The Trump administration, eager to force local officials to collaborate with ICE, is coming for a Tompkins County sheriff who released a man who’d served his sentence.
CENTRAL NEW YORK’S Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, found itself in the federal government’s crosshairs last month when the Trump administration made the county a focal point of the president’s push to force localities to dedicate resources to mass deportations.
Sheriff Derek Osborne did something routine: He released a man from jail after he’d served his sentence. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted Osborne to hold the man, an undocumented immigrant, past his release date so the federal agency could arrest and deport him.
The us Department of Justice is now investigating and threatening to prosecute the sheriff for failing to cooperate with ice, though it’s not clear what the department would charge him with.
The sheriff’s office said Osborne “acted consistently” with state and local policy, didn’t interfere with federal law enforcement, and told ice when the man was going to be released.
“From what I can tell, the sheriff did not violate any law,” said Estelle McKee, a professor at Cornell Law School in Ithaca who specializes in immigration.
The threats show how far the Trump administration is willing to go to pressure local police to work with ice and may serve as a test case for whether federal officials can successfully spook local officials into compliance.
The Trump administration “is throwing every piece of spaghetti at the wall to force people and scare them into capitulating,” said Lena Graber, senior staff attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “The fact that they publicly announced the investigation — they don’t even have to file charges for that to have a chilling effect.”
Robert McWhirter, an expert in constitutional law who practices in Arizona and has written on immigration law, said he is not aware of any past instance in which a local law enforcement official has faced federal charges for not complying with an ice directive.
“There’s no basis in law to do this,” he said. “There is no such crime as failing to help ice do its job.” New York Focus and Bolts reached out to the doj for comment and will update this story if they respond.
Still, the Justice Department has directed its prosecutors to investigate state and local officials who don’t comply with ice directives in order to potentially bring criminal charges. Since January, the Trump administration has cut off federal funding from organizations that work with immigrants and threatened to withhold money from jurisdictions with so-called sanctuary policies. And it has filed civil lawsuits against New York state, Chicago, and the state of Illinois over policies that grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants and limit state and local agencies from helping with immigration enforcement.
Unlike Illinois, New York has no statewide law governing local collaboration with federal authorities on immigration. It limits state-level cooperation with ice, and a state court has barred some forms of assistance by county sheriffs, but localities are largely left to decide whether to dedicate resources to helping with federal immigration enforcement.
Elsewhere in the country, Republican-run states are applying pressure on their own localities. Last week, Tennessee’s governor signed a law allowing the state to criminally investigate public officials who vote for policies that would protect immigrants from ice, while a new Florida law empowers the governor to remove local officials who don’t comply with ice directives.
For McKee, the Justice Department’s investigation into Osborne is part of this escalation. “These threats are just part of this administration’s tactics,” she said.
The federal ire and funding freeze threats have rattled communities in Tompkins County and Ithaca, both of which have had policies in place since the first Trump administration that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.