When Los Angeles police arrested Jose Juarez Bacillio in March on suspicion of threatening his ex-wife’s new romantic partner, he was released after spending less than 24 hours in prison.
A brief stay behind the bar was everything that took him to cause his deportation about three months later.
Despite not being charged with Juarez Basilio, the seemingly routine interpersonalization with police placed the 35-year-old undocumented Mexican man on the radar of US immigration and customs enforcement.
Leaders at the LA Police Station have reassured that there are strict restrictions on the department’s cooperation with immigration officers without getting in the way to reassure the public.
However, dozens of other cases identified in Juarez Basilio and federal court records show that nonetheless, LA police are sharing fingerprints regularly with federal law enforcement, allowing ICE to find new targets.
The fundamental question of what it means to work with immigration authorities amid the continuous crackdown on the region by the Trump White House, has taken on a new urgency in the meaning of what it means to work with immigration authorities. Hundreds of people were detained in masked ice and attacks by border patrol agents, sparking protests and indiscriminately rounding up the ongoing court battle over the use of “roving patrols” to suspects.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell frequently pointed out a long-standing policy known as Special Order 40. The policy, implemented in 1979, seeks to assure the city’s growing immigrant community that it can move forward as a witness or a victim of crime without fear of deportation.
But given how complicated the country’s immigration situation has become over half a century, it’s time for the LAPD to take steps beyond policy, councillor Hugo Soto-Martinez said.
“I thought Special Order 40 was the right thing at that point,” he said in a recent interview. “Do you think we’re meeting you at this moment? Of course it’s not.”
Of particular concern, LAPD handles data collected from automated license plate readers and is a device deployed around the city that tracks vehicle movement. Police officers claim that information is not shared with the ice. However, other local law enforcement agencies have fled their own similar rules in the past, raising concerns that LAPD may not follow the terms.
“If there’s even a slight chance that LAPD is sharing data with ice,” Soto-Martinez said the city should see such a loophole.
In the wake of the recent federal immigration attack, LAPD chief Jim McDonnell frequently pointed to a long-standing policy known as Special Order 40.
(Robert Gautier/Los Angeles Times)
This month, Mayor Karen Bass ordered the creation of a working group to consider and possibly update the LAPD immigration policy. At a press conference, McDonnell said he believes Special Order 40 still fulfills its original mission to build a public trust.
“We are not effective if people are not willing to come forward and report the crime that they are victims or witnesses,” he said.
However, the Chief has repeatedly said that his officers would not interfere with federal law enforcement practices – even if they violated a recent court injunction that temporarily blocked federal agents from racial profiling. If Angelenos had concerns, they could file a complaint with the federal government or pursue other legal remedies, he said.
In cities with a population of more than half that of Latinos, their stance is thinly clad in critics. Critics argue that the department implicitly supports the ice by providing crowd control when the attack attracts angry protesters.
“We can’t go through this for a month and we can’t expect the public to trust the law enforcement agencies that participate in it,” said longtime civil rights attorney Connie Rice. “The immigrant community is asking, ‘Don’t you protect us?’ ”
The Juarez-Basilio case shows how the ICE can indirectly deport while the LAPD remains at Special Order 40 and officially avoids immigration enforcement.
Records show he was taken into custody on March 23rd on suspicion of committing a criminal threat. The court application describes the case where he was accused of having an unknown object under his t-shirt while threatening his former new partner.
When Juarez-Basilio was booked and fingerprinted at a prison in the San Fernando Valley, it pinged the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, an ice facility in Orange County.
Court records show that an ice agent investigated Juarez Basilio and found out he had been deported three times before and illegally re-entered the country, a federal crime, as well as violating the Civil Immigration Act.
Juarez-Basilio posted the bond and was released before ICE agents arrested him. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office refused to file charges, citing the lack of evidence.
Ice Agent was waiting to custody him after a hearing in federal court last month.
He was arrested in the last few months, with at least 30 LAPDs arrested in the last few months, according to a review of Criminal Court filings.
In the case of Juarez-Basilio and some other cases, the bill does not mention past criminal acts apart from border intersections. In only a handful of cases, those arrested were pre-convicted of violent felony.
In several others, LAPD warned federal authorities of felony arrests. This is because they didn’t stop at a black Rolls-Royce stop sign, as in the case of two British citizens arrested for possessing a gun after being pulled into Hollywood in late June. Court records show that both men were overstaying their visas.
Police in some states, primarily in the south, have supported the ice for many years by handing over prisoners accused of immigration violations. Trump threatened to cut off federal funding for cities such as LA that refused to fully cooperate with immigration enforcement.
Christie Lopez, a Georgetown law professor who once worked for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said the city Trump faced choices. Refusing to retreat runs the risk of losing federal funds. They may also partner with local law enforcement agencies to defeat drug cartels, prevent terrorism and investigate other major crimes.
Such bonds are expected to grow closer at the LA set to host the 2028 Olympics.
But in this moment, Lopez said, there is a risk of undermining hard-earned trust in vulnerable immigrant communities who are wary of people already working with the police.
“If a large part of the population doesn’t trust the police, we can’t keep cities safe,” she said.
Earlier this year, the outage of the prominent watchdog group LAPD Spy Coalition sent the police commission that information collected by LAPD officers during daily pedestrians and traffic stops was flowing into a large database.
“Unless there is a vast network that serves as the eyes and ears of local police and ground governments, immigration enforcement cannot guarantee that anyone who has been detained for an arrest is ultimately false and will soon be placed on ice radar if they are ultimately thrown into court,” the letter states.
Since it was enacted almost 50 years ago, the Special Order 40 says it illegally gives the country’s free pass, both anti-immigrant activists who have faced repeated attacks from factions within the LAPD and have challenged it for constitutional and practical reasons.
Stephen Downing, the former deputy LAPD director who helped draft Special Order 40, said it was intended as a “law enforcement tool” to address city aggression gang violence rather than “to actually protect immigrants from immigrants.”
“These people were in the community, they were part of the community and they needed them to manage crime. We needed them to report the crime,” Downing said. “I wasn’t very altruistic at the time.”
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