Opinion: ICE And Alexandria: Is It Necessary?

The following letter to the editor is a response to the July 10 article Alexandria Sheriff Changes Policy On Working With ICE. The views expressed in this post are the authors' own.

By Caitlin Blunnie, Liam Dotson and Marilyn Siwek

Sheriff Dana Lawhorne recently announced changes to procedures in the Alexandria Jail regarding ICE. He announced he would reduce the time during which ICE can collect inmates from the jail. As the Sheriff reported in The Patch 7/10/18, reducing the time was not “changing our relationship with ICE [but] simply an adjustment to better reflect our practices.”

As longtime residents of Alexandria and disheartened citizens, we believe that making only an adjustment in the hours immigrants are held in jail past their release dates is inadequate. These concessions would not be necessary if the Sheriff would remove ICE from his Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) and if he would end his practice of making reminder calls to ICE when an inmate is about to be released.

We do not want to facilitate ICE’s presence in our city, including the city jail. Now, the Sheriff will continue to hold people up to 24 hours after they have posted bail so that ICE can pick them up. This means that people are being turned over to ICE before they have even seen a judge. Our goal is to have immigrants treated justly. If someone posts bail, they should be released to their homes. Everyone should receive equal and due process, no matter what their immigration status is. No detainee should be handed over to ICE, especially without a judicial warrant signed by a judge, which at present the Sheriff does not require.

We recognize that Sheriff Lawhorne has implemented worthwhile programs in the jail, such as GED programs, book clubs, and drug and alcohol sobriety support groups. These programs must continue. We are simply asking that ICE be removed from the IGA.

If Alexandria did not have this contract with ICE, people brought to the jail, documented and undocumented, would follow the same judicial procedures. That is the best policy: one that upholds due process rights for everyone.

Alexandria’s participation with ICE makes everyone, from the Sheriff to all of us in Alexandria, complicit in ICE’s brutality. The only way for residents of Alexandria to live peacefully, respect and embrace each other, and protect due process is to cut ties with ICE. It's time for the Sheriff to eliminate ICE from the IGA and stop calling ICE to collect inmates from the Alexandria jail.

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