local police extend ICE's reach, even in sanctuary cities
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
Just a heads up, y'all - this episode has some cussing. Just be advised.
What's good, y'all? You're listening to CODE SWITCH, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And today on the show - what it looks like when ICE comes to a sanctuary city.
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DEMBY: Alright, so it's a November morning back in 2019 in a town in New Jersey. And there's this guy who is in his late 30s. He's Mexican. He's driving his teenage son to work. But as they're leaving the house, ICE agents pull up. And the ICE agents hem this dude in in a way that he can't really drive away around them. And those agents are trying to tell the man to get out of his car. And again, he's in the car with his son, so he ain't budging.
PETER MANCINA: ICE planned it this way, in a certain sense, instead of trying to get him at his house because then they could drive up their cars and block him in so he couldn't get away.
DEMBY: That's Peter Mancina.
MANCINA: I'm a visiting scholar at the Center for Immigrant Justice at Rutgers Law School, and I'm also an anthropologist.
DEMBY: So his work involves learning about groups by basically embedding with them. When he was researching ICE in New Jersey, he watched hours and hours and hours of police body cam footage to better understand how things were unfolding on the ground and in the streets. That body cam footage is how he knows exactly what was going on in this particular encounter with ICE.
MANCINA: They call the cops. Even though there's not really an emergency situation, they just call them to do crowd control.
DEMBY: Two local officers show up, and they park their squad car in his way. So now this dude is really fenced in. Those officers talk to the ICE agents on the scene a little bit, and an agent tells them that the man barricaded himself in the car. I mean, he was just in the car or whatever. But the officers say, OK, they're going to hang back and let the feds do their thing. And they're supposed to be hanging back because these local cops are under guidance from the state government to not offer official help with immigration enforcement. They're not supposed to put cuffs on the man in the car. They're not supposed to detain him or question him or bust down his car window, if that's what it comes to if this encounter escalates somehow. This was federal immigration business.
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DEMBY: But - OK, as this is all going on, some neighbors come out. The first neighbor asks the police officers what's going on, and the officers shoo them away, like, mind your business. And then another neighbor comes out and asks the officers what's going on, you know, like, what did he do? Wondering why these federal agents are stopping his neighbor and his neighbor's kid? And the local officer says, quote, "I don't know. We're not part of whatever that is." And so that neighbor walks over to the car where the standoff is happening, and the local cops are telling him to stand back, get away from the scene, you know, for his own safety. And it turns out that this neighbor is an immigrant advocate...
MANCINA: And tries to tell the immigrant who's in the car of his rights. He tries to say, if they don't have a judicial warrant, you know, don't - you don't need to let them into your car. We are here to help you. We are watching this. We are observing this.
DEMBY: And so this neighbor, the immigration advocate - right? - he gets into it with the cops. He name checks the sanctuary law and says, you, as local law enforcement, are not supposed to be participating in this raid or attempted arrest or whatever. And one of the cops says, yes, that is why we are not participating in their actual event. We are just here to keep people safe. So they weren't participating, they said. They were just controlling the scene and dissuading neighbors from watching or getting involved, just using their car to further box in this man that the ICE agents were after. Eventually, though, after a while, that man in the car gets out. The ICE agents put him in cuffs, and the feds thank those local cops who, again, were not there in any official immigration enforcement capacity, right?
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DEMBY: The place where this all went down in New Jersey follows what's called the Immigrant Trust Directive. It's a statewide policy that's supposed to, and I'm going to just quote it here, "strengthen trust between New Jersey's law enforcement officers and the state's diverse immigrant communities, end quote. There's no real set definition of what makes a place a sanctuary city or sanctuary law. They have, like, different kinds of policies on the books. There's some variation. But in many places with sanctuary laws, local officials say straight up, they don't want ICE in their towns. We saw that this month in Minneapolis after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Macklin Good, and the mayor of Minneapolis famously or infamously said...
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JACOB FREY: To ICE - get the f*** out of Minneapolis.
