This story was originally produced by the Valley News. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
The Grafton County sheriff’s decision to enter into an agreement with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year has spurred opposition and action among voters who supported her in the November election.
On March 7, Sheriff Jill Myers, who ran as a Democrat in her first bid for the office, signed a “memorandum of agreement” for a collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, “to have at least one officer trained on the procedures and how they might deal with a situation if they were to encounter someone who was undocumented,” according to the minutes of the County Commissioners meeting on March 25. The New Hampshire State Police entered into the same program, known as 287(g), on April 25.
“We’re not going to be asking someone out of the blue what their (immigration) status is or racially profiling someone,” Myers said in a phone interview Monday. “Us signing on allows us to be in the know and it allows us to intervene and have some discretion.”
Since she became sheriff in January, Myers’ said she is “not aware” of anyone in her department coming across someone with an ICE detainer.
When other departments in the state began signing the agreement, Myers reached out to the federal agency expressing her interest in joining the program amid President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policies.
But some Grafton County residents who supported Myers’ election are baffled by her decision.
“I just don’t understand why she did it,” Alix Olsen of Canaan said in a phone interview last week.
A retired law enforcement officer of 30 years, Olsen campaigned for Myers’ election because she’s “supportive of women in law enforcement,” Olsen said.Now, Olsen’s helping to collect signatures on a petition calling on Myers to terminate the agreement with ICE. Olsen and others have been circulating the petition, which has more than 600 signatures so far, at Upper Valley rallies and protests.
The petition has yet to be sent to Myers but it was made clear during the commissioners meeting in March that several Grafton County residents do not support the agreement.
Hanover resident Maylena Chaviano, who is originally from Cuba, spoke out against Myers’ decision at the meeting.
“Those who are documented and legal residents no longer feel safe,” she said according to the meeting’s minutes. “Being a part of this program only supports the mistreatment that ICE has been doing.”
Chaviano, along with almost 140 other Hanover residents, signed a petition to add an article on the Town Meeting warrant calling on the town manager and police chief to “not enter into or sign any agreements” with ICE’s 287(g) program. Hanover’s annual Town Meeting is next Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Hanover High School gym.
“If you really want to make a difference come to this meeting,” Sharon Racusin, the organizer of the petitioned article, said in a phone interview last week. “If you want to resist, this is the way you to do it.”
Racusin began circulating the petition in early March because she worried checkpoints like the ones set up on I-89 in Lebanon in 2019, during the first Trump Administration, would pop up again with Trump back in office. Watching recent detentions and deportations in the news, as well as Myers’ decision to sign onto 287(g), affirmed the need for the Hanover warrant article for Racusin.
“This is a defining moment,” Racusin said. “If we don’t push back on people being taken away without due process, without having committed a crime, because some(one) decides they’re not human, then we’re doomed and that isn’t a hyperbole.”
For several years, ICE has been accused by human rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, for racial profiling and other human rights abuses. In recent weeks, the agency has come under fire for detaining and threatening to deport legal residents of the U.S. for speaking out in support of Palestinian people; sending hundreds of immigrants, many of whom have no known criminal background, to a prison in El Salvador without due legal process; and deporting children who are U.S. citizens.
“As former law enforcement, I totally support arresting people who have committed serious violent offenses, however I think draconian policies are being used as an excuse, along with racial profiling, to cast a wide dragnet on people who don’t have anything to do with crime,” Olsen said in a phone interview.
Being in the country illegally is a civil violation not a crime.
“People immigrate to the U.S. because we’ve always been seen as a land of opportunity,” Olsen said. “They’re not coming here because they want to commit crimes.”
While FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, there is no evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, such as New York. Studies from Princeton and Stanford have found that people living in the U.S. illegally are less likely than citizens to have been arrested for violent, drug and property crimes.
Olsen argued entering into the agreement with ICE will make immigrant communities lose trust in the sheriff’s department and less likely to report crimes for fear of getting deported.
“You can’t be in law enforcement and do a good job without having the trust of the community you swore you’d protect,” Olsen said.
Deputy Sheriff Benjamin Adams is the officer from the county sheriff’s department selected for the ICE training. Once trained, Adams will have much of the same authorities as an ICE agent, including the power to interrogate any undocumented immigrant or anyone believed to be an undocumented immigrant concerning their right to be in the country, and to detain and transport undocumented immigrants to ICE detention centers.
When reached by phone on Friday, Adams directed questions on the matter to Myers.
“The only difference is the process will be more streamlined,” Myers said. “If we come across someone with an ICE detainer, we’ll have a resource in our community on what needs to be done and where they need to go as opposed to waiting for numerous hours for someone else from a federal agency.”
Adams will not be trained until the department is fully staffed, Myers said. As of Tuesday morning, the department had 11 current officers listed on its website and job listings for a deputy sheriff and a dispatcher.
Concerns about enforcement costs
On Tuesday morning, the Commissioners approved the sheriff department’s budget as proposed by Myers, despite Commissioner Martha McLeod’s attempts to convince the other two commissioners to remove funding in an effort to persuade Myers to rescind the agreement, McLeod said.
“The argument from different departments that have signed on is they’re somehow going to protect people’s due process rights but the agreement doesn’t have any language about due process,” McLeod said. “It’s a nice talking point but I don’t see any reality in it.”
McLeod’s also concerned about funding the program.
Currently the average cost to arrest, detain, and remove an undocumented immigrant is more than $17,000, according to a May 5 news release from the Department of Homeland Security.
“The county taxpayer is responsible for that,” McLeod said.
Commissioner Katie Hedberg agrees with McLeod that entering into the agreement is a bad idea. “If there were designated dollars to immigration enforcement in the budget I would take that out,” Hedberg said in a phone interview Tuesday.
Because Myers can move money in the approved budget from one line item to another, Hedberg thought it didn’t make sense to slash the sheriff’s funding. “We could take money out and she could just spend other money on immigration,” Hedberg said.
When asked if she has considered withdrawing from the 287(g) program, which she can do at any point, Myers stood by her actions.
“As a law enforcement agency this is what we’ve agreed to do,” Myers said.
State lawmakers are considering bills this legislative session that ban municipalities from preventing local law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities, bringing into question the future of the Hanover warrant article if it passes.
Republican-sponsored House Bill 511 blocks state and local governments from adopting policies to “prohibit or impede the enforcement of federal immigration law.”
The bill, which passed the House last month in a 211-161 vote, largely along party lines, explicitly prohibits municipalities from preventing law enforcement from entering into any program under section 287 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
HB 511 still has to pass through the Senate to become law, but the Republican-controlled Senate passed a similar bill, 16-8, in March.
If the bills pass, the Hanover warrant article may be void, but local agencies wouldn’t be forced to enter into agreements with ICE.
“We’re not one of the communities that have agreed to be deputized as ICE agents and we have no intention of doing that,” Hanover Police Chief James Martin said in a phone interview last week.
Martin said he does not know of any ICE presence in Hanover in the last four years.
“I don’t see it as a current problem for the community, but I understand emotions and tensions are high with these issues and people want to clarify how the community would respond,” he said.
Emma Roth-Wells can be reached at erothwells@vnews.com or 603-727-3242. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
These articles are being shared by partners in the Granite State News Collaborative. For more information, visit collaborativenh.org.
