The Arlington County Board is drafting a new policy limiting when Arlington police officers and other county employees can contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or share data about undocumented county residents. Currently, police are not allowed to participate directly in immigration enforcement, but they have discretion to contact ICE under certain circumstances, which advocates feel are too broad.

“This is the beginning of a conversation about how we can work to bring all of the good work that we do across the county into a solid, one place for a policy that will codify good practices, reaffirm some of our policies, and take some additional small steps that we think are very significant,” said Board Chair Matt de Ferranti at Tuesday’s Board meeting.

Following the meeting, the Board released a framework for drafting the update, which includes broad language about access to services and information, as well as a commitment to not use Arlington law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws.

The Board put forth few specifics on how the community engagement process will work. De Ferranti told WAMU/DCist he hopes to draft and finalize a revised countywide ICE policy within two months, to be released around the Board’s November meeting.

One possible model for Arlington to follow is in neighboring Fairfax County, which put in place a Trust Policy and new police general orders earlier this year. The Fairfax policy establishes strict requirements for data sharing by all county employees and largely limits the list of circumstances under which Fairfax police are allowed to respond to requests for assistance from ICE to criminal matters.

Advocates have been pushing Arlington County to revise its current policies, particularly for law enforcement officers, for close to a year. They say the county’s police officers have too much latitude to contact ICE when arresting or stopping someone.

“We know that this is extremely dangerous, the way that Black and brown people and migrant youth are criminalized already in the schools, in communities,” said Danny Cendejas, an organizer with La ColectiVA, a local activist group. “The way that people are being funneled to deportation is extremely dangerous.”

Revising Internal Police Policies 

Concurrently with the county community engagement process to create an overarching county policy, Arlington police are also revising their general orders with respect to undocumented people. While Arlington police officers are not primarily responsible for immigration enforcement and aren’t allowed to stop or arrest people solely for suspected immigration law violations, “[t]his does not preclude the Department from cooperating with and assisting federal immigration officials when requested or from notifying those officials in serious situations where a potential threat to the public safety is perceived,” the current general order says.

The general order also notes that offering police services “is not contingent on citizenship or immigration status.”

Arlington police have discretion to contact ICE in five specific circumstances, per the department’s current general orders: when a person is arrested on suspicion of committing a felony; involvement in terrorism; participating in a trafficking operation to bring undocumented people into the country; when the officer finds out through a law enforcement database that the person they are arresting has an active ICE detainer (after which they have to contact a supervisor about the decision to make the arrest); or when the person is “reasonably suspected of participating in criminal street gang activity,” which the arresting officer must confirm with the department’s Gang Unit.

LaColectiVA and a number of other advocacy groups, including the National Immigration Law Project and Sanctuary DMV, have been mobilizing around the ICE issue in various community protest actions and during multiple public comment periods at board meetings. In the July county board meeting, tensions ran high: multiple anti-ICE activists attempted to testify during the public comment period, in breach of an Arlington County rule that limits the number of speakers on a single subject to one. After the first speaker, all subsequent speakers, including Cendejas, had their mics cut off.

Cendejas says LaColectiVA has a list of demands they presented to county officials and law enforcement outlining what they believe new Arlington police guidelines should look like.

The group, which has had several meetings with police representatives responsible for revising the department’s general order, is calling for removing dehumanizing language like “alien” from the police general orders, a request police have indicated they’ll comply with; preventing police from contacting ICE or responding to requests for support from the agency; broadening police definitions about what counts as a suitable identification to include IDs issued by foreign governments; and maximizing police use of summonses for arrestees, instead of taking them to jail, which may make their information available to ICE via a booking database.

Board members say they support creating a firmer stance against contact with ICE. But de Ferranti says that there are certain legal requirements the police department must fulfill in the arrest and booking process. That includes entering anyone booked into jail into a federal database, which ICE agents can access. And he says he believes officers should still have the ability to contact ICE in cases where there is a significant risk of violence.

The finished policy, de Ferranti hopes, will “essentially update what I think is already in Arlington, a history of very thoughtful and progressive policies to not collaborate with ICE unless the law requires it or there is a serious safety issue that is at stake.”

De Ferranti suggested the Board might seek to limit the types of felony arrests where Arlington police could call ICE. Cendejas and other advocates say the general orders give police wide discretion to contact ICE. Felonies, they point out, range widely, from serious but nonviolent offenses all the way up to extremely violent crimes. They also note that law enforcement gang databases are notoriously inaccurate. And they question why police should have discretion to call ICE on someone who is suspected of a crime but who has not yet been charged or found guilty.

Tracking Contacts With ICE

It’s not clear how frequently police in Arlington contact ICE about someone they’ve arrested. A spokeswoman for the police department told WAMU/DCist in an email that the information is included in individual incident reports, but not systematically tracked.

“Our under-revision policy will streamline how the department collects data on contacts with undocumented individuals and ICE,” the spokeswoman said in an email.

There is more information available about what happens to undocumented people who are booked into the county jail. The Arlington sheriff will hold undocumented people for up to 48 hours if the request from ICE to do so is signed by a judge, according to reporting from ARLnow. If the person posts bond, the sheriff can notify ICE that the agency has two hours to come pick someone up before the person is released.

ARLnow reported that in 2019, 74 people with ICE detainers were transferred from the county jail into immigration custody, compared to only 15 who were released back into the community.

There is also some anecdotal evidence that Arlington police do call ICE. Activists have focused on a 2019 incident involving a longtime undocumented Arlington resident who was deported after Arlington police responded to a fender bender. Police ultimately held him at the scene until ICE agents arrived. The man, named ‘Fidel R.,’ in a public complaint letter sent to the Arlington County Board and police department, recounted a lengthy interrogation by an Arlington police officer. The officer “began pressuring, intimidating, and threatening me with deportation while asking for my identification papers,” according to the complaint.

Arlington police said in a statement that officers were “attempting to confirm if the subject had a valid driver’s license or permit,” and ran Fidel. R’s name through a federal database, which said he was previously deported after committing a felony. Telemundo reported that ICE did not have a record of the deportation order.

What’s Next

Activists, county officials, and the police department have significant differences as to what limitations they would like placed on law enforcement. But activists and Board members alike point to Fairfax County’s recently-passed Trust Policy as an example that could guide Arlington’s future community discussions on the subject. As in Arlington, the county revised its police general orders alongside creating a more general ICE non-cooperation policy for all county staff, not just law enforcement.

“I think passing a policy like Fairfax has, both for the police and for the county, is invaluable in building trust [among undocumented immigrants],” says Diane Burkley Alejandro, the lead advocate on the issue for ACLU People Power. “It’s essential because general words of ‘We love you’ don’t matter. Putting it in terms where you are requiring your employees to follow efforts to help immigrants and to not help ICE — that’s essential.”

In the Fairfax policy, that means strict limits on data sharing, to prevent county information from getting into ICE’s hands. And it also means a prohibition on any police collaboration with ICE on civil immigration matters, which represent a majority of cases.

“These ICE detainers are requests. That’s all they are. You do not have to comply with them,” says Alejandro.

Alejandro acknowledges that advocates in Fairfax had to make some compromises in the course of drafting the county’s Trust Policy. She says she hopes activists in Arlington will be open to doing to as well.

“All I can say is get what you can,” she says, by way of advice to movement leaders in Arlington.

Alejandro also points out that the work won’t be finished even after a new policy is drafted and passed.

“I hope that in Arlington, if they get something passed that’s as rigorous, if not more rigorous than Fairfax, they will ensure that it actually is implemented — not just enforce the terms, but discipline against their employees if they call up ICE.”