The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office is in touch every week with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but Sheriff Joe Pelle said the routine contact doesn’t mean that deputies and jail staff are acting as federal immigration enforcement agents.
On Feb. 1, the Boulder County Jail received its annual letter from ICE requesting staff continue submitting Foreign Born Inmate Reports, or lists detailing names and places of birth of people who are booked.
“We don’t investigate immigration status, we don’t ask people about immigration status,” Pelle said. “It’s up to ICE what they do with that list.”
Since President Donald Trump called for heightened immigration enforcement, people across the nation have braced themselves for raids and roundups, seen locally by the recent, and false, rumor that ICE agents were stopping people in Longmont to check their papers.
In all of 2016, the Boulder County Jail submitted 460 names of non-American citizens and 184 names of inmates booked without citizenship records, according to 90 pages of records obtained through a Colorado Open Records Act request.
More than half of the non-American citizen inmates listed Mexico as their place of birth, which is the most common country, followed by 24 from El Salvador, 10 from India, nine from Nepal and eight from Guatemala.
Records technician Brenda West said once a week, two reports are sent from the jail to ICE: one with the name, date of birth, booking number, booking date and time, race, sex, booking officer and release date; and the other with the same information along with the place of birth and charges. She said names get submitted only once — usually when they are booked into jail.
The two reports sent by the jail are titled: “Non Citizens” and “Inmates Booked Without Citizenship Records.”
Pelle said even though his agency isn’t in the “immigration business,” there are federal and state statutes requiring the jail to share booking information, whether with ICE or with the public.
“Jail records concerning inmates are public records,” Pelle said. “The list of inmates and their charges is available to anybody that wants it. We don’t have any legal grounds to withhold that information.”
He said even before he became sheriff 14 years ago, the jail had been automatically generating the reports using their electronic record-keeping system.
ICE authority
The federal request says, “this report has been a valuable resource in locating at-large criminal aliens that do not have a positive match from our Interoperability queries from submitted fingerprints.”
ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said in an email that the number of names the agency receives from Boulder County varies monthly due to intake and reporting, which includes submission of fingerprints from people who are not already entered into the law enforcement database.
“All foreign-born inmates are vetted through ICE databases to determine whether a further investigation would be warranted based on legal presence and criminality,” Rusnok said in the email.
Automatically, whether an inmate is foreign-born or not, fingerprints are transmitted to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which then sends the records to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal law enforcement agencies, Pelle said.
“If somebody was in the ICE system, it would ping,” he said. “Just like if somebody was wanted in the FBI system or in another state, they would know they’re in our jail.”
Pelle said on rare occasions, ICE agents have appeared at court hearings and they have also waited in the jail lobby or front parking lot for an inmate to be released.
“When we have a dangerous criminal who has completed their sentence — for instance, some drug dealers — we’ve worked with ICE before,” he said. “It’s a public safety issue.”
But Boulder County Jail Division Chief Jeff Goetz previously said the sheriff’s office will not hold somebody on an ICE detainer, or an extended amount of time for federal agents to take them into custody.
“If there’s a warrant for the individual, just like any other person wanted on a crime has a warrant, they will be treated the same as anyone,” Goetz said last month.
Pelle also has said that federal courts in multiple states, including Oregon and Pennsylvania, have recently ruled that ICE detainers have no legal authority.
He previously said they aren’t reviewed by a judge or a magistrate, and, “If you really want us to hold someone in our jail, do what every other law enforcement agency in the country does, and go get a warrant.”
Outside Boulder County
ICE also requests reports from the nearby Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, which provides a daily list of foreign-born inmates, according to spokeswoman Jenny Fulton.
Fulton wrote in an email, “We only honor ICE holds that have been judicially reviewed and signed by a (federal) judge.”
Rusnok confirmed that Larimer and Weld counties do not receive letters requesting reports.
Once foreign-born offenders are transferred to the Colorado Department of Corrections, the state agency keeps public records of those inmates.
A public online database shows that there were 1,401 foreign-born inmates in Colorado prisons as of Dec. 31.
Of those, ICE placed a detainer on 1,067 inmates — the majority, at 818, being from Mexico — meeting deportation criteria. The next most common countries with a detainer were Honduras (52), El Salvador (41), Cuba (seven) and England (five).
Offenders on fugitive status are not included in the foreign-born and ICE detainer data set.
All inmates, according to the database information page, are processed through the Denver Reception and Diagnostic Center, which is a temporary housing facility for up to 575 inmates where they are classified before they are more permanently placed.
The foreign-born inmates are flagged for further screening at a later date if there’s an indication that they could meet deportation criteria, according to the database.
When they approach their release date or community or parole eligibility, ICE is contacted to place an active detainer on those inmates meeting deportation criteria. They are then transferred to their custody upon release from prison.
Amelia Arvesen: 303-684-5212, arvesena@times-call.com or twitter.com/ameliaarvesen
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
