If the sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts, Thomas Hodgson, who claims his number one priority is the safety of the people of the county, really wants to keep the people safe, he should not renew his contract with ICE that is up for renewal at the end of June.
Here is why.
For those who are not too familiar with what it actually is, a 287(g) contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), so named after section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, allows local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration enforcement agents by delegating specific immigration enforcement authority to designated officers within a local agency. Usually these contracts are signed by county sheriffs because they run the county jails and they have the required space.
Such contracts are not mandatory, but are, instead, totally at the discretion of individual county sheriffs.
There is a certain monetary advantage to entering such an agreement as the more people detained in the ICE unit, the more money the local jail gets from the federal government. This, obviously, results in doing what is necessary to detain as many people as possible. Whether or not the money received is spent totally on the detainees or for other things is at the discretion of the sheriffs who have signed on to the program.
Think of for-profit prisons.
A state contracts with a company that runs such facilities and part of that contract is the requirement that a state must maintain a certain number of prisoners or pay a fine beyond the regular fee they pay to that company. That requirement means that as many people as possible have to be sentenced, and that further means arresting as many people as possible, usually far beyond those who will actually end up in prison, in order to keep the inmate population at least at the agreed upon minimum. One of the actual objections to legalizing marijuana for recreational use is as simple as the fear that not being able to arrest people for low level marijuana offenses will threaten the ability to meet the prisoner quota and the state will have to pay that fine. So prisons are filled with non-violent, low level offenders.
These are “for profit” so the more prisoners, the more the state pays the company, and, so, the more the profit.
The same works with county jails that have 287 (g) contracts. The more detainees the more money the county sheriff gets from the feds, and by reducing things like medical care, quality of food, and the denial of basics like toilet paper and soap, the more extra money the sheriff has for other things, and in some states, that means the extra money can legally go into the pocket of the sheriff.
To fill the detainee units, sheriffs often rely on racial profiling and harassing Latinx residents because of the biased belief that that community is the greatest and easiest source of undocumented people. Trawling a huge net behind a fishing boat pulls in a lot of fish, and regardless how many are thrown back for being the wrong size or the type the boat is not authorized to bring in, there is a good chance of getting a great number of the fish you can sell.
Easier, faster, and more profitable than a rod and reel.
This often results in civil rights violations, isolation of immigrant communities, and family separations, while within the targeted community immigrants withdraw from the greater community, decline to participate in public events where law enforcement may be present, avoid businesses that require them to give their personal information, and could result in people no longer reporting crime and having eye-witnesses staying away from law enforcement who could use them to solve crimes. The latter can affect more than the targeted community.
In Massachusetts there are three county sheriffs who contract with ICE, and if carefully looked at, it is easy to see why this is helpful in profiting from the program.
It should be noted that the three Massachusetts county sheriffs who have ICE contracts entered into them during the Trump administration and are Republicans, and the sheriff of Bristol county is the honorary co-chair of Trump’s re-election campaign in the state.
Plymouth County is a rather ironic participant as it was there that the Pilgrims came to this continent and began taking over the land of the natives and profiting from the natural resources they took to send back to England reducing what could be used by the locals, the very thing that people complain that undocumented immigrants allegedly do.
Barnstable County is pretty much Cape Cod, a location whose population increases five times the size of the year round residents in the summer months as it is the state’s biggest summer resort location, and that requires workers to provide the increased services that are needed. Long gone are the days when college kids could combine working at a summer job with beach parties, and then go home with enough money to pay for the next year of college, so the person waiting on your table, cleaning your hotel room, or handing you your fried clam plate has to come from some place and live in such conditions that allow them to be paid the lowest allowable wage. During the summer the county closes an eye, but in the winter months, when the service workers become by and large expendable, the sheriff has a crop to reap.
And the third is Bristol County where the two major cities, New Bedford and Fall River, have been immigrant magnets from the days of whaling and manufacturing. They are ideal for racial profiling as just driving down the street a casual glance will show the diversity of the cities with a tendency toward the Brown. Manufacturing, fishing, and other industries employ quite a few Brown skinned people and this makes it convenient for ICE raids as they can target these places of employment, in spite of claims that those here illegally are living off the taxpayer, and have some degree of success in finding a few undocumented people while terrorizing those employees who are citizens or legal immigrants.
Sheriff Hodgson’s contract with ICE made the Bristol County House of Corrections one of the first county jails in New England to sign such a contract.
The question is, why would a sheriff, when contracts are willingly entered into, sign up.
The answers are simple.
They have a political agenda, in the case of the Bristol County sheriff that would include catching the eye of Trump, and there is money to be made with an ocean of people they can trawl and, by mere luck of the numbers, bring to their ICE detention units.