DEMBY: So, yeah, there are some really big questions over jurisdiction in these places where ICE and border patrol are now very visible presences as the Trump administration steps up its crackdown on immigrants. And New Jersey, like so many states and cities with sanctuary policies, is involved in this very strange political dance with federal immigration enforcement agencies like ICE because leave the rhetoric aside, the relationship on the ground between local cops and ICE is often way more aligned than the sanctuary branding might lead us to think. So that's what we're talking about today on this episode because sanctuary policies have been touted as protecting immigrants, but in many ways, in practice, they have given rise to a specific kind of policing that gives ICE a much wider reach than it might otherwise have.
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DEMBY: Sanctuary cities and sanctuary states have policies that are, in theory at least, supposed to help protect immigrants, you know, stuff like barring ICE agents from coming into courthouses or keeping the local cops from asking about someone's immigration status or not using local jails to detain immigrants. Peter Mancina, the anthropologist were just talking to, says it's also true that in places with these laws, people in Latino neighborhoods in particular report more crimes to the police. And he said that sanctuary laws do keep some people from being turned over by local cops to the Feds.
MANCINA: They do reduce the number of voluntary transfers of people with no criminal background and those whose charges are dropped by 30%. And 30% is not nothing. In New Jersey, that equated to 300 people that local law enforcement did not turn over to ICE.
DEMBY: That was from 2018 to 2019, the year after New Jersey adopted the Immigrant Trust Directive. Peter, who is the author of the recent book "On The Side Of ICE: Policing Immigrants In A Sanctuary State," said that it's also true that sanctuary policies very much aid in deportation in less direct ways because these policies have big carve-outs for how local cops can do their jobs. And those huge exceptions let local cops work with the Feds to go after certain people that local officials think it's OK to deport.
MANCINA: And these exceptions are the crux of sanctuary policies. And so I wanted to understand from an on-the-ground perspective, you know, what it's like to be a police officer trying to implement this when there's - they have to make on-the-ground decisions about whether or not to help ICE find this person, deport them, whether to detain this person for immigration enforcement assistance or whether they should say, no, this actually doesn't fit the policy requirements for me to actually cooperate.
And so I decided to start getting body-worn camera footage of local law enforcement officers actually implementing this in the world - literally be like a baby in one of those kangaroo slings on their chest...
DEMBY: (Laughter).
MANCINA: ...Following them around and seeing, you know, really behind the scenes of what it's like to be a police officer interacting with somebody who they think might be an immigrant, who they might suspect is an immigrant because of the way they speak, because the color of their skin, because the clothes that they wear. And this would go behind all of the public statements about what sanctuary cities are, about what heroic statements are made by Democrat mayors and state governors about how they protect immigrants.
And by and large, what we found in our public records request of those 400 agencies was that only half of the state law enforcement agencies are actually implementing the Immigrant Trust Directive, and that was reflected, really, in the body cam footage. I saw cops assist in immigration enforcement when they were either following those exceptional parts of the sanctuary policy or when they were just violating them and wanted to still help ICE sort of behind the scenes.
DEMBY: So let's just establish some terms there - sort of get some rules of engagement, as it were. Like...
MANCINA: Sure.
DEMBY: ...What is an administrative warrant? I remember last summer when federal agents were sort of fanning across the country and going to cities to do this immigration enforcement that the Trump administration was sort of ramping up, and a lot of people were talking about the sort of - that an administrative warrant sort of sounds very official, right? And if someone comes into, say, your restaurant and says, I have an administrative warrant, it's like, restaurant owners very quickly realized that they don't have to, like, abide by it.
MANCINA: ICE has a lot of different tactics for incorporating what they call force multipliers into their work. A force multiplier is something I deal with in the book as well. It's a concept actually that comes from military strategy, and it's any sort of local partner based throughout the whole world that the military might work with - local police, might be local news station - that will help them make advances in their warfare. So then ICE has taken this concept and used it to describe a variety of their local partners that they work with to find people. And local police have been described by ICE as force multipliers going back to about the mid-2000s.
And force multipliers really are not just tools that ICE uses. They are partners that they work with. And in turn, local law enforcement like to think of ICE also as force multipliers. When they work together, they see their joint operations as mutually beneficial. So it's - ICE has used this - a lot of tools to convince local force multipliers that in some cases they have to help them. And administrative warrants are one of those kinds of trickery tools.
