ICE foe endorses alleged Trump supporter Phil Berger
Okay. Let’s see if we can get this straight.
State senator Phil Berger is attacking sheriff Sam Page — credited here as an architect and inspiration for Donald Trump’s immigration policies — as weak on immigration enforcement.
Phil Berger is supposedly a straight-down-the-line Donald Trump supporter. So WHY is Berger’s reelection campaign championing the endorsement of their man by a politician who has made great efforts to hassle Immigration Control Enforcement agents just trying to do their jobs in North Carolina?
Here’s an excerpt from Berger’s campaign website:
So, now here’s a headline from a 2017 story about Barnes in a Greensboro-area publication:
And here’s some of the story itself:
Guilford County Sheriff BJ Barnes campaigned for President Trump, but his agency continues to decline immigration detainers in defiance of ICE.
The Guilford County Sheriff’s Office’s policy on immigration detainers had been set since September 2014.
But in December 2016 a new shift commander who had recently joined the staff at the Greensboro Jail questioned whether there was flexibility to allow US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, extra time to pick up an undocumented inmate who had served time, posted bond or otherwise resolved their criminal charges.
Matt Mason, the previous sheriff’s attorney, had established the policy in September 2014, writing in an email to command staff: “Based on recent legal developments, it is my recommendation that our detention facilities not hold inmates under ICE I-247 detainers once the inmate is otherwise entitled to be released unless ICE has and can produce a copy of (1) an outstanding criminal (not civil) arrest warrant, or (2) a valid court order directing the inmate’s detention.”
Mason and his successor, Jim Secor, have concluded that holding inmates violates the Fourth Amendment Constitutional guarantee against unlawful search and seizure, and that holding undocumented inmates beyond their normal release date could expose the sheriff’s office to legal liability.
“Any adverse consequences that could attach to a decision to hold an [inmate] beyond the disposition of his local criminal charges, will fall on us as I am certain the feds will grab the last available chair when the music stops and leave the GCSO standing by itself,” Secor wrote in a Dec. 7 email.
“I am hopeful that our new president may actually honor his Constitutional obligation,” he added. “If so, our policy could change shortly but not just yet.”
The decision for the sheriff’s office to not cooperate with ICE didn’t come without serious deliberation, Secor said.
“It is a difficult course to steer,” Secor told Triad City Beat. “The charges they are being held on are rather significant charges. These are not people who were being held for no driver’s license or expired registration. On the flip side, we’ve looked at this thing and have come to the conclusion that holding someone for 48 hours on a detainer absent some kind of judicial signature is going to violate the Fourth Amendment.” […]
*Awwww. This sleazy lawyer’s desire to assign constitutional rights and protections to non-citizen criminals IN THIS COUNTRY ILLEGALLY just warms your heart.*
Didn’t Berger and the legislature push for legislation mandating cooperation by local law enforcement with ICE? So WHY is Berger championing an endorsement from THIS guy who wasn’t interested in helping ICE out?
MORE:
[…] ICE receives a notification every time a fingerprint obtained through intake triggers a match in a federal database for immigration offenders. Secor said ICE typically sends an immigration detainer that winds up in the inmate’s file, adding that federal agents rarely make it to Greensboro in time to pick up undocumented inmates before they’re released from custody.
“Their office is in Charlotte,” Secor explained. “For them to make it here in time to get somebody, it’s rarely going to happen. That’s where ICE would see the sheriff’s office as deviating from complete compliance with the detainer process.”
Criminal violations by undocumented Guilford County inmates flagged by ICE for removal included at least three charges of felony assault with a deadly weapon, according to ICE immigration detainers from Oct. 29, 2016 through March 2, 2017 that were obtained by TCB.
In a couple cases, Secor said, shift commanders at Guilford County jails have held inmates beyond their legal release date to allow ICE to pick them up in violation of the sheriff’s office policy. He added that shift commanders might have been confused because ICE has started sending a document called an “administrative arrest warrant” with the detainer and they mistakenly believed they were obligated to comply. But the administrative arrest warrants, like detainers, are only signed by an ICE agent and don’t hold legal weight, he said.
