Sedgwick County Sheriff’s deputies are carrying out limited immigration work after the office signed an agreement last week with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Some departments and local ICE offices have used the agreements as a kind of ‘force multiplier,” expanding the reach and strength of immigration operations.
Sheriff Jeff Easter said for his office and others in Kansas, the agreements are more about codifying an existing relationship with ICE.
“There’s several other sheriffs that have now signed up in Kansas,” Easter said. “We’ve talked about it, and it’s more so formalizing the process.”
The Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office is one of 15 Kansas sheriff’s departments that have signed agreements with ICE this year. Two others — in Finney and Jackson counties — signed agreements in 2020.
The Coffeyville Police Department is the only local police department in Kansas to sign an agreement with ICE.
In February, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation became the second state agency in the country to sign an agreement with ICE.
The expansion of the agreements is not without pushback. In 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas published a white paper about agreements between local law enforcement and ICE.
“Being undocumented is not a crime,” the ACLU wrote, “and local law enforcement have no obligation to help the federal government enforce immigration law.”
The ACLU contends that the agreements “have given rise to racial profiling, civil rights violations, and breakdowns in community relations” and “continue to disrupt communities and fuel racism and xenophobia in Kansas and around the country.”
Three models of coordination
The agreement Easter signed is a 287(g) agreement — named for the 1996 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act. The amendment allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement and delegate some of its federal immigration work to the local departments.
The exact nature of that work has varied over the years, but today there are three models: a task force model, a jail enforcement model and a warrant service officer model.
The task force model is the most involved of the agreements.
It requires that departments nominate officers for the program and send them to six weeks of training at the federal law enforcement training center in Glynco, Georgia. When the training is done, the officers return home to their everyday assignments.
During the course of their regular work, the officers are allowed to question, investigate and arrest people they suspect of violating immigration law. They can also issue detainers — a request to hold someone for up to an additional 48 hours — arrest warrants and search warrants.
The jail enforcement model is more limited. Deputized officers are allowed to interrogate people about their immigration status. But they’re only allowed to question someone if they’ve already been arrested and are being held on local charges.
These officers have access to federal immigration databases and can also issue detainers, serve warrants and begin the paperwork for removal proceedings.
The last model, which is the one in effect in Sedgwick County, is the most limited.
Easter said warrant service officers receive four hours of training “on how to fill out a form, and the form’s not very big.”
Warrant service officers aren't able to conduct any of the investigation or interrogation work allowed under the other two models. They provide intake information to the department’s local ICE office.
The ICE office flags anyone they’d like to take into custody, and then the local officer serves the inmate with an administrative warrant for civil immigration violations. The warrants allow the local jail to hold the inmate for up to 48 hours so ICE agents can pick them up.
Easter said he signed the agreement with ICE this month because of staffing changes. Until now, his department didn’t have enough officers with the required experience in intelligence and jail operations.
“I was not taking a commissioned deputy off the streets to do this,” Easter said. “That’s why we hadn’t signed it before.”
A longstanding relationship
That doesn’t mean the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t already coordinating with ICE agents. Easter said the office has a long history of honoring ICE detainers — the requests to hold someone in the sheriff’s custody for additional time.
The department honored the requests without much question until 2014, when a series of lawsuits prompted some federal judges to rule that local jails weren’t obligated to honor ICE requests and could be held liable for potential civil rights violations if they did.
Following the rulings, the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office would notify ICE about an inmate's release, but would not hold someone for additional time unless ICE filed a probable cause affidavit.
Easter said between January and October of this year, the jail held 167 people on detainers for ICE.
He said local ICE agents asked the department to consider signing a 287(g) agreement, which he did this month.
The sheriff said that the local field office has only a handful of agents to come to the jail and regularly file paperwork.
“These (inmates) are folks that have committed criminal acts in our community that are now in our custody,” Easter said. “So yes, we’re going to assist them (ICE) on delivering that paperwork.”
He said later that “most of those folks are in our custody because of serious, violent crimes that they shouldn’t be back out in society.”
Data analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which uses Freedom of Information Act requests to collect immigration data from ICE, tells a more complicated story.
Detainer data from January 2004 to December 2023 shows that the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office received 2,160 detainers from ICE. Just over half — 1,224 people — were taken into ICE custody after the detainer was issued. Of those taken into custody, 595 had no prior convictions.
ICE identifies the most serious criminal conviction of each person issued a detainer in the data provided to TRAC. In Sedgwick County, the three most common convictions for people with prior criminal history was driving under the influence (145 people), traffic offenses (71 people) and assault (30 people).
That trend is mirrored in data for the state as well. Of the 7,552 people taken into ICE custody with detainers, 43% had no criminal history, 7% had a DUI, 6% had a traffic offense and 3% had an assault conviction.
Easter said that while inmates with ICE detainers might not have prior convictions, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a criminal history.
“We cannot admit someone into our custody for simply being in the country illegally,” Easter said. “Everyone that has a detainer placed on them in Sedgwick County was booked on probable cause that they have committed a criminal act.”
Easter said he does not plan to sign more involved agreements with ICE. He’s said in statements to the media that he doesn’t have the staff to expend on task force staffing, and he has no interest in doing the federal government’s “job for them on that.”
“Not interested, not doing that,” Easter said. “That's fraught with issues because if we make mistakes, it's on us. And I guarantee you the DOJ is not showing up to defend us.”