So an administrative warrant is something that is issued by ICE themselves. It is not something that has gone in front of a local state judge that determines probable cause that this person has committed a crime or violated a law. It is just basically a statement that ICE thinks that this person is deportable and they want to target them for an immigration arrest, detention and potentially removal. So it's actually not something that local law enforcement is obligated to comply with.
DEMBY: You say in the book that presidential administrations going all the way back to Ronald Reagan have been trying to get local police to help out with, you know, federal immigration enforcement but that the Trump White House in particular really stepped up the aggression. Can you walk us through some of the history of presidential administrations trying to get buy-in and cooperation from local police departments?
MANCINA: Absolutely. In the '80s, before ICE or CBP or USCIS were even on the scene - that is prior to September 11 and a few years later, when the Department of Homeland Security was even created - the immigration enforcement organization that would grant benefits to immigrants but also would try to find immigrants, either at the border or in the interior of the country, was the INS - the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And during the Reagan period they were trying to fight effectively two political wars as well as law enforcement wars at the time. They were fighting undocumented immigration, and they were fighting the war on drugs. And in this particular period, they wanted force multipliers - like local police and local jails, who encounter people more often than INS agents - they wanted to get those people on board with the project of immigration. And local cops were already fighting drug crimes, and so they created the notion of the criminal immigrant or the criminal illegal alien...
DEMBY: Right.
MANCINA: ...Which was supposed to allow them to target people who are both undocumented and involved in the drug trade. And that allowed them to work in various ways to just basically go to local jails - INS would show up to a local jail, ask them for a roster of their inmates, and local law enforcement, which would see the INS as, you know, law enforcement partners, they would just hand over their jail roster to the INS. And they would scan it for Latin American names.
DEMBY: Oh, my God.
MANCINA: Yeah.
DEMBY: Just - like, just straight up racial profiling.
MANCINA: Yup.
DEMBY: Yeah.
MANCINA: Absolutely, 100%. And so, of course, in a place like Los Angeles, San Diego, border towns, you know, a Latin American name obviously does not distinguish your immigration or citizenship status.
DEMBY: Absolutely, right.
MANCINA: So they would go through, and they would have access - they would be given access to interview different people to ask them questions that would allude to immigration status. And if they found somebody, then the local law enforcement agency would just hand them over. This is all manual.
Now, fast forward. Through the '90s, this continued to happen, and laws at the federal level were changed so that, you know, if you committed one of these crimes - certain crimes that were known under the umbrella term an aggravated felony, then you would become newly deportable if you're an immigrant. So this could apply to people who had status. It wasn't just undocumented people, but these people became a priority, and their status could be stripped and they could be deported if they had committed one of these crimes. So this whole process of getting local law enforcement engaged further incorporates them into the immigration enforcement regime.
Now, then you fast forward to September 11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the refocus on national security, on terrorism. There is this new push in the Bush administration to make all of the databases from the federal to local what are called interoperable databases. They can communicate with each other. This is digital communication. It's automatic. All the firewalls can be broken down. Agencies can share information about terrorists, about undocumented immigrants. Of course, at that particular period, everyone was focused on the Muslim population, on Black and brown people going to mosques, but also still on undocumented immigration from Latin America.
So after September 11, for the first time in our country's history, all of a sudden the federal government is saying, well, now it's required that you use a fingerprint-sharing program that - anytime someone's booked in a local jail, that fingerprint is not just going to be sent to the FBI for a criminal background check, the FBI on the back end is going to send it to ICE for immigration status check.
DEMBY: Wow.
MANCINA: And local cops couldn't actually opt out of this. They were forced to use the fingerprint sharing. 'Cause it wasn't happening from the local cops, you know, being forced to send it directly to ICE. The FBI on the back end was sending it.
DEMBY: How does that work? Like, how does the federal government say...
MANCINA: Yeah.
DEMBY: ...You are mandated as a local law enforcement agency to do this thing? Couldn't they just opt out?
