A D.C. Council committee slammed Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration Thursday for what it said was a failure to level with residents about police cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
Bowser (D) and public safety officials have repeatedly stressed that D.C. police do not enforce immigration laws or initiate immigration investigations. Still, citing resident testimony and media reports, the council’s public works and operations committee, chaired by Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), issued a blistering report that accused the administration of allowing police officers to patrol with immigration authorities and refusing to clarify the extent of the city’s cooperation with deportation efforts.
The committee’s most significant finding, Nadeau said in an interview, was that residents have lost trust in their police department as a result of perceived coziness with immigration authorities. Nadeau, whose committee oversees the office of human rights — which she said gave her jurisdiction over the matter — said those perceptions would cause immigrants to fear police, who had previously assured residents that reporting a crime would not lead to deportation.
“It took generations to build that trust,” Nadeau said, “and it is now going to take generations to rebuild it.”
At a news conference Thursday — the day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis — Bowser declined to comment on the D.C. Council report but said outrage about ICE activity should be directed toward the federal government, not the city.
“You could ask me a thousand questions, you could send a thousand questions to the chief about ICE,” she said. “ICE is patrolling American cities. If we don’t want that, the Congress has to stop funding ICE, because thousands of agents who are untrained to police urban environments are on our streets. That’s where the questions should be placed.”
D.C. lawmakers have been pursuing answers from Bowser’s administration and the police about the extent of their collaboration with federal immigration agents over the past six months, as ICE boosted its presence in the city and the Trump administration urged D.C.’s government to comply with their aggressive deportation agenda. While Bowser administration officials have stressed that immigration enforcement is not a local police goal, they have repeatedly declined to explain why D.C. police have been present during stops that led to deportations.
The committee acknowledged that Bowser had been put in a difficult position under President Donald Trump, who often retaliates against politicians who provoke his ire. Still, the report urged Bowser and D.C. police to roll back policies that opened the door to more collaboration with federal immigration agents, and called on them to be more transparent about what kinds of cooperation have transpired.
The acceleration of immigration enforcement in D.C. began in August, when Trump declared a crime emergency and seized control of the city’s police department for 30 days, exercising a power he has under the law to temporarily compel D.C. police to comply with federal orders.
In a city where local police frequently work with federal agencies to investigate crime, some forms of collaboration during the emergency were not new. But others were jarring for residents, particularly the many cases in which police were seen alongside ICE agents at traffic checkpoints. While D.C. police had long-standing policies that limited information-sharing with immigration authorities, a federal judge said the Trump administration was probably within its authority to demand that D.C. cooperate with immigration enforcement during the 30-day emergency.
Starting in August, federal immigration arrests spiked in the District — and in most cases, those arrested had no prior criminal record. Many arrests were carried out without warrants, which a federal judge said was probably illegal.
While Bowser does not have the power to prevent federal immigration enforcement, residents and lawmakers have called for her to more forcefully disentangle police from patrols with federal immigration agencies. After Trump’s 30-day emergency expired, photos and videos showed D.C. police officers next to agents with vests labeled “HSI” for Homeland Security Investigations — a branch of ICE. In two of those cases, including one in which a D.C. police officer handed a man’s wrists to a Homeland Security officer, men detained by the police ended up in ICE custody.
Police officials have said that although they do not patrol with ICE agents, all federal agents patrolling with officers are authorized to conduct immigration enforcement. Bowser, who has voiced concern about masked ICE agents “terrorizing communities” in D.C., has also said she was working to remove HSI from a task force that jointly patrolled with the police. Asked Thursday about the progress of those efforts, Bowser said she would “continue to work to have only DOJ agencies on the task force,” such as the Drug Enforcement Administration or FBI.
“To the extent that HSI or any other agency is out in the community, they are out in the community without [D.C. police] every day,” Bowser said, noting that she did not have control over federal immigration authorities’ deployment in the District.
Nadeau said in an interview that she had faced “complete obstruction” from the Bowser administration and police department when she asked for information about incidents in which residents saw police working alongside immigration agents. She added that she felt Bowser administration officials had “no desire to get to the bottom of any of my concerns.”
At a December council hearing, when asked whether D.C. police were cooperating with federal immigration agencies, Assistant Police Chief Andre Wright said they were not.
“So why are we hearing testimony that there is such cooperation?” Nadeau asked, questioning whether Wright had heard the scores of residents who testified that they had seen D.C. police alongside immigration authorities after the end of the emergency.
Wright said he had not, but had heard some talk: “I’ve definitely heard. I’ve heard it said at [the department], but what I can tell you is, I’ve never witnessed that myself. I’ve never had direct knowledge of anything, and it’s never been reported up to me.”
Nadeau, in an interview, said eyewitness testimony contradicted the statements from D.C. officials.
“It is clear from the testimony we heard, and what I’ve seen with my own eyes, that MPD is cooperating with ICE,” she said, referring to the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. But “the big question,” Nadeau added, is whether that cooperation violates the city’s sanctuary law, which limits local authorities from sharing information with federal immigration authorities.
Bowser established an “emergency operations center” to coordinate with federal law enforcement — a strategy she saw as a way of assuring Trump he need not extend his emergency control of local police beyond 30 days. She has stressed that she explicitly did not put federal immigration agencies on a list of city partners. Still, Nadeau’s committee urged Bowser to rescind the order and cease that coordination, which the committee said was unnecessary.
Nadeau’s committee also recommended that the police chief rescind an order issued during Trump’s emergency that allowed officers to share information with immigration authorities about people not in custody, including those contacted at traffic stops. At the December hearing, Deputy Mayor Lindsey Appiah said the order was “no longer operative” once Trump’s emergency declaration expired. But the Bowser administration has struggled to explain why, if the order is no longer in effect, it has not been rescinded.
At Thursday’s news conference, interim D.C. police chief Jeffery Carroll — less than a week into the job — did not commit to rescinding the order and said he was continuing to evaluate the policy to determine the best path forward. Last month, Carroll said that the department was “here for the entire community, including the Hispanic population,” and that he did not want anyone to be afraid to contact the police.
Nadeau said she hopes to firm up the city’s sanctuary law to make clear that D.C. police should not share information with ICE for civil immigration enforcement purposes. That could be accomplished through a bill introduced last month by council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), which would prohibit D.C. agencies from providing transportation for immigration authorities, conducting surveillance or patrol operations related to immigration enforcement, or joining federal law enforcement operations outside schools and recreation centers barring extraordinary circumstances.
Nadeau is not the only lawmaker seeking answers from the Bowser administration. In December, the council’s public safety committee chair, Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2), sent a detailed letter to D.C. police Chief Pamela A. Smith, who resigned later that month, seeking more information about immigration enforcement. Among other questions, the letter asked how many arrests for civil immigration violations were made by federal agents during joint patrols with police, and how many times police have shared information with immigration authorities pursuant to the chief’s August order.
The letter was signed by all other council members. On Thursday, a day before the deadline Pinto gave in the letter, Carroll said the police department was reviewing the letter and planned to respond.
Meagan Flynn contributed to this report.
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