Greene County has been named in regional and statewide news many times this summer with the approval of a gaming license for Wild Rose Jefferson, the Ram softball team’s successful state tournament appearances, and even top notch young talent in the Bill Riley Talent Search at the Iowa State Fair.
The county was in the news earlier this week for a matter more political in nature, but the mention came under unusual circumstances. An article in the Aug 18 Des Moines Register named Greene County as one of 22 counties in Iowa that would no longer detain foreign born inmates on a request by a federal agency without a judge’s signature.
According to Greene County sheriff Steve Haupert, it is correct that he will not honor a request from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold an inmate for up to 48 hours while ICE checks his or her immigration status (a “detainer”). However, he had not made that fact known, nor had anyone else at the Law Enforcement Center.
Haupert said he, and apparently many sheriffs in Iowa, received a query via email from a Register reporter about the use of detainers. He saw the email but didn’t respond before the requested deadline. He was out of the office but planned to reply when he returned. Before he replied, the article was published listing Greene County as no longer agreeing to detainers.
“What was in the paper was accurate because that’s how I feel, but I didn’t tell him that,” Haupert said during a GreeneCountyNewsOnline interview about the Register article.
The question was raised following an Oregon court ruling in April that the ICE requests were not probable cause to hold a person in jail. It is a matter immigration rights advocates have championed for years.
A criminal act is not required for ICE to make the request, but only a suspicion of illegal immigration status.
Haupert has been sheriff for two years, and he has not been asked to detain someone, nor has he done it. “It’s going to have to be a criminal act before I’ll detain. Criminally, if they’ve done something, just like you or anyone else would, they’ll land in our facility. If they’re found to be foreign born – and I’m assuming ICE is checking for terrorists, checking all the files for everything – if they’re in our facility for something criminal, and they’d like them to be detained maybe for another day while they check, I have no problem with that. But just to go out, for ICE just to say they should be held… they need to be there for a criminal reason,” Haupert said.
“I agree that our immigration laws are not good, but that’s Washington’s problem. We need to be dealing with our borders and rewriting our immigration laws in Washington, rather than detaining on a county level,” he said.
Haupert said it’s his understanding that when ICE makes a detainer request, it’s up to local law enforcement to go find the subject. He said he views that as a civil liberties question, just as the Civil Liberties Union does. It was the Civil Liberties Union that alerted Iowa sheriffs about the Oregon court ruling against detainers. Haupert said holding someone in jail for 48 hours without probable cause or a criminal intent is the same question no matter who the person is or where he was born.
There are “numerous” undocumented residents in the county, Haupert said. “We do traffic stops all the time that they don’t have a valid work card or driver’s license,” he said, but they aren’t put in jail. They’re cited for not having a valid license, a scheduled violation with a $200 fine. The information goes into the computer data base, but it is not flagged in any special way to show a suspicion that the driver may not have legal immigration status.
Haupert said the detainers are used as a tool to fight terrorists, not illegal immigrants. He said that if he had a detainer request, he would listen to the rationale for the request. If there were a strong reason to think the subject was involved in terrorist activity, he would possibly oblige. “But just to say, ‘bring somebody in for two days while we’re going to check him so we know where he’s at’…where does that lead? Pretty soon they’re going to be doing that to everybody,” he said.
