PROVINCETOWN — The Trump administration has already begun to implement its plans for large-scale deportations, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in major cities and legal threats to state and local officials who do not cooperate with federal enforcement.

While those raids have not yet been seen on Cape Cod, concerned citizens here have been calling their police chiefs to ensure their practices are still in line with the “safe communities” resolutions that all four Outer Cape towns passed during the first Trump presidency.

Heidi Schmidt of Provincetown said she spoke with Police Chief Jim Golden before inauguration day. She told the Independent that Golden “couldn’t have been warmer or more reassuring” that his department would continue to operate in line with Provincetown’s 2018 safe community resolution. Several residents who spoke with police chiefs in Wellfleet and Eastham said they had also offered reassurances about their departments’ approaches to immigrants.

Between 2017 and 2019, 15 communities across Cape Cod and the Islands passed “safe communities” policies, including the four Outer Cape towns, the six towns on Martha’s Vineyard, Brewster, Harwich, Dennis, Falmouth, and Mashpee.

Those resolutions affirmed that local funds and resources, including local police officers, would not be used for federal immigration enforcement, which was already the norm in Massachusetts.

Despite their limited scope, policies and practices limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement do appear to have an effect. An analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of various policies enacted between 2010 and 2015 found that they “reduced deportations of people fingerprinted by local authorities by about one-third … [and] had an even larger effect on deportations of people with no convictions, which fell by over half.”

According to Rod MacDonald of the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities, the idea behind the local push for resolutions during Trump’s first term was to protect the rights of immigrant community members and encourage them to trust local police.

Local organizers favored the term “safe community” over “sanctuary,” MacDonald told the Independent, because the latter designation seemed “dicey” when it came to the risk of federal blowback. President Trump repeatedly threatened to cut federal funding to sanctuary cities and states in his first term, and he renewed that threat again in his second.

Tom Ryan, another organizer with the Coalition for Safe Communities, also said that the “sanctuary” designation “scared some people.”

A longtime leader of the Cape Cod Council of Churches, Ryan said he is wary of the term because of its multiple meanings — ranging from a general ethic of witness and solidarity to the idea that a church or local government could effectively shield a person from federal enforcement.

 

Hold or Notify

The “safe communities” resolutions in Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro all explicitly stated that they were affirming, not changing, town policy. Provincetown’s directed town leaders to avoid using town funds and resources for federal immigration enforcement “to the extent permissible by law.”

That doesn’t mean that police departments don’t communicate with ICE, however. When local or state police arrest someone, the subject’s fingerprints are automatically run through FBI and Dept. of Homeland Security databases, which each contain civil immigration records, according to the National Immigration Law Center.

ICE receives that arrest information and can then generate a “detainer request” for local law enforcement to either hold someone after her scheduled release so ICE can detain her, or notify the agency of the person’s impending release date.

In 2017, the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Lunn v. Commonwealth that state and local law enforcement do not have the authority to hold people at the behest of the federal government after they are scheduled to be released.

That case does not apply to whether agencies can notify ICE of an impending release, however.

As the Independent reported last week, the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Dept. notifies ICE when people with detainers are set to be released, even after ending the 287(g) agreement that had involved deputizing the department’s staff as immigration officers.

The Provincetown Police Dept. prohibits officers from asking about immigration status and requires them to provide an arrested person with copies of any documents the agency receives from ICE.

But the town’s policy still stipulates that “ICE shall be notified by the [officer in charge]” if an arrested person with an ICE detainer is set to be released.

Nationwide, detainer requests for people in custody are responsible for a large share of ICE’s overall immigration enforcement. According to a 2023 report by the Northeastern Law Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy, over two-thirds of ICE arrests in 2020 occurred after the agency was notified by state and local law enforcement of impending releases.

In fiscal 2019, 1,748 detainers were sent to local law enforcement agencies in Massachusetts by ICE, that study reported.

For more than a decade, activists nationwide have argued that ICE doesn’t file detainers only against people with prior convictions or civil enforcement actions.

As a result, merely being arrested can lead to a deportation, even if the person is never arraigned or convicted, according to the National Immigration Law Center.

 

Out Here, a Rarity

Provincetown’s Deputy Police Chief Greg Hennick said that the town’s policy is for any detainer request received by the department to be logged for future reference — and added that he could not find any record indicating his department had ever received one.

Truro Police Chief Jamie Calise said that a review of the last three years of arrest data showed that no one arrested in Truro had an immigration detainer at the time of the arrest.

Eastham’s Chief Adam Bohannon called detainers “incredibly rare” and told the Independent that he can remember only a few during his 24-year career.

“Despite what you hear in the national media, this is just not something that is occupying the time and resources of local police departments,” Bohannon said.

Bohannon said his department does communicate with ICE if it is holding someone with an ICE detainer. “We would do the same to any other law enforcement agency that had a missing person report out or a criminal arrest warrant out and we placed one of those individuals under arrest,” he said.

Wellfleet Police Chief Kevin LaRocco did not respond to requests for comment.

After a quiet few years under the Biden administration, members of the Cape Cod Coalition for Safe Communities have gotten back in touch recently.

“Our coalition is doing what we can to reach out to immigrant neighbors regarding their constitutional rights,” MacDonald said. He added that his group hopes to convey “a sense of solidarity and friendship and to remind everyone of the immeasurable value of immigrants to our community life.”