The Trump administration’s chaotic and often violent immigration crackdown is starting to turn a number of local law enforcement leaders away from the federal immigration enforcement agencies they once supported, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
“I’m not anti-ICE by any stroke of the imagination, but they’ve moved the goal posts,” said Sheriff Kevin Joyce, a 39-year law-enforcement veteran in Maine, the Journal reported.
Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to target only the “worst of the worst” in his immigration crackdown, a vast majority of the more than 328,000 migrants arrested since last January had no criminal histories, and immigration operations have often been chaotic and violent, as was the case Saturday when Border Patrol shot and killed a Minnesota resident.
Federal immigration officers’ controversial operations have started to affect local law enforcement officials themselves, such as was the case when a handful of off-duty police officers in Minnesota were harassed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
At a press conference this week, Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said ICE agents had harassed his officers, all of whom are people of color, with baseless searches and, in one case, surrounded an off-duty officer, knocked their phone away, and drew guns.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said, the Journal reported.
Federal immigration officers have also stopped cooperating with local law enforcement, according to Faribault Police Chief John Sherwin, who leads the Minnesota city’s police department.
“At first, the narrative certainly fit that they were targeting people with significant criminal history,” Sherwin said this week, the Journal reported. “Since the New Year, they’re not sharing with us who they’re going after.”