Fears of deportation assuaged by police chief

‘It isn’t our job to uphold deportation’
With the upcoming change of the presidential guard occurring Friday, Jan. 20, many individuals throughout the nation are worried about threats to their basic rights. The issue hits close to home in Sonoma County where, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, roughly 8.8 percent of the county’s population are undocumented immigrants who have worked to make a life for themselves and their families within the United States.
As such, people throughout the U.S. and in Sonoma County’s local municipalities, including Healdsburg, Santa Rosa and Sebastopol, have asked cities to decree themselves as sanctuary cities. After the November election, Healdsburg citizens went to city council meetings requesting the declaration.
Defining a sanctuary city is tricky, at best. There is no legal definition of “sanctuary city” and its limits vary from place to place. The label generally refers to municipalities that provide a safe haven for undocumented immigrants, protecting them from extradition by refusing to cooperate with detention or deportation requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal “promoter of homeland security and public safety” by “identifying and apprehending removable aliens” since 2003, according to the ICE website.
Now more than ever, the term itself has become loaded and derisively used by those advocating tougher immigration laws, including President-elect Donald Trump.
While campaigning this summer, Trump laid out a 10-point immigration plan vowing to establish a deportation task force that would put an end to sanctuary cities.
“We will end the sanctuary cities that have caused so many needless deaths,” Trump said at a campaign rally. “No more funds.”
Other promises in the 10-point plan include tripling the number of ICE agents and moving “criminal aliens out on day one, in joint operations with local, state and federal law enforcement.”
“We will terminate the Obama administration’s deadly, non-enforcement policies that allow thousands of criminal aliens to freely roam our streets,” the plan reads.
Nevertheless, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and law enforcement agencies in each of the county’s nine cities have informally vowed to not work with ICE
The agreement came around 2006 at a time when the Sheriff and other city police departments were honoring ICE detainment requests.
“We’d stop someone for a broken tail light. They’d have no ID so they’d be physically arrested,” said Sebastopol’s Chief of Police Jeff Weaver. “Once they were fingerprinted, they would be sent to ICE and get deported, all because they didn’t have an ID.”
Now, should an undocumented immigrant get pulled over, her or she is treated like a natural citizen, receiving whatever punishment is applicable to their violation.
“We work with undocumented immigrants the same as we work with everyone else,” said Healdsburg’s Chief of Police Kevin Burke. “As a municipal agency it isn’t our job to uphold deportation. That’s for federal agencies.”
Burke said such a policy is a best practice for municipal law enforcement agencies throughout the nation. “This is how it was when I was working with the Los Angeles Police Department,” Burke said.
Not complying with deportation requirements a best practice, Burke continued, because it encourages all citizens within a community to have a relationship with its police department.
“On the fundamental level, our job is to be a police department for our entire community,” Burke said. “Just because someone might not be of citizen status doesn’t mean they won’t need to be able to come to us.”
While the Healdsburg Police Department hasn’t had anyone come to them with concerns about possible policy change once Trump is inaugurated, he did acknowledge the fear is out there.
“We want to let people know our policy isn’t going to change, no matter who the president of the United States is,” Burke said. “We have a responsibility to serve the whole community.”