| Robert Samuels |
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa – Illegal immigration makes Bill Hartzell seethe. The memories are fresh from the afternoon in October 2013 when he saw his wife’s 93-year-old grandmother bloodied and unconscious, after being beaten and raped in her house by a 19-year-old Mexican who crossed the border and never left.
His outrage is driving Hartzell to vote in Iowa presidential caucuses for Ted Cruz, who has vowed to battle the ‘sanctuary cities’ that refuse to help the feds deport illegal immigrants. Cruz has said he would block these localities from receiving federal funds for law enforcement – an idea that makes perfect sense to Hartzell.
Except when it applies to the place where he lives.
Pottawattamie County’s sheriff adopted a sanc-tuary policy in 2014. Hartzell knows the sheriff. He trusts the sheriff.
And he is uncomfortable that his county, which includes Council Bluffs, would lose at least a million dollars should a President Cruz carry out his threat.
“For us in Council Bluffs, it’s a little more tricky issue,” he said. “This isn’t San Francisco.”
With illegal immigration roiling the GOP elec-torate, the party’s presidential candidates have spent months blasting sanctuary cities as bastions of liberal naivete and bleeding-heartedness gone awry.
Sofia Sandoval, Family Support Services Coordinator at the Centro Latino, works at her office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, January 15. In Iowa, immigration can be a messy and sometimes ethereal issue
Bill Hartzell at the Rodeo Saloon in Council Bluffs, January 14. Hartzell’s wife’s grandmother was murdered by an undocumented immigrant in 2013
No place symbolised this mind-set better, they have said, than San Francisco, where last year, 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle was allegedly murdered by an illegal Mexican migrant.
But there is an awkward, and unstated, element to the hostility toward sanctuary cities. In Iowa, at least 26 of the state’s 99 counties are deemed ‘sanctuaries’ – including some of the state’s most conservative.
The designation is an informal one, assigned by activists on both sides of the immigration debate. Governments are generally considered sanctuaries if local officials refuse to honour requests by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold onto suspected illegal immi-grants arrested on minor charges while federal agents figure out their status.
After a federal appeals court ruled in 2014 these federal requests – known as ‘detainers’ – were optional, the American Civil Liberties Union alerted local sheriff’s departments that they would be subject to lawsuits if they held a citizen without a proper warrant. Nearly 300 jurisdictions nationwide, conservative and liberal, have opted not to take that risk.
Typically, the decisions that lead to a community earning ‘sanctuary’ status are made without fanfare or public debate. Instead, the refusal to cooperate with ICE usually comes from a police chief, a sheriff or a government attorney – not necessarily a politician looking to extend an act of mercy toward illegal immigrants.
Republican presidential contenders on the campaign trail have avoided such details. Others have joined Cruz in demanding that local governments face penalties for not assisting immi-gration officials. At times, the candidates have blasted sanctuary cities – while standing in one.
“We will finally, finally, finally secure the borders and end sanctuary cities,” Cruz said to applause recently in the public library in Onawa, Iowa – in a county that has a sanctuary policy.
“If you are a sanctuary city, you will lose your federal funding,” Senator Marco Rubio, declared this month to an eager audience at a hotel in Coralville, Iowa, which also has a sanctuary policy.
“Crap” is the word that Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner, has used across the state to describe sanctuary cities.
The dynamic illustrates the disconnect between hard-edged, campaign-year rhetoric on illegal immigration and the complications of enacting policy on local communities.
Pottawattamie County Sheriff Jeff Danker said that he did not want his jail to keep anyone without a proper warrant. Keeping someone longer for the sake of immigration officials, he said, could be a civil rights violation.
The presidential candidates are threatening to take millions of dollars from local communities over a relatively small disagreement, Danker said. ICE only issued 13 detainer requests between November 2014 and November 2015 in Pottawattamie, according to a Syracuse University study. The local jail here received about US$1 million in federal funds last year.
Danker, who describes himself as a conserva-tive, said he hoped the presidential candidates’ focus on sanctuary policies was just political bluster.
“When you bring things down to a local level, things are not so clear cut,” he said.
Over the next few days, Danker expects a flurry of phone calls and visits from presidential campaigns. Trump is expected to visit Council Bluffs, as is Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
The city, which has a dual identity as a small town nestled beside endless rows of cornfields to the east and as a suburb of metropolitan Omaha to the west, is vote-rich and not particularly ideological. 27 per cent of voters were registered as Democrats, 37 per cent are Republican, and the rest are affiliated with no party at all.
In a county of 93,000 residents, about six per cent are Hispanic or Latino, according to Census data. Those immigrants have largely supplemented an aging workforce in farms and factories as younger white residents decamp for cities, according to Melvyn Houser, a corn and soybean farmer who serves on the county’s board of supervisors.
Houser, a Republican who said he plans to caucus for one of the former governors in the field, said that he believes GOP candidates who talk about having the federal government punish sanctuary cities are contradicting traditional conservative values of limited government and local control.
“This isn’t Texas or Arizona, where there are issues at the border and its more of a burden on the local schools and hospitals,” Houser said.
“If the federal government wants something done, they should get their act together and do it. They shouldn’t try and take away funding while we get stuck with all the work and responsibility.”
But anti-illegal immigration activists say the issue is far simpler than the sheriff or his backers suggest.
“That’s a clear sanctuary policy,” said Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the conservative Center for Immigration Studies. “This county is choosing to obstruct the work of the government.”
Vaughan acknowledged that “there is no settled law” on the legal risks of detaining immigrants. Still, she added that a plethora of other local governments – including such cities as Dayton, Ohio, and Salt Lake City – have insisted on complying with federal requests “because it’s the right thing to do”.
Lynne Branigan, a former Council Bluffs City Council member, expressed shock when a reporter told her that her own community was deemed as having a sanctuary policy.
“Based on what happened in California, I absolutely don’t agree with sanctuary status,” Branigan said. “I’m not versed in all it means, but believe me, I’m going to find out.” – Text and Photos by The Washington Post
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