Florida Sheriff Bob Gualtieri was awarded NSA's 2019 Sheriff of the Year after publishing a model for law enforcement collaboration with ICE.

Emails obtained by Political Research Associates, and shared exclusively with The Progressive, show extensive contacts and cooperation between the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) and an anti-immigrant group.

“That is awesome, we accept,” wrote Jonathan Thompson, NSA’s executive director, in a March 2017 email. Thompson was responding to an offer of assistance from Bob Dane, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant hate group. “My schedule is whacked,” Thompson continued, “but this [is] important enough to try to solve sked issues. . . . Eager to keep this going.”

Political Research Associates is a national social justice think tank that studies the U.S. political right wing, white supremacists, and paramilitary organizations. The National Sheriffs’ Association, based in Alexandria, Virginia, represents 3,000 elected sheriffs nationwide, with a total membership of more than 15,000.

Dane was offering the NSA a “full pro-bono consultation” with Matthew O’Brien, FAIR’s research director and a former official of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“The senior staff and I,” wrote Dane, “spent most of the last few days turning over your detainer/ACLU issues.”

This meant they had brainstormed a response to the hefty backlog of lawsuits sheriffs have faced across the country for detaining people for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, without a warrant.

While some law enforcement officers have refused to cooperate with ICE, the NSA appears willing to do anything it can to help streamline the jail-to-detention-center pipeline.

While some law enforcement officers have refused to cooperate with ICE, the NSA appears willing to do anything it can to help streamline the jail-to-detention-center pipeline, including working with designated hate groups.

“We’ve developed an unofficial ‘task force’ here specifically to lend support and advice to you,” wrote Dane. “I’d like to suggest/offer that our team come over to the NSA next week and meet with you.” The email thread was shared with Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Florida’s Pinellas County. “I will be there,” Gualtieri replied. FAIR’s 2017 annual report says the meeting took place.

In June of this year, Gualtieri was awarded NSA’s 2019 Sheriff of the Year for his role in developing a novel “Basic Ordering Agreement,” which he unveiled in 2018. According to the NSA, this new model for law enforcement collaboration with ICE “clarifies that aliens held by these jurisdictions are held under the color of federal authority, thereby affording local law enforcement liability protection from potential litigation”—an apparent solution to the legal “detainer/ACLU issues” referred to in Dane’s email.

The NSA did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

Nanci Palacios moved to Florida from the Mexican city of Guanajuato twenty-four years ago, when she was six. A Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient, Palacios now finds herself in the middle of a multi-pronged, rightwing attack on Florida’s immigrant community. Family members and friends of hers, who were not as lucky in qualifying for a program like DACA, remain undocumented, and fearful as they watch the unveiling of a new, anti-immigrant paradigm in the state.

Palacios lives and organizes in Tampa Bay and in Hillsborough County, next door to Gualtieri’s Pinellas County. She works with Faith in Florida, an interfaith and interracial organization. In early 2018, Hillsborough and Pinellas Counties entered into a Basic Ordering Agreement with ICE. (Hillsborough later ended the agreement in November 2018, but continued honoring ICE detainer requests.)

“After last year’s announcement,” says Palacios, there was a scramble to “educate people around what was happening.”

The agreements are a way to effectively turn sheriff’s officers into ICE “service providers.” The thinking is that the new arrangement would exempt county sheriff’s offices from litigation from the ACLU and others by establishing that officers collaborating with ICE are working “under the color of federal authority.”

In January 2018, seventeen Florida sheriffs passed the nation’s first Basic Ordering Agreements with ICE, with support from the NSA and the Major County Sheriffs of America (MCSA), of which Gualtieri is also the treasurer. According to an email sent by Gualtieri on May 7, 2019, there were thirty-four Florida sheriffs participating in the program.

Meanwhile, Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez, Gualtieri, Thompson, and ICE launched an update to the Basic Ordering Agreement, known as the “Warrant Service Officer” program. According to ICE, “The new procedure was prompted by requests from the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America, which asked for a program limited in scope that would allow jurisdictions prohibited from honoring immigration detainers to cooperate with ICE.” Gualtieri was once again the first in the nation to adopt the new model.

At the NSA’s private 2019 conference in June, Trump’s new head of ICE, Mark Morgan, praised the NSA’s role in creating the model, and sheriffs in general. “Where do we get the majority of criminal aliens? We get them from you,” Morgan told the crowd, according to Political Research Associates research analyst Cloee Cooper, who was in the room.

Also in June, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a draconian anti-immigrant law that forces all law enforcement officers and state agencies to “use best efforts to support the enforcement of federal immigration law.” It forbids state agencies, universities, cities, and law enforcement agencies from adopting any “sanctuary” policy or practice that impedes collaboration with ICE. In an email, Gualtieri wrote that the new law “requires that all county jails honor the ICE detainers and ICE issued arrest warrants.”

Any public employee in the state that does not comply “may be subject to action by the Governor,” the law reads.

This tactic of centralizing state power through “preemption” legislation that bans local laws, like “sanctuary policies,” has been a primary tactic of corporate and xenophobic movements in recent years. It is a go-to tool of the rightwing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has devised model state legislation to ban local sanctuary policies, minimum wages, environmental regulations, and worker protections. Several of the state senate sponsors of Florida’s harsh new law have ties to ALEC.

The ACLU of Florida has issued a “Travel Alert” warning that the law could make all travelers, including U.S. citizens, experience racial profiling, unjust detention, and deportation. FAIR celebrated the bill’s passage.

“They’re trying to turn Florida into the new Arizona of immigration policy,” says Salvador Sarmiento of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, who has been tracking the new program.

In recent months, Palacios has gotten an “uptick in calls from people who say their loved ones have gone to jail for not having a driver’s license and then being transferred to detention centers.” These are people who have “never had a deportation order before,” she says.

“They are using Florida as ground zero to test these policies, so they can expand them across the country.”

Some immigrants, Palacios says, are driving less and refraining from extracurricular activities due to their heightened fear of apprehension.

“These policies are not by accident,” she says. “They are using Florida as ground zero to test these policies, to see what types of lawsuits come up, so they can test them and expand them across the country.”

On May 5, 2019, the day before ICE announced the Warrant Service Officer program, the NSA’s Thompson emailed a list of forty-two sheriffs from Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and likely elsewhere. (Some of the email addresses were private, making it difficult to determine the location of the sheriff.)

“Tomorrow,” he wrote, “will mark the first phase” of the Warrant Service Officer program. He credited Gualtieri, who was “taking the lead in negotiating and designing” the program, as well as being its first signatory. “The nationwide roll out” he continued, “will commence after Louisville”—a reference to the NSA’s annual conference that took place in mid-June.

According to an email from the Florida Sheriffs Association dated May 15, 2019, forty-six Florida sheriffs and one jail have asked the association to reach out to ICE on their behalf for assistance with the Warrant Service Officer program. The Florida group also apprised its members that “ICE will be working to set-up regional training sites very soon.”

Back in Hillsborough, Palacios is focusing on registering voters, local bail reform efforts, the next sheriff elections, and “creating protection plans for families, making sure they know they have rights regardless of their [immigration] status, coordinating with attorneys, educating people, protecting people, and making sure we have a plan.” u