In the case of the Bristol County sheriff, Thomas Hodgson, he needs to convince the people of the county that his motivation is pure and that he is protecting the people of the county from a threat.
The first way he does that is to present the two cities as a threat to those small, mostly white, picket fence communities in the county but outside those two metro areas. Since both cities are not the epicenters of the county as they had once been now that shopping can be done at malls and roads make going elsewhere more convenient than in the past, there are options for not going into those cities making it easier to accept what people in the small towns are told by someone who claims he is telling them what those cities are actually like.
Bigotry is not based on experience, but on not having firsthand experience with people or places, and only believing what someone else you assume you can trust tells you about them through their filter whether positive or negative.
The second way to appear pure and altruistic is to totally and purposely misrepresent reality and omit information that would contradict the claim.
Sheriff Hodgson supports his actions with the claim that his number one priority is to keep the people of Bristol County safe, as opposed to it being doing his real job, and to have this claim work, he has to present a threat.
His invented threat presently is the undocumented residents of the county.
When Trump declared,
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,”
he handed the sheriff his biggest tool as that is who Sheriff Hodgson claims he is protecting the people of the county from.
And when he objected to a judge’s decision to release those in his ICE detention center who qualified for release to help slow the spread of COVID-19 in his facilities, he played up that threat by releasing his Bristol County Prisoner Release Alert System that lists the alleged criminal histories of ICE detainees. It lacks names, so nothing on the list can be verified as actual crimes committed, or just a list of generic and extreme crimes.
He also states that the released detainees would now be free to roam the streets of Bristol County threatening the good citizens.
“The law-abiding people of Bristol County and beyond have a right to know who is being released back into their communities. As of today, more than 30 illegal immigrants in ICE custody have been released from our correctional facilities, some of whom have been charged or convicted of crimes such as rape, robbery, assault, fraud, trafficking fentanyl and others. Some of them also had final removal orders from an immigration judge to be deported to their country of origin, but are instead free to roam the neighborhoods of our communities.”
He insists that his number one priority is to protect the people of Bristol County, and to release ICE detainees would be a threat to them.
But an important piece of information that he omits is that when he signed his contract with ICE, he went far beyond detaining undocumented people from Bristol County and volunteered to establish a detention camp holding immigrants from across the country.
In other words, he is the one bringing the supposed danger into the community by bringing those he refers to as “criminal illegal aliens” into the county from other places.
While Mexico might be “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,”
the sheriff has figuratively driven a bus to go get them if you accept his characterization of who is in his detention center.
While he volunteered his inmates to help build the wall on the Southern Border to keep “those people” out, he skirts the wall and brings them to Bristol County.
So while he claims he is the one protecting us, in reality, he is the one introducing into the community those who he claims are the threat.
And, since repetition is the mother of learning, let me repeat for emphasis that those people he warns us about would not be here if they stayed in the communities and states where they live and he had not had them come here.
And, in order to introduce this “threat”, the Bristol County taxpayers pay for Bristol County Sheriff Office personnel to receive ICE training and the “overtime” pay for those personnel performing the duties of regular employees while they are away getting that training.
According to his agreement with ICE, taxpayers in Bristol County are also paying for
“all expenses at the BCSO facility regarding cabling and power upgrades…the BCSO will be responsible for covering any installation and recurring costs associated with the BCSO line…for providing all administrative supplies, such as paper, toner, pens, pencils, or other similar items necessary for normal office operations…for providing the necessary security equipment, such as handcuffs, leg restraints and flexi cuffs, etc.”
The “etc.” being important because it is open ended and could mean anything regardless of cost.
He is making money from the federal government while charging the taxpayers what it costs to allow him to do that, and while he claims releasing ICE detainees will have them roaming the local streets, he is the one who brought them here from other states in the first place while conveniently hiding that they are not being released locally, but into their home states, unless the sheriff does not insist on that.
If he doesn’t insist on that, a person has to question his claim that only he can protect us from these people who have no jobs and, so, will prey on the people of the county to meet their needs. After all, he knew they had no jobs when he brought them here.
When these detainees are released, they should not be roaming our streets threatening us, they should be sent back to the states from which they came.
Otherwise, how is the sheriff keeping the people of Bristol County safe from a threat of his own creation?
This is in no way beneficial to the community.
It is merely his way to promote himself and create his tough guy image while in the process frightening the people of the county and creating a false Us/Them atmosphere that includes suspicion of one’s neighbor by bringing what he considers a threat into the county.
He is lying to us and charging us for his lie.
His contract with ICE is up for renewal at the end of June, and if he truly wants to keep the people of Bristol County safe from his alleged threat of “criminal illegal aliens” freely roaming our streets and victimizing us, he should let the contract expire and have other localities deal with the people from them in them.