‘Tread Carefully’: What a $112 Million Verdict Could Mean for Local Police Working With ICE

As the Trump administration pushes local law enforcement to sign up to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an order to pay out $112 million to unlawfully detained immigrants could serve as a warning of the legal risks.

Last week, a jury ordered Suffolk County, New York, to pay the total sum, which will go to 674 immigrants unlawfully held in jail between 2016 and 2018 based on requests from ICE. The verdict stemmed from a 2017 class action claiming the county violated immigrants’ constitutional rights by keeping them in jail on ICE’s request when they’d otherwise be released.

Immigrant rights attorneys hope that local leaders elsewhere take notice.

“When counties do things illegally, courts and the justice system might one day force them to pay for the harm they’ve caused,” said Rex Chen, supervising counsel for Immigrant Rights LatinoJustice PRLDEF, which represented the plaintiffs. “So they may have to sit up and pay attention that breaking the law is something that they may have to pay for later on.”

The Trump administration has expanded the use of ICE detainers, requests by immigration forces to hold people in local law enforcement custody for up to 48 hours. But complying with the ICE request can run the risk of violating the Fourth Amendment and right to due process if people are held in jail without an underlying charge and not given the opportunity to challenge the detainer.

While the Biden administration reserved ICE detainers for immigrants who had a criminal background or posed a national security threat, their use has been expanded under President Donald Trump, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute office at the New York University School of Law.

The legal complexity surrounding immigration policies can be hard to keep track of, he said.

“It’s bad enough for ICE officers to follow the changes in law. It is much harder for local officials to know how law has changed, therefore more likely that they make errors,” Chishti said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to NOTUS’ request for comment about whether anything will be done to shield local jurisdictions from liability. The White House referred questions to DHS.

The Suffolk County case isn’t finalized: The county plans to appeal the verdict, its communications director said. The appeals process could mean that it might take longer than a decade from the initial detentions for the case to be fully resolved.

Some of the nearly 700 immigrants Suffolk County held unlawfully had authorization to live in the country, but the majority didn’t have legal status and have since been deported, making it harder to track them down to receive the damages, Chen said.

Meanwhile, local law enforcement around the country is under intense pressure to cooperate with deportation efforts. Often that goes beyond detainers: Florida has been at the forefront, with more than 400 agreements deputizing law enforcement within cities, counties, state agencies and universities to arrest people they suspect live in the country without authorization.

The DeSantis administration strong-armed jurisdictions to partake in the street-level enforcement authorization known as a 287(g) agreement through threats of removal from office for local elected officials who rejected the collaboration with ICE. Suffolk County does not have a 287(g) agreement.

Millions are also flowing from the Department of Homeland Security to Florida and $250 million from state coffers to local law enforcement to buy equipment and to pay personnel participating in immigration enforcement. On Sept. 26, ICE announced a $38 million award to state-level agencies and local jurisdictions with 287(g) agreements.

Since Aug. 1, Florida law enforcement has encountered more than 7,000 people officers suspected didn’t have legal status, according to a state dashboard. Police arrested 5,700 of those, with most of the arrests coming from Florida Highway Patrol.

The use of ICE detainers in Florida has increased because of the training local officers have received in identifying people subject to deportation, said Grady Judd, the sheriff of Polk County, Florida, who also chairs the State Immigration Enforcement Council.

Judd called the Suffolk County verdict a quandary.

“We still had to spend who knows how much money of the good taxpayers’, honest taxpayers’, citizens’ money to defend ourselves against this conduct or this action that should have never been able to have been brought if they weren’t here in the country illegally,” he said.

But Judd said the verdict wouldn’t deter most law enforcement in Florida from working with ICE.

“If we quit making arrests because we were concerned with lawsuits, then we would never, ever make another arrest,” he said.

Not everyone agrees. The city of South Miami has held out from deputizing its police to act as immigration agents. Its mayor, Javier Fernández, said the Suffolk County lawsuit highlighted his reasoning for opposing his city getting entangled in immigration enforcement and potentially putting the city at the precipice of insolvency.

“This is exactly the kind of concern that was at the center of our deliberations, where we could be exposed to paying a substantial legal claim,” he said. “And again, the size of our enterprise as a city is rather small, and so anything in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for us is of concern, much less a jury verdict awarding damages to a class of individuals in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The South Florida city had asked a state judge to clarify whether it would run afoul of state law if it didn’t enter into a 287(g) agreement. Leon County Judge Jonathan Sjostrom ultimately threw out the lawsuit on Sept. 24, but attorneys for the state said during oral arguments that municipalities would be in the clear as long as they didn’t hold a vote on the agreement.

Fernández said he’s satisfied with the outcome for his city in state court. His message to other cities working with ICE: “Tread carefully.”