MANCINA: They tried. In California - at the beginning, the federal government was sort of pitching this program as, like, an opt in kind of thing. Like, sign this contract with us, and you can start what's called the Secure Communities program. That's the name of this fingerprint-sharing program. And when they said, OK, well, this clearly violates our sanctuary policies 'cause we're handing over all of the fingerprints of anybody booked - and this is just bookings. This is not criminal convictions. They would be released. But ICE already had their fingerprints, knew about them. And then they would also send requests to the local law enforcement agency when they got a fingerprint saying, you know, we don't know who this person is you sent us a fingerprint about or, we know about this person. They're undocumented. We want them. They would send what's called a detainer request. It's a fax form to local sheriff's department.
DEMBY: Fax.
MANCINA: Yeah, yeah. It's old school.
DEMBY: Super analog, yup.
MANCINA: Yep. And they would send it to them, and they would say, could you please hold this person who we think might be undocumented.
DEMBY: And that detainer form was nonbinding, though, right? Like it wasn't...
MANCINA: Exactly.
DEMBY: OK.
MANCINA: Yes. It was also - it's also one of these things that was sort of a trickery tool where they would send them, and it sounded very much like the administrative warrant, like something that a local agency had to comply with. A lot of law enforcement agencies thought it was a mandate. They weren't necessarily familiar with that notion that they did not have to follow the federal government's immigration requests yet.
DEMBY: Wow.
MANCINA: California recognizes the problem, and so California said, well, we want to opt out of this program, out of Secure Communities. They went to the attorney general. The attorney general went to DHS and was like, sorry, we want to opt out. The federal government comes back and says, the contracts are null and void. This is a mandatory program. Sorry. Eventually, every state is going to use this. It's going to be required. And that's eventually what ended up happening. Now it is active in every jurisdiction throughout the United States. There's no opting out of the fingerprint program.
So the immigrant rights advocates, mostly the lawyer advocates, came back and said, OK, well, we got to deal with this in some way. And they came up with a solution that we're going to educate everybody about these detainer requests and tell the local law enforcement that they're not legally binding. They're not something that the local law enforcement has to to follow up on, has to comply with. This is simply just a question ICE is asking local law enforcement. Will you do this as a favor? And you don't have to do that favor.
So they started passing laws all over the country that said under what circumstances will local law enforcement comply with the requests - these favor requests for somebody to be held in a local jail for a certain period of time so ICE can pick them up. A lot of people then have been calling these kinds of laws sanctuary laws because local law enforcement then will release certain people if they comply with a local policy that says, you know, this person is releasable. You know, we're not going to give their information to ICE. But these policies had exceptions in them. And they said, OK, we're going to - at the local level, we're going to release somebody if they've, you know, been picked up on drunk and disorderly. But we're going to tell ICE if there's somebody who's in custody who's, you know, accused of committing a murder - something more serious.
DEMBY: Right.
MANCINA: And that sounds reasonable to a certain degree. But actually, there has been studies that have shown that helping ICE by transferring people even who've committed heinous crimes, it actually doesn't reduce heinous crimes in the city. So it sounds reasonable, but actually, it is a completely ineffective tool for crime-fighting.
DEMBY: What - do we have any sense of why?
MANCINA: Yeah, absolutely. For a variety of reasons. For one, the vast majority of people who are picked up by police in communities of color and then turned over to ICE don't have any criminal records.
DEMBY: Of course.
MANCINA: So we're talking about the corner cases, the extreme cases, the very few which are - can be very heinous and can be people that it's reasonable to say, yeah, we don't want them in our community. But it does make sense when you think, well, let's say they're part of a criminal organization and they have capital to come right back in a variety of ways. Also the immigrant population in general has a lower rate of committing crimes, right? So targeting this community on the basis of mere bookings primarily - not even convictions, but bookings, accusations - you might not even be getting somebody who actually committed that serious crime.
DEMBY: Right.
MANCINA: You're just getting somebody who's been booked on a serious crime. They have these exceptions often because a local Democrat or a state Democrat doesn't want to look soft on crime and doesn't want to get undermined by the right wing in their next election campaign. So the Democrats are very afraid of that for electoral reasons. But actually, when it comes down to it, statistically speaking, it doesn't actually make the city any safer to include those exceptions in sanctuary policies. All it does - and this is what my book primarily says, through body camera videos - is basically that when you have these exceptions and sanctuary policies, the sanctuary policy itself makes up this whole process where local law enforcement now has certain procedures for helping ICE in those corner cases, in those exceptional cases.
