Emboldened by recent federal court rulings, more and more cities and counties across the nation are refusing to honor requests by federal immigration officers to hold inmates arrested on local criminal charges and scheduled for release for an additional 48 hours to give ICE time to pick them up for immigration law violations. Until recently, these immigration “holds” were a common law enforcement tool and example of cooperation between local and federal authorities. Given the small number of ICE officers compared to the hundreds of thousands of local law enforcement officers, local cops are a “force multiplier” for ICE.
Although some liberal localities started limiting the number of immigration holds a few years ago, the trend of completely ignoring the requests gathered steam this spring after a series of federal court rulings held that the federal immigration holds are not mandatory and that local agencies can ignore them. Now more than 225 local law enforcement agencies nationwide have adopted policies to completely ignore requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to hold an inmate for an additional 48 hours after his scheduled release date from jail.
Source: http://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-ff-immigration-holds-20141005-story.html
Posted 10/4/14 by Margaret Hull