Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent $122,515 to the town of Carroll this month. The payment follows Carroll’s decision to join the Department of Homeland Security's Task Force Model, also known as the 287(g) program.
Their participation means its four full-time police officers are committed to assisting ICE in federal immigration enforcement. They did just that in December when they detained seven people in Twin Mountain for ICE.
NHPR’s Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with investigative reporter Sammy Sussman, who broke the news about Carroll’s payment from ICE for WIRED.
Transcript
At their town meeting this month, Carroll voters were tied over whether to recommend the police department withdraw from their task force agreement with ICE. Now in New Hampshire, towns can’t prohibit police from working with federal immigration authorities so the vote would only be a recommendation anyway. But what does Carroll's task force agreement with ICE entail?
The task force model basically allows the department to designate specific officers, or in this case, the entire department all the way up to the chief, to work with ICE in a variety of different capacities. So both detaining people, transporting people, and in return, ICE will pay salaries for that time, they'll pay some rewards based on how effective an agency is in detaining specific people. And they'll engage in more, I would say, robust and proactive collaboration than might otherwise be the case.
So what kind of incentives has ICE offered to Carroll and other local police departments to join this program?
So up until September of last year, ICE was offering $100,000 to every department that signed one of these agreements that they could use for a new vehicle or other equipment. And then they were also offering $7,500 for each officer that decided to join the program in each department, and [that] $7,500 could also be used for equipment, for computers, vehicle purchases, something of that nature.
Then in October, they changed how that agreement works, and they added a financial component even after the agreement is reached, which is that they would cover an officer's annual salary and a quarter of that salary and overtime costs – only regarding work that these officers are doing for ICE, but that ICE is willing to pay up to the annual salary and up to 25% of that in overtime.
Along with this, they look at each officer's quarterly success in identifying specific undocumented people that ICE wants to have detained or transported. It's a little unclear, but the agreement says that officers will receive between $500 and $1,000 each based on their quarterly success rate. They have these brackets of 100% success to 91%, 90% to 81%. You get the idea. And there's a breakdown in cash rewards for each officer between $500 and $1,000.
These are some significant numbers for a small police department, to be sure. Carroll Police Lieutenant Ian MacMillan told NHPR that this $122,000 ICE payment is earmarked for new equipment for the department. He also said he's only requested some $945 for the department's work in detaining those seven people back in December. Are you aware of other payments that have been made to police departments that are working with ICE, whether in New Hampshire or elsewhere in the country?
I found out about Carroll when I was looking at a number of departments around the country. Carroll, I believe, is one of the first departments, at least that has provided records of payments to reporters, to be clear. I filed a number of records requests, as reporters do, around the country, and I didn't find many other records of significant payments in the way that I saw them in Carroll. That's not to say that that money isn't flowing. That's not to say that there are not agreements where money will flow from ICE to a lot of municipalities and counties around the country, but I believe that they're one of the first departments to actually see that money come through.
There's a separate process that they have to undertake. They have to reach a service agreement with ICE and effectively become a contractor to get paid, right? Like there's a separate system to allow the federal government to disburse funds. So part of the records that I obtained that were not included in the article are just the fact that Carroll successfully completed that program, and they're now registered to to receive money from the federal government. I would assume that a lot of other municipalities are somewhere in that process, but haven't reached the point where they can actually accept those funds.
The other thing that was in the service agreement, the private agreement between Carroll and ICE, is the fact that ICE will ask the federal government, the DOJ specifically, to represent Carroll if Carroll is sued by anyone who's challenging their immigration status or their detainment. So in this private agreement, we can see that there's a little bit more of a commitment by ICE to offer legal services to Carroll should that be necessary.
You found in your reporting, Sammy, that these agreements with ICE also have guidelines on confidentiality and the public's access to government records. And as you said, we're just starting to get some information here. Tell us more about what those are and how you're seeing that in your reporting.
That was a really unexpected finding, I would say, in the reporting. Obviously, the departments that have partnered with ICE through this 287(g) model are public. There's an Excel sheet that ICE updates almost every day, and you can go to that and click on a link and see the terms of the MOA – the memorandum of agreement between ICE and this local department. Separate from that, what I found in filing a request specifically with Carroll to get their town records, is that to actually accept the money from the federal government, they had to reach a service agreement. And that service agreement had, as you said, these different terms about confidentiality.
So one of the terms was that this agreement and information obtained under this agreement, at least it purports to say, is subject not to the state records law seemingly, but to federal records law. That I, as a member of the media or a citizen of New Hampshire, if I'm filing a request to try to get back records about that agreement, I would have to file it under federal law and not under state law, which is not something that I've seen before or had seen reported before.
There's also specific agreements about if a member of Congress reaches out to Carroll. Carroll would have to forward that request to the Office of Congressional Relations at ICE and wouldn't be able to answer it directly. There's questions about if they can release statements to the media or if they have to clear those statements with ICE's Office of Public Affairs. Basically, they've added in various provisions that govern the release of information, but they've added that in a service agreement that's purportedly about the exchanging of funds or essentially the federal government paying Carroll. So it's this new way to introduce a separate set of contractual obligations in this separate document that we didn't already know about.
So it adds another layer of complexity. If you, as a citizen of a town, are looking for some local records and how money is being spent at your local police department, now you've got to get some kind of clearance for a Right to Know from the feds to find that out?
Theoretically, but also FOIA is different than the Right to Know law. FOIA obviously is the Freedom of Information Act, the federal law about requesting records. There's just substantive differences in how those requests are handled, what exemptions can be made, what records you can get back, the time frame, the amount of money that you can be charged.
I've filed requests, obviously with ICE before, too. ICE will take months, if not years later. There's such differences in timeframes and scopes of how these requests are handled that I have to imagine that had Carroll abided by this and forwarded my request to ICE for the same records, it would have been a much longer time period before I would get anything back.
So you may be able to find some detailed information from one town, but not another.
Yeah, and I saw this. I requested other records from other municipalities in New Hampshire, and at least one other municipality said that they were going to coordinate with ICE and DHS before responding to my request, which I don't really know what that means, and I don't really know how the law provides for them to do that.
