MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The federal government has added hundreds of thousands of immigration arrest warrants to a national database used by local police. As NPR's Martin Kaste reports, that means local cops are now more likely to know if someone is wanted by ICE.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: If you're ever pulled over for, say, speeding, the National Crime Information Center is what the cop will use to run your name. NCIC flags criminal warrants from other states or from the feds, and it also includes warrants for immigration charges. But under President Trump, there's a lot more of those. The administration recently put at least half a million more immigration cases into NCIC, and Terry Cunningham of the International Association of Chiefs of Police worries about how that's going to play out.
TERRY CUNNINGHAM: There's going to be so many of these in NCIC. And some street cop is going to, you know, roll in behind the 7-Eleven at 2 o'clock in the morning and run somebody and get a hit on a detainer, and it's going to be a civil detainer and not a criminal warrant.
KASTE: Detainers are ICE requests that police hold someone until ICE can come and take that person into custody. But the thing about detainers is that they tend to be civil warrants not signed by a judge.
CUNNINGHAM: There's been no adjudication, which gets really sticky.
KASTE: Counties have been sued for millions of dollars for arresting someone based only on this kind of ICE detainer. And now that the NCIC system has so many more of them, Cunningham sees greater legal risk. ICE would not directly confirm to NPR that it has increased the number of immigration detainers in NCIC. It says it won't comment on internal methods because of, quote, "operational security." But it also says adding those arrest warrants to NCIC is routine and a, quote, "vital tool to protect public safety." Local cops say they have seen the change on their computers.
DOUGLAS GRIFFITH: These warrants are now showing up in our database.
KASTE: Douglas Griffith is president of the Houston Police Officers' Union. The department tells officers not to inquire about a person's immigration status. But if the computer flags someone, it says they should call ICE. Griffith says it's clear to him what the next step should be.
GRIFFITH: If they pop up with a warrant, then we have no alternative but to take those people into custody.
KASTE: But legal experts say it's not that black-and-white, especially if ICE is slow in arriving to pick that person up. Once the officer has written the speeding ticket, for instance, how long is it OK to hold the person in custody there by the roadside waiting for ICE? Half an hour? An hour? Cunningham says the courts haven't settled what's reasonable, and his organization has just updated its advice to police departments for how to navigate the legalities of all this. But he recognizes that politics also plays a role.
GRIFFITH: You've got states now that have said we want our officers not to be involved in any immigration enforcement issues at all. Then you got other states that are mandating that, you know, officers get involved.
KASTE: And he says it's the patrol officer, the one who sees that ICE detainer popping up on the screen, who ends up caught in the middle.
Martin Kaste, NPR News.
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