Fairfax County Police
Remove Arrest Blotter Over ICE Data Sharing Concerns
Colleen Grablick
Community advocates
said the list violated a new law that limits local law enforcement’s
interactions with immigration enforcement agencies.
Michael Pope / WAMU
Fairfax County’s
police department will no longer publish the names and personal information of
people arrested for crimes, heeding concerns from advocates that the list
endangered immigrant residents.
Earlier this year,
the county’s Board of Supervisors passed a Public Trust and Confidentiality
Policy, cutting off all voluntary cooperation and information sharing between
local agencies and federal immigration authorities. But advocates said the
arrest blotter, which lived on the police department’s website and included
information like names and last known addresses, continued to violate the law,
commonly known as the Trust Policy, by allowing Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials to target immigrant residents.
“We believe that [the
arrest blotter] violated the Trust Policy, because it’s not necessary to
release that personal information,” says Diane Alejandro, a lead advocate with
ACLU People Power Fairfax. “It just is, more than anything, a shaming list.”
According to Anthony
Guglielmi, a spokesperson for Fairfax County police, the county originally
began publishing that type of information online in 2016 in order to limit the
amount of calls the department received from residents seeking information
about arrests in their neighborhood.
The arrest blotter
came down last Friday, after a review of the practice by ACLU People Power
Fairfax found the blotter to be non-compliant with the Trust Policy, Guglielmi
said. The Washington Post first reported the decision.
The county will still
be running a weekly crime roundup on the department’s website, but will
withhold names and any other information regarding the individuals arrested.
“Important
information will continue to be shared with the community, and arrest data
remains easily accessible via FOIA to residents and reporters,” County
Supervisor Dalia Palchik, one of the nine supervisors that voted in favor of
the Trust Policy policy, wrote in a statement to DCist/WAMU.
Alejandro, who
advocated for the passage of the Trust Policy, say ACLU People Power Fairfax
supports the continuation of a crime roundup, without the names and personal
information of individuals arrested. If someone is truly interested in
gathering that information, she says, there are plenty of ways to dig for it on
the internet — instead of the police proactively offering it.
“It’s not like folks
are being left in the dark,” Alejandro says, adding that arrest information
will still be available to members of the public upon a FOIA request. “I think
that honestly smacks of racism to suggest that the interests of people who just
want to know the name of every person arrested to satisfy their curiosity
should take precedence over the lives of immigrants.”
Unlike in D.C. or
Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, where the police force is
overseen by the top elected official, the Fairfax County Police Department is
under the purview of the Board of Supervisors. The Trust Policy, which passed
the Board of Supervisors by a 9-1 vote in January, applies to all agencies
across Fairfax County’s government. While the provisions of the new law allow
cooperation with ICE officials if it is required or requested, the policy bars
willful or voluntary local information sharing that would help immigration
enforcement track down individuals.
Alejandro says she
does not know of any residents that were targeted directly as a result of the
arrest blotter, but that she and other advocates “know it happens.”
“We don’t need to
hand [the information] to them on a silver platter,” Alejandro says. “We’re not
going to volunteer information to ICE, and this is what the police were doing.”
A spokesperson for
ICE denied that the agency used the Fairfax County’s arrest information to
locate or apprehend any residents.
“ICE Enforcement and
Removal Operations does not use police blotter data to identify immigration
enforcement targets in Fairfax County, Virginia,” the spokesperson wrote in an
emailed statement to DCist/WAMU. “ICE ERO officers use intelligence-driven
leads to identify specific individuals for arrest.”
The removal of the
arrest list marks the latest step in Fairfax County’s efforts to limit the
county’s interactions with federal immigration agencies. In 2020, the county
codified a policy that prevents police officers from asking or disclosing a
person’s immigration status, or using immigration status as a determining
factor when considering to take a person into custody on a misdemeanor charge.
Regionally, Arlington
County officials are also considering ways to decrease local law enforcement’s
engagement with ICE — last week, the Arlington County Board released the draft
of a framework to increase protection of immigrant residents, including
proposals to decrease the local police’s contact with immigration agencies.