You know, the vast majority of it sounds very pro-immigrant to have a sanctuary policy, but it's still a deportation procedures policy.
DEMBY: Right.
MANCINA: How do we help ICE in these cases? And it institutionalizes the idea that it's OK to help ICE and deport these particular people. And cops, here's how you're going to do it.
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DEMBY: When we come back...
MANCINA: The moderate progressives and the left, they often say, let's make a sanctuary policy because it's protectionist. We're going to protect immigrants. The right villainize it, saying these cities are harboring immigrants. But both of them are basically saying the same thing, that sanctuary cities actually protect immigrants. And so I'm trying to pop this political bubble around this topic by saying neither of you are right.
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DEMBY: That's after the break, y'all. Stay with us.
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DEMBY: Gene. Just Gene this week. CODE SWITCH.
We are back, and we're talking to the anthropologist Peter Mancina about how local police departments often end up working with federal immigration agents and ICE officers. So generally - OK? - in places with sanctuary policies on the books, cops are usually not supposed to help with immigration enforcement. But in places without those laws, local cops can actually be federalized to help with immigration policing. So that happens through a program called 287(g). And you're going to hear that term a lot in these conversation, so we're just going to explain what 287(g) is and how it works and why Peter says we should all be paying attention to this local expansion of federal immigration muscle.
We should explain what 287(g) is. It authorizes ICE to give local cops the authority, the license, to do immigration enforcement as an extension of ICE.
MANCINA: Absolutely. The way 287(g) works is that ICE enters into a contract with the local government. It's passed by typically a city council and mayor or a county government, saying, yes, we're entering into a contract where our officers will undergo training with ICE to be immigration officers. And ICE will actually station or have a local officer who's in the local ERO or HSI -Enforcement Removal Operations or Homeland Security Investigations - department be a supervisor of a local sheriff's deputy or a police officer who's cross-deputized as a federal agent. And in those contracts, it says very clearly that if there's some kind of officer misconduct, even, in the course of doing 287(g) activities, then they're actually going to be taken to court in federal court and tried as a federal agent.
So they're not even - if, let's say somebody goes into a Black or brown community and they kill somebody and they're a 287(g) officer. There's potentially an issue where the local laws pertaining to officer misconduct would be superseded by federal laws for misconduct. That person, if they're carrying out 287(g) responsibilities - which can be anything now. Every single Florida state highway patrolman right now is now a 287(g) officer.
DEMBY: Wow.
MANCINA: They've been deputized, and they are actually federal agents while doing their highway patrol work. So let's say they stop somebody on the highway and they're asking about immigration status and they're - you know, then they shoot them or they abuse them in some way. That family or that community potentially wouldn't have a recourse, you know, to take them to state court for that kind of violence. They would technically be protected by federal laws. That family would have to go to a federal court over that issue.
And that's a major issue right now, especially when somebody like JD Vance is saying that Jonathan Ross, you know, is completely immune from shooting Renee Good in Minneapolis. There's major implications not just for immigrants now that there are 1,300 287(g) programs throughout the country. It's a major boom since the Trump administration 2.0 has come into power, that - you know, in the past, in 2022, there was 117 287(g) programs throughout the country. Now there are 1,300. They're mobilizing this particular contractual arrangement to get local officers deputized as federal agents, and what people actually haven't been talking about in the media at all is that this also not just gives them immigration powers, it also to a certain extent, you know, gives them greater protection against any kind of court cases against officers. And I'm talking not about ICE. I'm talking about local cops and local deputies.
DEMBY: And the police obviously already enjoy a lot of protection from certain types of accountability. And speaking of accountability, I wanted to ask you about body cams, which you write about, because we've talked before on CODE SWITCH about police body cameras, right? They were pitched to the public, and I think most people understand them as this tool to hold cops accountable for bad behavior. But we know that in reality, body cameras work, like, most practically, as a way to gather data about neighborhoods and surveil neighborhoods, right? Cops use them for facial recognition and things like that. And you say that those body cameras are one of the really, really big ways that local cops in sanctuary jurisdictions help ICE cast a wider net. So how does that work?
