Nassau's agreement with ICE to help detain immigrants is dangerous

In Nassau County, people are living in fear of federal immigration agents. Children aren’t showing up at school. Workers aren’t showing up to job sites. Even green card holders and those who’ve been granted asylum worry they could be subject to deportation.

With the details of the Nassau County Police Department’s agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement now public, we know those fears are warranted. The threats aren’t just from federal agents — they’re also from our own county. Any driver on Nassau’s roads who “looks undocumented” to a police officer is now at risk of being pulled over, investigated for their immigration status, or worse.

At a February news conference, County Executive Bruce Blakeman and NCPD Commissioner Patrick Ryder announced the department would assign 10 detectives to work with ICE to investigate the immigration status of people arrested for serious crimes. But the agreement they actually signed — a so-called “287(g) Task Force” agreement — is much broader in scope and has led to racial profiling wherever it has been used around the country.

The “Task Force” agreement is the most aggressive type of agreement ICE offers to local law enforcement. Some agreements provide limited authority to extend the detention of people already in local law enforcement custody. The “Task Force” agreement authorizes local police officers to initiate traffic stops, detain pedestrians, and make arrests solely because the officer believes the person is undocumented.

It’s not hard to see how this policy can lead directly to racial profiling of Latinos. LatinoJustice PRLDEF is already suing the NCPD for failing to provide language access to Spanish speakers and recently settled a lawsuit against Suffolk County for racially profiling Latinos under the pretense of looking for undocumented drivers. Data from 2022 suggests Nassau is already racially profiling drivers — a practice unlikely to stop when officers are given free rein to stop people for “Driving While Brown.”

It is no consolation that officers are getting training from ICE. The agency has a long history of racial profiling. The Task Force 287(g) training that ICE provided in 2008 instructed officers that “apparent Mexican ancestry was a relevant factor that could be used in forming a reasonable suspicion that a person is in the country without authorization.” The use of the Task Force model led to rampant racial profiling, particularly by Joe Arpaio, whose Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office became the national symbol of 287(g) Task Force policing — and a national symbol of racial profiling. To this day, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office remains under federal monitorship.

By now, we know that President Donald Trump was deadly serious about mass deportations. Green card holders have been detained and deported. Asylum-seekers have been whisked away with no hearing. People have been deported for being a “gang member” based on nothing more than a rose tattoo. Police in New York City and Long Island have a long history of improperly identifying people as gang members based on scant evidence, with disastrous consequences.

There is no need for any of this. While violent crime in Nassau is low, it leads the state in traffic fatalities. Nassau residents face real public safety challenges that are not solved by converting part of the police department into a de facto deportation force. LatinoJustice is outraged that the NCPD signed this agreement with ICE. County residents should be outraged as well.

This guest essay reflects the views of Andrew Case, supervising counsel for LatinoJustice PRLDEF.