READING — Carrying out mass deportations was a key campaign promise for President Donald Trump, and since he’s reentered office, his administration has increased use of a tool that furthers that goal — ICE detainers.
These voluntary requests ask local jails to hold people in their custody beyond their scheduled release so they can be taken into federal custody.
Berks County does not have a formal agreement to cooperate with federal immigration officials, but its jail does honor ICE detainers.
In February, the county’s prison board voted to increase the time inmates can be held on detainers from four to 24 hours. The board modified the policy again in April to increase the time to 48 hours.
The motion was made by District Attorney John Adams and seconded by Commissioner Christian Leinbach, according to meeting minutes. All three of the county’s elected commissioners serve on the board.
Adams said he was informed that the county could lose about $290,000 for emergency services if it did not change the policy and comply with the Trump administration, the Reading Eagle reported.
Local officials say honoring ICE detainers is part of cooperating with federal law enforcement partners — something the county has always done and will continue to do so.
Leinbach said in April that removing undocumented immigrants who committed crimes is in the best interest of the county, the Reading Eagle reported. He also said he did not want the county to be designated as a “sanctuary city” if it did not comply with ICE detainer requests.
But both here in Pennsylvania and across the country, there are legal risks for localities that choose to honor these detainers, which can sometimes be based on flawed or inaccurate information.
Keith Armstrong, an immigrants’ rights attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said one of the main issues with ICE databases is that they show a person's immigration status at only a fixed point in time.
“We all know that, in reality, a person's immigration status can and does change for any number of reasons,” Armstrong said.
In a 2019 case, a federal judge in California wrote that “the core databases ICE relies on suffer from structural flaws, incompleteness, and pervasive errors that render the databases unreliable.”
Here’s what you need to know about Berks County’s ICE detainer policy:
How do detainers work?
In Berks County, an ICE detainer is often requested after a person is arrested and brought to the central booking office for processing, Mandy Miller, the county sheriff, told Spotlight PA.
Deputies in central booking gather fingerprints and photographs, then run a background check. If the person is wanted by ICE, the system will show a notification to contact federal immigration authorities. The deputy in central booking will then call ICE to ask if the agency wants to request a detainer, according to Miller.
Under current policy, a person charged with a crime would be held in the county jail up to 48 hours beyond the time they would typically be released, even if their charges were resolved or after they post bail.
Miller said this notification system does not specify why a person has a detainer or is wanted by immigration authorities.
“It’s one line that says ‘contact immigration if you have this person in custody,’ so that's what we do,” Miller said.
The county will honor a detainer if the individual is in the Berks County Jail on criminal charges. However, “we do not accept individuals to be booked into our jail system solely on a detainer,” Berks County Solicitor Christine Sadler said in an email.
If ICE does not pick up the person after 48 hours, the county is required to let the person go, according to agency guidelines.
Can detainers lead to lawsuits?
Because detainers are voluntary, localities that choose to honor them can be held liable if someone is wrongfully held, so some local agencies in Pennsylvania choose not to comply with them.
Montgomery County Correctional Facility does not honor detainers unless ICE provides a judicial warrant, which is a formal written order issued by a judge. With a judicial warrant, Montgomery County will hold a person for 24 hours, which is less time than what ICE usually requests.
ICE detainers do not hold the same legal weight as arrest warrants, which are issued by judges who have made an independent determination of probable cause. For detainers, ICE agents determine probable cause based on their own databases and information-gathering.
And ICE has issued detainers based on inaccurate information in the past.
In 2008, Ernesto Galarza, a New Jersey man, was wrongfully held for three days in Lehigh County Prison on an ICE detainer, even after he had posted bail. The detainer request was based on a false tip alleging he was an undocumented immigrant from the Dominican Republic.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Galarza by the ACLU, led to the federal government, the City of Allentown, and Lehigh County having to pay Galarza damages and attorney’s fees.
Sadler, the county solicitor, said at the April meeting that what happened in Lehigh is “unlikely to occur exactly the same way in Berks,” per the Reading Eagle. She said ICE had added an additional layer of review and that county employees are able to do due diligence.
When asked what the county would do if it was sued for honoring an unlawful detainer, Jonathan Heintzman, public relations officer for Berks County, said the county will not comment on a hypothetical situation.
If ICE makes a mistake, Miller, the sheriff, said, “We can’t control that.”
“As long as we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, we can't control that they’re making a mistake,” Miller said.
Is Berks County considering working with ICE in other ways?
County sheriffs and local law enforcement also collaborate with federal immigration authorities through 287(g) agreements. These formal partnerships with ICE allow trained local police to carry out some immigration enforcement activities.
There are three types of 287(g) agreements local police can choose to pursue:
The Jail Enforcement model, which allows local police to use ICE databases to identify and process “deportable” immigrants in their jails.
The Task Force model, which allows local law enforcement to question and arrest people for immigration violations.
The Warrant Service Officer program, which gives police officers the power to execute administrative warrants within jails and facilitate the custodial transfer of prisoners to ICE. According to a fact sheet from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, this model is “designed to re-create the days when sheriffs held people on detainers everywhere.”
Nearly 30 local law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania had signed 287(g) agreements with ICE as of July 23, most adopting the task force model.
Berks County pursued a 287(g) agreement in 2017, but is not currently doing so.
“No one has approached the Board of Commissioners with any interest in establishing a relationship under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the board’s spokesperson said in a statement on behalf of the county commissioners.