Whether in Congressional hearings or in media “fact checks”, arguments against local cooperation with ICE are often accompanied by the claim that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate compared to the general population (aside from immigration offenses). The claim itself is dubious — see the addendum below — but the more important point is how little it should matter when deciding whether to turn arrested suspects over to ICE.
There are many ways for state and local authorities to cooperate with ICE, but perhaps the most fundamental is to honor detainer requests. For illustration, imagine that local police arrest a man for, say, drunk driving. They submit his fingerprints to a federal database, and it turns out that the man is known to be an illegal immigrant. ICE notifies the local police and requests that they hold on to him for a few days until ICE can pick him up and initiate removal proceedings.
At this point, the local police have in their custody a specific person with demonstrated criminal behavior. The arrested man’s risk of future offending is surely higher than the average person’s, regardless of whether illegal immigrants as a group have a high crime rate. Put another way, removing a randomly selected illegal immigrant may not lower the community’s expected crime rate, but removing this illegal immigrant certainly would.
Sanctuary jurisdictions nevertheless choose not to cooperate, sometimes with disastrous results. Last September, police in Fairfax County, Va., arrested Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez on assault and brandishing charges. According to DHS, ICE identified him as an illegal immigrant with a long criminal history. However, when Morales-Ortez’s victim failed to cooperate, the county released him from custody rather than honor the ICE detainer. The very next day, Morales-Ortez shot and killed a local resident.
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