The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution Tuesday encouraging San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey and Juvenile Probation Chief William Sifferman to ignore Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers — documents requesting that local law enforcement officials detain an individual so that ICE may seek custody.
Members of the immigrant community came out to speak in favor of the new policy earlier this month at a public safety hearing.
The supervisors voted 8-3 in favor of the resolution, which calls on law enforcement officials to not use local funds to respond to ICE detainers. Supervisors David Campos, Jane Kim and Scott Wiener, who each represent portions of the Mission District, voted in favor of the resolution.
According to the resolution, “entanglement between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) harms public safety and interferes with community policing strategies by increasing fear in immigrant communities of coming forward to report crimes.”
ICE holds through the federal government’s Secure Communities Program have led to the deportation of 104,464 illegal immigrants since the program’s inception in 2008. But 73 percent of those deported were arrested for misdemeanors or lesser crimes, or have not been convicted of a crime at all.
