Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman is doubling down on his mistake to become a deputy for Trump border czar Tom Homan.
Last month Blakeman announced that his county’s police force had entered into a so-called 287(g) agreement with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allowing local officers to check the immigration status of people already arrested and keep suspected immigration violators in custody longer.
It was a bad move, as we and others warned, but rather than scrap it, Blakeman has decided to go the other way and expand cooperation to the so-called task force model, now deputizing detectives to go out and make immigration arrests themselves. This model had been discontinued back in 2012, largely because it just didn’t work; local police empowered to do both local criminal and federal immigration enforcement didn’t do either well, and the community often hated it.
Blakeman is unable to articulate a real rationale for why this move could advance public safety. Local police forces around the country have long been preoccupied with enforcing state and local law because that’s their reason for existing and primary responsibility to local taxpayers. The United States, wary of centralized government power in the wake of its fight for independence from Britain, has consciously never formed anything resembling the national police forces that are so common in other countries.
The closest we’ve got are federal agencies, with the broadest mandate falling to the FBI, an agency that really only intervenes in targeted ways and does not patrol or generally respond to emergency situations. Other federal law enforcement is narrow — the ATF investigates gun and explosives, the DEA handles drug cases and ICE and CBP do customs and immigration enforcement.
The task force model upends that balance, effectively fanning deputized federal law enforcement out to patrol communities, which is the exact type of thing that a lot of otherwise small-government conservative types would typically be against.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: even the appearance of close cooperation with immigration authorities can undermine local public safety. That goes double when the county and its police force are explicitly saying that officers will be out enforcing immigration law. Some local residents aren’t going to parse the intricacies of when and under what circumstances the police department will engage in this type of enforcement. They will simply avoid contact with the police at all, which means fewer crimes reported, fewer witnesses coming forward, less trust and more friction.
In exchange for all these negative eventualities, what exactly does Nassau County get? Using up more of its resources on non-local law enforcement functions?
Blakeman and his supporters keep alluding to this as a tool to combat crime, but we imagine that they’re aware that the Nassau County Police Department is fully empowered to enforce criminal laws already. Any immigrant engaged in criminal activity that they would be able to arrest on immigration grounds they could just as easily arrest on the criminal enforcement authority they already have, unless part of the goal here is to be able to detain people they wouldn’t have the evidence to arrest otherwise, which is its own problem.
All in all, we don’t imagine that the NCPD will detail these detectives to do full-time immigration enforcement and that this will be a relatively minimal part of their focus. But it will make the force’s job harder.