Sheriff’s Office Signs ICE 287(g) Agreement
By ERIC SANTOMAURO-STENZEL
OTSEGO COUNTY
The Otsego County Sheriff’s Office signed a warrant service agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on October 17. The 287(g) program allows local law enforcement agencies to partner for immigration enforcement.
The Sheriff’s Office has signed up for the “Warrant Service Officer Program,” one of three 287(g) models. Under the program, “ICE trains, certifies and authorizes” officers “to serve and execute administrative warrants on aliens currently in [the] agency’s custody,” according to the ICE website.
Reached by e-mail, Otsego County Sheriff Richard Devlin Jr. told AllOtsego he signed the agreement “to identify individuals in custody who are also wanted by ICE before they are released.
“This will enhance community safety by enabling law enforcement to work with ICE to remove dangerous or potentially threatening individuals rather than releasing them into the community,” he wrote.
Otsego County is now one of seven New York counties with a 287(g) agreement. New York has 62 counties.
Sheriff Devlin said the decision was under his own purview to make. He plans to train five jail supervisors under the program. To date, he said, no one in the Sheriff’s Office’s custody has been subject to the terms of the 287(g) agreement.
“This is a limited program where ICE trains correction officers to serve federal immigration warrants on inmates already inside the Otsego County Jail,” he wrote.
The Village of Cooperstown and City of Oneonta have recently passed similarly-worded resolutions opposed to current immigration enforcement and deportation practices of the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is part.
“There are immigrants seeking asylum in the United States who live and work in Otsego County and the Village of Cooperstown and are law-abiding members of their communities and valued employees,” the Cooperstown resolution reads in part. “Among those immigrants are persons who have been subject to seizure, detention, and deportation by actions of the federal Department of Homeland Security.”
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