This week, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman fed his affinity for culture war red meat that doesn’t actually help his constituents by announcing that the Nassau County Police Department had entered into a so-called 287(g) agreement with the federal government, deputizing 10 detectives to conduct certain immigration enforcement functions.
This is just showboating, utilizing a seldom-used program (for just a handful of detectives) that goes back to Bill Clinton’s time. The 10 detectives should continue to focus on solving real crimes and not be diverted from that essential public safety function.
Under the deal, the detectives could run the names of people arrested by Nassau cops through federal databases to determine if they had potential immigration violations, alert ICE, and hold these people until federal law enforcement could come pick them up.
The job of the NCPD is to protect the county’s residents, which it can achieve by enforcing the state and local laws. Blakeman must ask himself: will this arrangement enhance public safety? Or, its related inverse, does this have the potential to harm public safety?
When it comes to 287(g) agreements, there’s a reason that so few counties around the state, even those with Republican leadership, have decided to partake. These agreements create an additional burden on local resources as some portion of local law enforcement’s attention, time and energy is geared towards acting as agents for the feds, which necessarily means that these efforts are diverted away from investigating and resolving the local crimes that these departments were created for and are tasked with combating.
It doesn’t matter if Blakeman insists that these will be minor redeployments of resources; every hour spent processing or holding an immigrant for ICE is one not spent, for example, investigating homicides. Of course, beyond the unnecessary added responsibilities, we can well expect this agreement to actually substantially damage the NCPD’s ability to work with the public to preserve public safety. Already, immigrant communities, of which there are many on Long Island, are on edge over President Trump’s deportation push.
What is going to happen is that immigrants — undocumented and documented, or even U.S. citizen family members of immigrants — are going to hear that the NCPD is working with ICE now and may stop reporting criminal activity, stop cooperating with enforcement efforts, stop serving as witnesses and showing up to court. This is going to make everyone in the community less safe while not doing anything to enhance public safety.
If Blakeman is worried about immigrants potentially committing crimes in the county — which, as we often remind readers, they do at lower rates than the native-born — then the police are already empowered to deal with that via the existing criminal justice system. They do not need to layer on an additional system that will dissuade residents from trusting the police, especially since it’s a system liable to put innocent people in the crosshairs.
Under our justice systems, an arrest does not equate guilt, but if someone is arrested and then turned over to ICE, a dismissal or eventual acquittal means nothing. This is a decent deal for ICE and a terrible one for Nassau County and its public safety. We hope Blakeman will realize this before too much damage is done.