POV: Enlisting State Police to Enforce Immigration Law a Mistake

Reversing the policy of his predecessor Deval Patrick (Hon’14), Governor Charlie Baker announced on June 2 that the Massachusetts State Police will now be permitted to detain suspected noncitizens. Baker insists that without this collaboration he has “concerns about restricting law enforcement’s ability to do their job.” But enlisting the state police to enforce federal immigration law is a costly mistake.

First, federal immigration authorities know how to enforce federal immigration law, and in fact, they do so quite effectively. The Department of Homeland Security is the largest law enforcement agency in the country—with a budget of nearly $60 billion in fiscal year 2016. Under the Obama administration, a record 2.5 million individuals have been deported from the United States. Simply put, federal immigration authorities don’t need the help of state law enforcement in order to successfully do their job.

Moreover, the presumption that increased collaboration between state and federal law enforcement is necessary to keep our communities safe rests on a mythical premise—that noncitizens are more likely to commit crimes. But study after study has demonstrated that this is false. In fact, higher immigration is associated with lower crime rates. Between 1990 and 2013, as the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States more than tripled, to 11.2 million, FBI data from the same time period show a 48 percent decline in the violent crime rate, and a 41 percent decline in property crime. Other studies have confirmed that noncitizens are less likely to be incarcerated—that during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants.

Not only is increased collaboration between state police and federal immigration authorities unnecessary, but it also directly undermines the trust required for effective community policing. When immigrant communities fear that any interaction with local law enforcement authorities could lead to their arrest, detention, and ultimately deportation, witnesses and victims are significantly less likely to cooperate in investigations. This erosion of community trust directly undermines state law enforcement’s ability to “do their job”—the very concern Baker claims to have.

Finally, asking state police to enforce federal immigration law is complicated and draws on already scarce resources. As highly skilled federal judges have noted, “…the immigration laws have been termed second only to the Internal Revenue Code in complexity” Asking busy, overburdened police officers to inquire into immigration status, respond to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) inquiries, and collect data for federal immigration authorities is not only difficult, but diverts resources, time, and energy from the important community safety work they are actually tasked with doing. And lawsuits against erroneous ICE holds—which have wrongly netted US citizens and others with lawful immigration status and no criminal history—will cost Massachusetts cities and counties precious financial resources in litigation expenses.

Whether Baker’s policy reversal is an effort to appease his more conservative backers, who may doubt his hard-line bona fides in the wake of his support for the recently passed transgender bill, or a policy move that’s always been in the pipeline, we may never know. But either way, this shift sends a troubling signal to Massachusetts immigrant communities that state law enforcement cannot be trusted—and that puts us all at risk.

Sarah Sherman-Stokes, a School of Law clinical instructor in the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, can be reached at sstokes@bu.edu.

“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact Rich Barlow at barlowr@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.