The Washington Times reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suspending, at least temporarily, its weekly “name and shame” report on so-called sanctuary city jurisdictions that refuse to hold criminal aliens for deportation. Only three weekly reports were issued after President Trump ordered them, covering weeks two through four of Trump’s administration. It is unclear when the weekly report will start up again, although it seems it is part of the plan to keep issuing these reports with a six-week lag.
The weekly report is intended to highlight when and where local police agencies refuse to cooperate with ICE requests. It was somewhat informative in its first three weeks of operation, but not always correct. For example, the last report showed that authorities in Brooklyn, N.Y., had declined to turn over a detainee with “Ussr” citizenship who had been convicted of sexual assault — presumably a reference to the communist country that was dissolved 26 years ago.
A correction also had to be issued for the first report, because some jurisdictions were either mistaken for similarly named jurisdictions (there are a lot of “Franklin Counties” in the United States, it turns out), and other cases where ICE had made an error by sending its detainer request to the wrong jurisdiction, which couldn’t cooperate because it didn’t have custody of the people ICE was looking for.
Still, first three reports contained some interesting information, such as the number of detainers issued nationwide in a given week (it was 2,868 during the week of Feb. 11-17, for example) and the number going to jurisdictions with a policy of non-cooperation. It’s also interesting to see what sort of convictions or charges will attract ICE’s attention — assault, sexual assault burglary, robbery and domestic violence all feature, as does drug dealing, with some DUI’s and even the occasional unspecified traffic offense (three of them in the most recent report).
