{"id":9882,"date":"2016-12-05T01:21:41","date_gmt":"2016-12-05T06:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/?p=9882"},"modified":"2016-12-05T01:21:41","modified_gmt":"2016-12-05T06:21:41","slug":"ocean-county-officials-were-not-a-sanctuary-county","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/2016\/12\/ocean-county-officials-were-not-a-sanctuary-county\/","title":{"rendered":"Ocean County Officials: We’re Not a ‘Sanctuary County’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>

The Ocean County Justice Complex, Toms River, N.J. (Photo: Daniel Nee)<\/p><\/div>\n

Ocean County changed a policy in 2015 that set forth a detailed list\u00a0of specific offenses for\u00a0which officers at the Ocean County Jail would honor detainers issued by\u00a0federal authorities for inmates found to be in the country illegally.<\/p>\n

The policy, drawn up in 2015 by newly-appointed Warden\u00a0Sandra J. Mueller, replaced a policy from a year earlier<\/a> that earned Ocean County semi-sanctuary status in a report<\/a> issued by the American Civil Liberties Union\u2019s New Jersey chapter. That policy outlined specific crimes for which Ocean County would fulfill detainer requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Suspects charged with offenses\u00a0that were considered \u201cdanger to the person or the community,\u201d such as murder, vehicular homicide, aggravated assault and various sex crimes, would be held for 48 hours on the detainer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not now, nor have we ever thought of ourselves as a sanctuary county,\u201d said County Administrator Carl Block. \u201cWe have no idea how we got on the ACLU\u2019s list.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ACLU has lobbied heavily for cities and counties to turn down detainer requests by ICE because they do not constitute an arrest warrant. A federal appeals court in 2014 ruled that detainers are merely requests rather than orders to local law enforcement, essentially making it optional for a local agency to honor them.<\/p>\n

After that ruling was handed down, County Attorney Jack Sahradnik helped former warden Theodore Hutler promulgate a county policy on honoring the detainers, which contained the list of offenses. Mueller, in 2015, replaced the policy with a new one which more broadly states that illegal immigrants charged with any first or second degree crime, or any inmate whose offense makes him or her a \u201cremovable alien\u201d should prompt jail employees to honor the detainer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very lucky to have an ICE officer at the jail full time,\u201d said Mueller, during an interview with Shorebeat on the matter. \u201cTheir responsibility is to identify the inmates who fall under the priority enforcement program, make sure they have ICE detainers, and if they need to transported to a detention facility, they make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to ICE,\u00a0under the\u00a0Priority Enforcement Program, ICE \u201cwill seek the transfer of a removable individual when that individual has been convicted of an offense listed under the [Department of Homeland Security]\u00a0civil immigration enforcement priorities, has intentionally participated in an organized criminal gang to further the illegal activity of the gang, or poses a danger to national security.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mueller said ICE determines which inmates fall under the program and should be detained, and the county fulfills all requests.<\/p>\n

\u201cI worked with ICE to do a policy to cooperate with their priority enforcement program,\u201d said Mueller.<\/p>\n

So-called sanctuary cities and counties \u2013 which exercise their legal right to ignore some or all ICE detainer requests \u2013 have drawn scrutiny following the recent election of Donald J. Trump as president. Trump has promised to impose penalties on jurisdictions that ignore the requests, potentially withholding federal funding. The 2015 murder of\u00a0Kate Steinle in San Francisco \u2013 a sanctuary city which\u00a0ignored a detainer request for her alleged killer \u2013 also ratcheted up the debate, in part leading the U.S. House of Representatives to approve a bill that would have imposed penalties on sanctuary jurisdictions. Democrats in the U.S. Senate blocked the legislation from making it to President Barack Obama\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n

The ACLU has firmly argued against enacting policies or legislation to restrict sanctuary efforts.<\/p>\n

\u201cRather than taking a punitive approach to local law\u00a0enforcement agencies that are working hard to balance their duties to uphold the Constitution\u00a0and to keep their communities safe, the Senate should end DHS\u2019s unconstitutional detainer\u00a0practices, or fix the constitutional deficiencies by requiring judicial warrants for all detainer\u00a0requests,\u201d the organization said in a statement issued in July.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ocean County changed a policy in 2015 that set forth a detailed list\u00a0of specific offenses for\u00a0which officers at the Ocean County Jail would honor detainers issued by\u00a0federal authorities for inmates found to be in the country illegally. The policy, drawn up in 2015 by newly-appointed Warden\u00a0Sandra J. Mueller, replaced a policy from a year earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[24,942,2301,1592,2630,2629,2631],"class_list":["post-9882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ocean-county","tag-brick-nj-news","tag-new-jersey","tag-nj","tag-ocean-county","tag-sanctuary-cities","tag-sanctuary-city","tag-sanctuary-county"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/ocean_county_court.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgt2Ft-2zo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}