ICE Report Lists DeKalb County As Uncooperative With Immigration Agents

DECATUR, GA -- The national spotlight is on DeKalb County after White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the county was one of the municipalities that wasn't cooperating with immigration orders from Immigration & Customs Enforcement.

Spicer said Tuesday during a news conference that local governments were not turning over illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes to federal authorities for deportation.

He was referring specifically to a case out of Maryland where a 14-year-old girl was assaulted at school and the two boys accused in the incident both have outstanding orders from ICE.

Read more: Rockdale rape suspects in country illegally, authorities say

"I just read off that this executive order is dealing with people who have committed crimes who local enforcement agencies, our municipalities of -- at the state level are not dealing with it," Spicer said.

He said that a federal report lists local authorities that fail to honor ICE detainers -- requests to detain people in jail longer than they would otherwise be held so that immigration agents can investigate their status.

"And if you go to the ICE website and download this, you’ll see it’s over 30-something pages of cases where there’s a person that is convicted of a crime that local people -- local municipal law enforcement, for whatever reason -- and in some cases they’re prohibited but for one reason or another are not enforcing the law and not turning that individual over to federal authorities to be deported. And I think this is another example of why this issue needs to be addressed."

True enough, the ICE report says that the DeKalb County sheriff’s department “will not honor an ICE detainer unless ICE first presents the sheriff’s office with a warrant or ‘sufficient probable cause.’”

In response, DeKalb Sheriff Jeffrey Mann told reporters, “To the extent that this agency can, we will continue to employ our limited, taxpayer-supported resources to assist ICE with its efforts to secure and detain 'alien' criminal suspects in our community by providing advance inmate release notification,” according to WXIA-TV.

“However, federal case law has determined that detaining inmates beyond lawful release without sufficient probable cause or a judicial warrant from ICE is a violation of constitutional law,” Mann was quoted as saying.

As far back as 2014, Mann has maintained that his office would not comply with certain ICE requests to hold illegal immigrants without probable cause. He said that he arrived at the decision after requesting a legal review.

See Spicer's full remarks here.

The sheriff's office of suburban Atlanta's Clayton County was also cited by ICE as a “jurisdiction that has enacted policies that limit cooperation with ICE.”

Image via Wikimedia / Public Domain