The Southern Poverty Law Center is taking action against ICE’s
use of Basic Ordering Agreements.
Here’s why you should know what that means
for your community.
For years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
better known as ICE,
has been trying to get local law enforcement to help
them arrest and deport people. Local law enforcement,
like your local sheriff,
is authorized to enforce state criminal law.
ICE is authorized to enforce federal,
civil immigration law anywhere in the U.S.,
other than its borders.
Despite recent massive increases in the number of ICE agents
and in the agency’s budget,
ICE cannot possibly detain and deport all the millions
of undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. —
most of them living quiet, busy lives,
focused on work and family. So what’s ICE’s solution?
Get local law enforcement to do their work for them.
Basic Ordering Agreements, or BOAs,
are one of ICE’s latest attempts to do just that,
by encouraging local law enforcement to illegally
arrest people ICE wants to deport.
Here’s how it works.
Whenever a person is arrested by local law enforcement,
their fingerprints are sent to a nationwide
database that ICE can access.
If ICE is interested in that person,
they send over a piece of paper asking local
law enforcement to keep the person locked up for up
to 48 additional hours, so ICE has time to pick them up.
That paper is called an ICE Detainer.
An ICE detainer is a checkbox form
that states the reasons ICE believes
that person can be deported.
Remember how local law enforcement is only authorized
to enforce state criminal law? Well, when ICE sends a detainer,
they are simply saying they believe someone
has violated civil immigration law.
Local law enforcement cannot arrest someone for that reason.
Yet, to effectuate an ICE detainer,
local law enforcement must wait until the person’s
criminal charges have been resolved —
meaning they are free to go — and re-arrest them just for ICE.
Several courts have found that acting on ICE
detainers violates the Fourth Amendment
of the U.S. Constitution.
And ICE often makes mistakes,
including issuing detainers for U.S. citizens.
Between February 2017 and February 2019,
ICE sent Miami-Dade County detainers for 420 people
who were listed as U.S.
citizens in the county’s records.
We know from public records obtained by the SPLC
that sheriffs in Florida were worried that acting on ICE
detainers would get them sued. In fact, after getting sued,
many counties and sheriff’s offices across
the United States have had to pay tens
of thousands of dollars to people they held
under ICE detainers. To reassure Florida sheriffs,
ICE and their ally Sheriff Bob Gualtieri
of Pinellas County tried to come up with a workaround:
Basic Ordering Agreements, or BOAs.
ICE’s BOA program was introduced in Florida in 2017
and has since spread to Louisiana.
But BOAs are not new.
They have been used for many years to order supplies.
For example,
if ICE needs to regularly order pencils,
they can enter into a basic ordering agreement
with a pencil supplier stating,
“Every time I buy pencils from you,
I will pay 50 cents per pencil.”
This agreement determines how ICE and this pencil company
will do business from then on.
Now ICE is using the same exact system to order people —
specifically, immigrants.
And the supplier just might be your local
law enforcement agency.
BOAs are an agreement between ICE and local law enforcement
about how they will conduct the business
of ordering and supplying immigrants for deportation.
And obviously,
human beings should never be treated
like products to be ordered.
According to the BOAs already signed by at
least 29 Florida sheriffs,
ICE will pay $50 for every immigrant a sheriff
unlawfully arrests for ICE by effectuating an ICE detainer.
Although the actual BOA doesn’t say anything about it,
Sheriff Gualtieri and ICE claim BOAs protect local law
enforcement from legal responsibility.
They claim that, thanks to the BOA,
the person locked up by local law enforcement
under an ICE detainer is, somehow suddenly,
in ICE custody,
despite never interacting with an ICE officer.
We disagree.
In December 2018,
the SPLC sued Sheriff Rick Ramsey
of Monroe County for unlawfully re-arresting a U.S.
citizen as part of his BOA with ICE.
Despite ICE and Sheriff Gualtieri’s claims,
the Basic Ordering Agreement does not protect Sheriff Ramsay.
Want to know more about Basic Ordering Agreements?
Visit our website at www.splcenter.org/basicorderingagreements
to find out if your sheriff has signed one.
You’ll find materials that will help you speak out
against them in your community.
You can also join our webinar on August 13th
in Spanish and August 14th in English
at 2:00 p.m. EST, 11:00 a.m. PST.