A police department in New York is rethinking its decision to cooperate with federal immigration agents in home raids, saying its police force was duped into an operation that targeted undocumented workers more than dangerous criminals.

Officials in Nassau County yesterday asked for a federal investigation into the behavior of immigration agents during a series of raids that took place in the area last week.

Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff detailing concerns expressed by Nassau County Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey about the raids:

"The operation on Monday lacked current intel." I.C.E. officials failed on three occasions to check the names and addresses of their arrest targets against the Nassau County Police Department's Gang Intelligence Files. The result was that many wrong residential addresses were raided and in one instance I.C.E. sought a 28 year old defendant using a photograph taken when he was a 7 year old boy. Of the reported 82 Nassau County arrests, our police records indicate that 8 are active gang members and 1 is a gang associate.

 

"Tactically the operation was structured poorly." The federal operation utilized border patrol personnel from around the country who had not trained together for this complex mission. "[S]ome [I.C.E.] members wore cowboy hats and in the view of some of my members displayed a "cowboy" mentality. This, in my view, posed unnecessary danger to all parties, including my members, who in fact were drawn upon by some of the agents."

"When you enforce the law, it has to be done in a way that follows the law as well," Suozzi said during a Tuesday press conference (see the video).

Mulvey said that the county requested a list of people arrested during the raids but did not receive it for several days. He said the department needed the information to be able to serve the community in the wake of the arrests. For example, to respond to missing person reports filed by families whose loved ones never come home.

"They [ICE] pick up and leave town and we have to deal with the aftermath of this," Mulvey said.

Questions over the true targets of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have been raised publicly several times in recent months. While the agency claims these operations are intended to take gang members off the streets, in raids in Illinois and Massachusetts this summer many people who were arrested had not been involved in gangs in more than a decade and were making important contributions to their communities (one NIJC client talked about his own situation with Chicago Public Radio).

Perhaps Nassau County's attempts to find the truth behind these raids will encourage other police departments to reconsider their own decisions to team up with ICE, and question whether their efforts are really fulfilling their mission of protecting public safety.