This Idaho sheriff fought against mandatory ICE cooperation. Now he’s signing up
On the afternoon of March 30, Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford railed against what he called “bad legislation,” after lawmakers resurrected a plan to mandate law enforcement apply to join cooperation agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The attempt to require applying for what are known as 287(g) agreements was just one part of a swath of failed legislation on immigration. The plan was killed in the state Senate in mid-March, then resurrected twice before dying right at the end of the session, after law enforcement forcefully opposed the idea. But Clifford, who was a central part of police opposition, left the door open.
“The ironic part of this is probably by the end of the year, you’ll see me have portions of 287(g). That’s the irony of it,” Clifford said to lawmakers, while he protested their plan. “But I don’t like being tethered to them.”
Now, Clifford’s getting ready to walk through that door. His office is planning on signing a 287(g) agreement with ICE for the warrant service officer program.
The warrant service officer program, sometimes considered the lightest 287(g) option, allows officers to enforce administrative warrants within an agency’s own jail. Clifford told the Statesman that generally, the only ICE warrants they see are for detainers, which are requests from ICE for the sheriff’s office to let them know before releasing someone or potentially keep someone detained, according to ICE.
Clifford said it will “streamline the process” by allowing the sheriff’s office to place detainers on people in custody without ICE needing to make the trek and do it themselves. But the warrant service model also allows officers to arrest someone in the jail for immigration violations, serve warrants of removal and detain and transport immigrants to ICE.
Ada County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Lauren Montague said the county is doing “simply the detainer service” and that the agency doesn’t serve warrants of removal or transport immigrants.
“We will only be placing detainers,” Montague said. She said the program won’t cost any additional money.
Clifford said he hopes to have staff undergoing online training by the end of the summer, he told the Statesman on Thursday.
“ICE will obviously welcome us with open arms,” he said by phone.
The other two ICE programs — the jail enforcement model (which lets police identify and process already-arrested immigrants) and the task force model (which lets police interrogate people on the street about their immigration status) — wouldn’t work for his agency because they don’t have the room or the manpower, respectively, Clifford said.
“We’ve pulled people off task forces that we wanted to be on, because we can’t staff them,” Clifford told lawmakers this session.
In March, just days before the 287(g) legislation was brought back, Clifford issued a statement that he already worked with ICE. The program was “not the devil, nor is it a savior,” he said.
“Entering into a 287(g) agreement would create redundancy and cost taxpayers money without providing additional benefit to public safety,” Clifford said. The Idaho Sheriffs’ Association, in a letter he signed, wrote that the 287(g) program “carries significant, unfunded costs, including training, staffing impacts, and liability exposure for local agencies.”
Asked about it now, Clifford said those statements referred to a potentially mandatory 287(g) program, because any part of that program could be changed by the government and become problematic. The warrant service officer agreement isn’t a drag on resources, he said, and Ada County can elect to withdraw at any time if there are concerns.
Nine Idaho counties and the Idaho State Police participate in 287(g) agreements. The governor’s office announced incorrectly that the State Police would be participating in the jail enforcement model, but they were actually participating in the controversial task force model, which was discontinued in 2012 over racial profiling concerns but was brought back.
