James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
11:01 A.M. EDT
ACTING DIRECTOR ALBENCE: Good morning. Thank you for joining us. My name is Matt Albence. I'm the Deputy Director of ICE and the senior official performing the duties of the director.
Before I begin, I want to take a moment to recognize and thank the dedicated law enforcement professionals that are here on the stage with me.
I have Sheriff Jim Skinner from Collin County, Texas; Sheriff Wayne Ivey from Brevard County, Florida; Sheriff Harold Everson — Eavenson, excuse me — Rockwall County, Texas; Sheriff Matt Saxton from Calhoun County, Michigan; Sheriff Sarah Warner from Hettinger County, North Dakota; Sheriff Jesse James Casaus, Sandoval County, New Mexico; Sheriff Sam Page Rockingham County, North Carolina; Sheriff Dale Schmidt, Dodge County, Wisconsin.
We have Mike Davis, who's the Deputy Principal Legal Advisor for ICE. He's the highest-ranking career official within ICE, also legal advisor, which is one of the most critical enforcement arms within ICE.
And we have Chris Cronen, who is the Assistant Director for Enforcement within Enforcement and Removal Operations.
We are here today to help the public understand the human cost of sanctuary laws and policies which ban and prevent local law enforcement agencies from working with ICE, to include even the simple sharing of information about criminals already in their custody.
Laws and policies like these make us all less safe. Plain and simple. This isn't a political matter, it's a public safety matter. And it's past time to put aside all the political rhetoric and listen to the facts.
And the fact is: People are being hurt and victimized every day because of jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with ICE. As law enforcement professionals, it is frustrating to see senseless acts of violence and other criminal activity happen in our communities, knowing full well that ICE could've prevented them with just a little cooperation.
The type of cooperation we seek is simple. ICE utilizes a decades-old process in which we all issue an official immigration form, known as a detainer, to advise our law enforcement partners that we have established probable cause to believe than an individual — who, again, has already been arrested for an unrelated criminal violation and placed in that agency's custody — is an alien whose removal from the United States under this nation's immigration laws.
The detainer asks our law enforcement partners for two simple things: advance notice of an alien's release from custody and a brief, continued detention of the alien in the partner's custody until ICE can be present to take this individual into federal immigration custody in a safe and secure environment.
The fact is that 70 percent of the arrests ICE makes are at local jails and state prisons across the country. But we used to make more. And we used to get more criminals off the street before sanctuary laws and policies prevented us from doing so, leaving us with no choice but to expend significant digital resources to locate and arrest criminal aliens and other immigration violators out in the community, including at their homes and places of employment — a more dangerous undertaking for our officers and a more disruptive action within our communities. And simply put, a less effective method.
There will be criminals we don't find. And sometimes, when we do find them, it's only after they've been arrested for another subsequent criminal violation. Our at-large criminal alien and fugitive operations teams are working in your community every day. We'd much rather take custody of criminal aliens in the safety of a jail environment instead of sending our officers out to perform the dangerous and difficult task of finding them all over again because a local law enforcement agency has refused to allow us to exercise our lawful federal authority to make an immigration arrest.
There's a lot of misinformation out there with regard to how we do our operations and what is required. So I'm going to give a little bit of information and context to dispel some of those myths and misinformation that's out there.
