Federal officials recently started threatening to seek criminal charges against two elected county sheriffs who have declined to give immigration agents broad access to inmates subject to deportation.
The threats to prosecute the two sheriffs, in Minneapolis and Chicago, cities that have experienced some of the most intense immigration enforcement of the Trump era, are a new salvo in the president’s campaign against state and local officials who refuse to embrace his administration’s crackdown.
The warnings have been conveyed in a series of letters that federal agents began hand-delivering in early July to Sheriff Dawanna Witt of Hennepin County, Minn., which includes Minneapolis, and Sheriff Tom Dart of Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago. Both are Democrats.
The letters assert that failing to hand over inmates being sought by immigration agents could lead each elected official to be charged in federal court with witness tampering, a felony. The New York Times reviewed the letters.
Legal experts say it would be difficult if not impossible for federal prosecutors to charge the sheriffs with witness tampering, let alone prove the elements of that offense. But the threats are part of the Trump administration’s effort to portray so-called sanctuary jurisdictions as obstacles to the president’s mass deportation campaign. The Justice Department has sued several local governments over their unwillingness to cooperate on immigration enforcement.
Federal judges in Illinois and Minnesota have dismissed two lawsuits in which Sheriffs Witt and Dart were defendants, ruling that the Constitution gives states and cities the authority to refrain from assisting with immigration enforcement.
Sheriff Witt said the threat of prosecution — which has not been previously reported — would not lead her to rescind the department’s longstanding policy, under which requests from ICE seeking to take custody of inmates are honored only if there is a warrant from a judge.
“It’s a scare tactic,” Sheriff Witt said in an interview last week. Speaking in her office in downtown Minneapolis, which faces the federal courthouse, Sheriff Witt all but dared the federal government to make good on its threat.
“I don’t want to be arrested,” she said. “But they know where I am. Come and get me.”
Matt Walberg, a spokesman for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the largest jail in the Midwest, confirmed that Sheriff Dart also began receiving letters from ICE last month threatening to charge him with witness tampering.
In an emailed statement, the Department of Homeland Security said the letters were an effort to compel “sanctuary politicians” to hand over dangerous criminals so they can be deported.
Patrick Royal, a spokesman for the National Sheriffs’ Association, said on Monday that the group was not aware of any other sheriff having been threatened with criminal charges over access to inmates subject to deportation.
The extent to which jails work cooperatively with immigration agents varies widely around the country. The issue became a flashpoint after President Trump returned to the White House last year having promised to begin the largest deportation push in history.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, has argued that immigration enforcement could be done more safely and efficiently if all local jails turned over any inmates in the country illegally and being sought by ICE. He cited lack of cooperation from certain jurisdictions as a justification for the crackdowns the administration began last year in Chicago and the Twin Cities.
“If you want less officers in the street, then let us in the jail,” Mr. Homan said early this year.
Many state and county detention facilities in Republican-led states have struck agreements with ICE, making them force multiplier in the push to ramp up deportations.
Others, including several in Democratic-led states, cooperate routinely in some ways, for instance by turning over inmates convicted of serious crimes to ICE. Illinois has a state law that sharply limits the extent to which local officials can assist with immigration enforcement.
Whatever a particular jurisdiction’s level of cooperation, legal experts said they doubted the warning conveyed in the letters, which ICE referred to as “immigration subpoenas,” was a credible legal threat.
Ryan Wood, a former ICE lawyer who also served as a senior immigration judge in Minnesota until last year, said the agency has broad subpoena powers to compel people to testify and to turn over documents. But ICE subpoenas cannot be used to force a local official to transfer custody of an inmate, he said.
“It’s a creative use or misuse of the subpoena power that they have, which I’ve never seen before,” Mr. Wood said.
Former federal prosecutors who reviewed the letter said that refusal by a county official to turn over custody of an inmate does not meet the elements of the federal law against witness tampering, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
“Whatever one’s position on immigration policy, I see no plausible interpretation of the witness tampering statute that reaches these facts,” said Joseph H. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor who served as acting U.S. attorney in Minnesota last year. “I doubt any serious prosecutor would bring such a case.”
Hoang Bui, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, declined to say whether ICE had sought the office’s input before threatening to prosecute Sheriff Witt, whose office often partners with federal agencies on weapons and narcotics cases.
Sheriff Witt, who is running for re-election in November, faced extraordinary pressure from the White House during the immigration crackdown last winter because she oversees Minnesota’s largest jail.
At its height, she briefly pondered making a politically unpopular concession to cooperate with ICE, thinking it could give the Trump administration a face-saving excuse to end an operation that left two American citizens dead and touched off nationwide protests.
Yet Sheriff Witt said she now feels more confident than ever that her agency should play no role in immigration enforcement. Her jail is a pretrial facility, which means that transferring inmates to ICE stands to disrupt state prosecutions. Additionally, she said, the perception that local law enforcement officials work closely with ICE undermines public safety because it makes many reluctant to report crimes, a concern that has been echoed by other local law enforcement leaders.
Sheriff Witt said that the threat of prosecution had been unnerving for her and her relatives, who in recent weeks have grown fearful when they can’t reach her on the phone promptly. Whether or not it’s legally sound, she said, it does not feel like a hollow threat in this era.
“Because they have done things none of us would have ever perceived the federal government to be doing,” she said.
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