The Arlington Country Board in Virginia on Tuesday unanimously approved a policy that says county resources cannot be used to enforce federal immigration laws. That includes barring county employees, including police, from asking people about their immigration status.
The new protocol is meant to give access to government services while protecting illegal aliens from possible deportation proceedings.
“This was the moment to make a decisive break entirely, and they didn’t do that,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the immigrant advocacy program at Legal Aid Justice Center, said in a Washington Post report. “Police should be completely out of the business of immigration enforcement.”
The Post reported on the development as positive and not about the possible threat to public safety or the strain on public services from a constant stream of migrants entering the country illegally and being sheltered in so-called sanctuary jurisdictions.
The Post reported on what the county is calling a “trust policy:”
Under the “trust policy,” Arlington police can now only contact ICE if they have arrested someone for a violent felony or in some limited situations involving community safety threats, terrorism or human trafficking, and street gang offenses. Officers must now also receive permission from a supervisor to contact ICE, and, under a law passed last year, cannot arrest someone for failing to show ID.
Still, the new policy stops short of meeting every demand from some activist groups, who for over a year had been calling on county lawmakers to accept a wide range of identification documents and bar Arlington police from working at all with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The trust policies in either jurisdiction do not supersede state or federal law, which in some cases do allow or direct local law enforcement to communicate with ICE. For instance, officials are required to submit the fingerprints of anyone booked into jail into a federal database that can be accessed by the agency.
The Post reported that Arlington already does not accept ICE detainers, which asked for local authorities to hold illegal aliens who have served jail time until federal agents can check on their status and process the former inmates.
The new policy also targets policy by directing Arlington’s new police oversight board to investigate any officers who may have violated the policies.
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