Florida sheriffs reach reasonable stopgap deal on detaining undocumented immigrants

A Tampa Bay Times Editorial

An agreement between several Florida sheriffs and Immigration and Customs Enforcement strikes a reasonable compromise in a long-standing quandary over how local jails should handle undocumented immigrants. The new protocol provides a workaround that heeds constitutional concerns while letting law enforcement do its work.

It does not supplant the need for more comprehensive immigration reform, which is on the front burner now that President Donald Trump has proposed a path to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants in exchange for a crackdown on others living illegally in the country and funding for a border wall. But the sheriffs' deal is better than the ban on so-called "sanctuary cities" embraced by conservatives in the Legislature.

For months, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri has been working with federal immigration officials to resolve how local law enforcement can legally hold prisoners for ICE without violating their constitutional rights. When jail detainees were suspected of being in the country illegally, ICE commonly asked sheriffs to continue holding them until they could be taken into federal custody -- even after their local charges were resolved. That raised the specter of lawsuits for unlawful search and seizure. But many sheriffs were loath to simply release people sought by immigration officials.

Now, in those cases, ICE will send a booking form that transfers custody of the detainee from the local jail to federal immigration authorities. The jail would then only be responsible for housing the person, an arrangement similar to agreements local law enforcement agencies have with other federal authorities, such as the FBI. Sheriffs would be paid $50 for housing the person for up to 48 hours. The new practice covers the entire Tampa Bay area as well as several other Florida counties and is expected to be adopted statewide and eventually throughout the country. That uniformity alone is an improvement over the uncertainty and uneven practices in different jurisdictions.

It's not a perfect solution, however. ICE arrest warrants are not signed by judges, which should be standard practice. But as Gualtieri correctly pointed out, that would take action by Congress to change. Immigrant advocates warn that a booking form doesn't alleviate civil rights concerns, and there is legitimate reason to worry that ICE, under the Trump administration, is targeting not just criminals but immigrants who have been living here peacefully and productively. Case in point: A Mexican man who had lived in Detroit for 30 years while long seeking legal status was deported this month, separated from his wife and children.

There is no question that lawmakers in Washington must tackle the difficult work of immigration reform in a bipartisan way, and the U.S. Senate, spurred by Trump's announcement, may start to do so in hopes of coming up with a better plan than the president's. In the meantime, thanks largely to Gualtieri's efforts, the narrower issue of how local law enforcement should process ICE detainer requests has some needed clarity.