The Guilford County Sheriff’s Office’s policy of limited cooperation with ICE runs counter to the posture of BJ Barnes, a Republican first elected sheriff in 1994 who has conspicuously aligned himself with high-profile, anti-immigrant politicians in recent years, including President Trump and former Gov. Pat McCrory.[…]
Saying one thing in public but doing another in private. BJ Barnes really does have something in common with Phil Berger.
MORE:
[…] Only weeks after Barnes hosted Gov. McCrory for the signing of HB 318 at the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office, ICE attempted to persuade the agency to relax its policy on immigration detainers, according to Sheriff’s Attorney Jim Secor, but Sheriff Barnes held firm.
“We met briefly with the sheriff in advance of the meeting with ICE and the decision was to stick to the policy as articulated by Matt Mason,” Secor recalled in a December 2016 email. “The meeting with ICE was postponed but never rescheduled.”
Barnes told TCB that regardless of his personal feelings about immigration, his oath to uphold the Constitution requires that he adheres to the law.
“There are 11-, 12-, 13 million people here illegally,” he said. “I’m very pragmatic. We’re not going to be able to get all those folks out of the country. There’s not enough law enforcement. We would have to stretch the law to get all of them out, and I’m not willing to do that. I don’t know that they’re going to be able to do anything without a law being changed. The detainer is signed by an ICE agent; that is not a judicial order. I need a criminal paper. I made that very clear to them.”[…]
Wait. “We’re NOT going to be able to get all those folks out of the country”? Isn’t that the SAME statement the Berger campaign wrongly attributed to Sam Page in a recent attack mailer? (I do believe it IS.)
MORE:
[…] In June 2016, Barnes made the first of three campaign appearances on behalf of Donald Trump as an official surrogate for the candidate. Barnes said he met briefly with then-candidate Trump during the campaign, but the conversation “was wide open” and “didn’t get down into the weeds.” It mostly focused on Trump’s prospects for carrying North Carolina and Guilford County in the November election.
[…] Once elected, one of Trump’s first acts was to sign an executive order designed to accelerate the removal of undocumented immigrants, in part, by pressuring local law enforcement to cooperate with federal authorities. Entitled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” the Jan. 25 executive order has met with only limited success so far.
Among its many provisions, the executive order instructs Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to encourage local agencies to sign what are known as 287(g) agreements to empower local law enforcement officials “to perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States under the direction and supervision of the secretary.”
Both sheriffs in Guilford and Forsyth County have essentially said: No, thanks.
“I don’t have the manpower to be doing my job and ICE’s job, too,” Barnes said in an interview.
[…] The relationship between Sheriff Barnes and ICE hasn’t always been smooth.
“I did butt heads with ICE,” Barnes said. “It was not over who was in charge; it was over whether what they were doing was Constitutional,” Barnes said. “We had some discussions with that, and the answers they gave were not satisfactory to me. It had to do with a joint task force that we were working together.”
The sheriff declined to elaborate on the basis that doing so would compromise a criminal investigation.
[…]
Meanwhile, in an attempt to shame local jurisdictions that don’t honor detainers, Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order instructed the homeland security secretary to create a “Declined Detainer Outcome Report” to “make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to aliens.”
The first report issued was riddled with errors, including declaring that Richmond County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina had declined a detainer, though the inmate sought by ICE was actually in a different county. After three weeks, the agency stopped issuing reports.
A note on the homepage for the program states: “ICE remains committed to publishing the most accurate information available regarding declined detainers across the country and continues to analyze and refine its reporting methodologies. While this analysis is ongoing, the publication of the Declined Detainer Outcome Report will be temporarily suspended.”
[…]
“We’re not on that list,” said Jim Secor, the sheriff’s attorney, “but we’re not complying with the requirement to detain someone once they’re eligible for release.”