MANCINA: Yeah, body cams are a relatively new thing. And as you said, body cams from a law enforcement perspective are not about transparency. They're really about collecting evidence so they can prove their case in court. They can disprove statements by members of the public that they've arrested or witnesses that are claiming that police did something wrong. The police use it as a tool to, you know, cover their backs and make sure that criminal charges stick. Also, if ICE knows that a local cop has a body cam and they're recording, they can use that to their advantage even to make the arrest.
So in the case that you described earlier, where the man was in his car and ICE was trying to get him out of the car to arrest him, once the police showed up, the ICE officer asked, are you guys rolling? And the - you know, the cops said, yep. And the ICE officer said, good. And then he started to talk to the immigrant man and said, look, everything you're doing right now will be used against you. You know, we're recording. Like, they're going to see your bad character, that you're not cooperating. You need to come out and let yourself be arrested to make things easier. We're just trying to make this process easier for you.
You know, they were these stewards of immigration enforcement trying to help. That's how they framed themselves, but they could only do that because the police were there lending their cameras as a tool for ICE to use. And police then upload these camera videos in databases. They can make those camera videos available for various court proceedings, whether they're criminal or immigration court.
DEMBY: Right.
MANCINA: And so it turns real people into what scholars have called data doubles, their digital selves. And they record immigrants, and those digital immigrants, they exist in databases, and they can be used just the same way that our criminal background can be used in a patrol car to pull us over and arrest us. These digital versions of us, these digital representations of immigrants and of ICE officers and of police can be used to really target people and arrest them and deport them.
DEMBY: So one of the sort of ironies is that, like, you're pointing out the ways that most of us misunderstand the ways that sanctuary laws sort of expand the scope of ICE. But it's obviously not just the general public who buy into that pro-immigrant branding around sanctuary cities because the Trump administration has been painting those cities and states as lawless havens for undocumented criminals. In fact, the day before you and I were talking, President Trump said he was going to stop all federal payments to sanctuary cities. Even though, as you point out, like, the police in those cities are doing this force multiplying for ICE. So Trump's move seems counterproductive to his own aggressive deportation plans. Like, what do you make of that?
MANCINA: Yeah, during the Trump 1.0, during his first term, I used to say Trump is the biggest defunder of the police in all of history.
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MANCINA: You know, he was - he's the person who was trying to cut JAG grants, you know, justice department grants to local police agencies that were in sanctuary jurisdictions, which were used for a lot of different things. I mean, he's made - first of all, he's made mention of this in a social media post. This is not - I mean, there is an executive directive on defunding. There are legal proceedings where he was defeated on the same kind of approach, not only in his first term, where he lost on this, but also during this term. In the summertime, you know, many cities and states sued him for that executive directive that was passed when he first came into office in January. And he's trying it again, and why is he trying it again? - 'cause it's great politically (laughter).
DEMBY: Right. It plays well.
MANCINA: He actually - yeah, it plays really well. And it's not just him. It's also the Democrats. When you look at both sides, they're both really saying the same thing about sanctuary cities. The moderate progressives and the left, they often say, let's make a sanctuary policy because it's protectionist. We're going to be the heroes of immigrants. We're going to protect immigrants. The right villainize it saying these cities are harboring immigrants, which is a different way of saying they're protecting immigrants. They're just doing it illegally. That's - you know, they're adding that extra, you know, element of it's illegal. But both of them are basically saying the same thing that sanctuary cities actually protect immigrants.
