How ICE Is Using the LAPD to Track Down Immigrants for Deportation

When Los Angeles police arrested Jose Juarez-Basilio in March on suspicion of threatening his ex-wife’s new romantic partner, he was released after spending less than 24 hours in jail.

The short stay behind bars was all it took to trigger his deportation roughly three months later.

Even though no charges were filed against Juarez-Basilio, the seemingly routine run-in with police put the 35-year-old undocumented Mexican man on the radar of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which tracked him down and removed him from the country.

For months, L.A. Police Department leaders have gone out of their way to reassure the public that the department has strict limits on cooperating with immigration officials.

But the case of Juarez-Basilio and several dozen others identified in federal court records show how L.A. police are nevertheless enabling ICE to find new targets by routinely sharing fingerprints with federal law enforcement.

The basic question for the LAPD of what it means to cooperate with immigration authorities has taken on fresh urgency amid the Trump White House’s continued crackdown across the region. Hundreds of people have been detained in raids by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents, triggering protests and an ongoing court battle over the use of so-called “roving patrols” to indiscriminately round up suspects.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has frequently pointed to a longstanding policy known as Special Order 40, which bars officers from stopping a person for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status. The policy, implemented in 1979, seeks to assure the city’s growing immigrant community that they can come forward as witnesses or victims of crimes without fear of deportation.

But given how complicated the country’s immigration landscape has grown in the half century since, it’s time that the LAPD took steps beyond the policy, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez said.

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Of particular concern, he said, is the LAPD’s handling of data collected from automated license plate readers, devices deployed around the city that track the movements of vehicles. Police officials have insisted that the information is not shared with ICE. But other local law enforcement agencies have flouted their own similar rules in the past, raising concerns that the LAPD may not keep its word.

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