This letter is provided as opinion/commentary from the author. You can submit your own: editor@citydesk.org
As soon as Monday, the Albuquerque City Council will consider amending our city’s long-established immigration protection policies under the auspices of public safety. But this misguided amendment will have the exact opposite effect, weakening police work while opening the door to catastrophic – and potentially costly – enforcement errors.
We all want Albuquerque to be safe and welcoming for everyone, regardless of immigration status. That means building trust between our immigrant communities and the Albuquerque Police Department so they know they can report crimes they have witnessed or experienced without fear of being handed over to federal immigration authorities. That trust is vital for effective law enforcement. The proposed amendment, R-45, would with one vote, overturn years of trust-building and create a process that violates our fundamental due process rights.
If someone is charged with a serious crime in our city, the priority needs to be on the careful execution of the criminal legal process. APD shouldn’t be wasting time, resources, and community trust by doing work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency whose $8 billion allocation dwarfs our city’s entire annual budget.
Additionally, these proposals raise the possibility of a catastrophic error where the wrong person is charged with a serious crime. That’s not a hypothetical. In 2019, APD arrested, charged and detained a young Latina student simply because someone thought she vaguely looked like the suspect in a murder investigation, despite obvious differences in the two girls’ names and physical description. That was a deeply traumatic and harmful experience for a young person in our community – how much worse could it be if that officer’s carelessness had also resulted in her ending up in ICE custody?
Or, what if a U.S. citizen is detained and charged with a crime – one for which they may very well be found innocent if afforded their due process rights – and is incorrectly flagged by ICE as an undocumented resident. That’s not hypothetical, either. A sheriff’s department in Florida was sued this year when they detained and transferred to ICE a U.S. citizen who was nearly deported to Jamaica because the Department of Homeland Security’s notoriously error-prone immigration database indicated he was undocumented.
Worse yet, opening the door to any involvement in immigration enforcement by APD immediately brings up the specter of unconstitutional racial profiling – the two go together like summer and mosquitos. We don’t need to list all the harms of racial profiling but here’s a recent example: A racial profiling lawsuit against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department in Arizona while it engaged in immigration enforcement activities has racked up a settlement of $314 million and raised the very real possibility of a Department of Justice consent decree.
Is an amendment that makes us less safe, our police officers less effective, and our due process rights weakened worth it? No, it’s not. Simply put, R-45 is a lose-lose proposition, and we urge our city council to reject it.
Leonardo Castañeda is a policy advocate at the ACLU of New Mexico
Disappointing to see City Desk publish the piece on the UNMH bond issue without an editorial clarification. The author presents the piece as a history of UNMH when in actuality it is revisionist history. The original purpose of the UNMH mill levy was for indigent care and the uninsured. (Google Bill Rehm UNMH) With the advent of the ACA it was no longer necessary so it was “converted to an operations fund to cover executive salaries and new construction. There is no mention of indigent care in the UNMH piece which is evidence enough that the mill levy is no longer necessary.