And so I'm trying to pop this political bubble around this topic by saying, neither of you are right. In both cases, you're saying that they're protecting people. And what I'm seeing in the stats, in the body cams is that cops are still helping a lot. And that undermines the reason for the federal government sieging cities like Minneapolis, a sanctuary city, sending federal troops to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to New Orleans because they're doing it on the basis that these are sanctuary cities and that they don't cooperate with ICE. Well, that's not true. Local law enforcement in sanctuary cities help a lot. Yeah, they don't help every time, but they help a lot. And so they're going into these cities. They're talking about these cities still in terms of them being illegal, they harbor immigrants because they want to play well with their base, both. The Democrats want it to play well with their base, and the Republicans want it to play well with their base. And so the real difference now in this administration is that the Trump administration isn't just mobilizing force multipliers in the criminal justice system - the police, the courts. They're militarizing it like a military occupation where they're bringing in troops. They're not just bringing in ICE officers. They're bringing in the National Guard. He's talking now about invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow for either the National Guard or the military to quell unrest and uprising in Minneapolis.
So Trump is continuing to use force multipliers in the criminal justice system through the 287(g) program in sanctuary cities where they're still cooperating with ICE by handing over a lot of people under those exceptional circumstances. But now what's new is they're treating Minneapolis like Iraq. They're sending in troops to racially profile people on the streets, to pull over cars of citizens, to try to yank them out of their cars or shoot them if they try to drive away.
DEMBY: After the ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, the mayor there, Jacob Frey, said he wanted ICE out of Minneapolis. The sheriff from my hometown made a similar comment that she wanted ICE out of Philadelphia. But it seems like what your book is saying is that if a mayor or local leaders or even a governor wanted to actually get out of the business of bolstering ICE, they would have to kind of rethink the way they do all kinds of, like, regular-degular (ph) policing. Like, what would they have to change if they really wanted to stop this from happening?
MANCINA: That's absolutely right. This comes down to the fundamental role of police in society. If we have a policing agency that's tasked alone with responding to crowds - that's effectively what they're being used for, crowd control - in certain circumstances, then you will have cooperation with ICE because they will help ICE by controlling the crowd, by pushing them back, by tear gassing them, by making sure that ICE can get in a car with an immigrant they've arrested and drive away. They will clear the roads. If there is an organization in our society that clears roads for federal agencies to arrest people, then no sanctuary policy will be effective. It will never be effective. In order to actually make a safe space, you'd have to reconsider the role of police in society.
And you'd have to have other ways of responding to those kinds of situations. It's actually impossible to pass even a no-cooperation sanctuary policy and not have police respond unless you're going to tell police, you can't respond to crowd control efforts. And I have a strong sense that no mayor is going to tell a police agency to not respond to crowds or, similarly, to not respond to calls from other law enforcement agencies of an officer down. It goes back to the fundamental question of policing in society and what kinds of institutions do we want to respond to certain events, whether those are mental health events, whether they're crowd control events.
And also, you know, thinking about a new era when cities are under military occupation - (laughter) you know, this isn't just about sanctuary. This - as I said, with the 287(g), if the federal government is giving 287(g) protections to local officers, and they're taking a similar approach as they are with Jonathan Ross, that they're totally immune from prosecution when they shoot somebody in broad daylight on camera, then you're talking about something broader that cities and counties need to think about, what are we going to do under a military-type siege in our own cities and states? That is a different kind of sanctuary.
And what are grassroots movements, what are community organizations going to do to protect themselves and their neighborhoods when people who thought that they had privilege, who thought my white skin is going to protect me if I drive up, and now they're shooting - you know, they're shooting white people the way that they've shot people of color forever? What is the new sanctuary that is needed, and how is that possible from a community organizing perspective, from a city and county policy perspective?
But the answer should not be just more sanctuary policy. That's not going to work. It needs to be thought of broader than just sanctuary policy 'cause sanctuary policies are not going to achieve the kind of safety that people need. That's a broader conversation for community organizing, for local leaders and beyond just even the immigrant rights movement. As I said, if somebody can be shot and then the deputy can be given federal immunity because they were a deputized officer, that's an issue that pertains to every single person in this country.
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DEMBY: Peter Mancina is a cultural anthropologist at Rutgers University School Law, and he's the author of "On The Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants In A Sanctuary State." Thank you, Peter.
MANCINA: My pleasure.
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This episode you're listening to right now was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Leah Donnella, and our engineer was Kwesi Lee. And we'd be remiss, of course, if we did not shout out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Christina Cala, Xavier Lopez, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams and B.A. Parker.
As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.
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