Why Wyoming sheriffs shouldn’t take dollars for detainees

To some, she’s a mother. A friend. A co-worker. A neighbor. 

But to Uinta County Sheriff Andy Kopp, she’s also a potential source of revenue. 

That’s because for every immigrant detained by ICE agents and held in the Uinta County Jail, Kopp’s department gets paid $66 a day — barely enough to cover his costs, but he’s hoping to increase that to $120 a day — and he’s banking on detaining enough immigrants to collect $500,000 per year. By doing this, Kopp is putting a price on immigrants and is sending a clear message about how he and other law enforcement officials see the immigrant community — with dollar signs in their eyes.

Kopp has earmarked this money to give his deputies a raise — the Wyoming Legislature’s property tax cuts left the county with less revenue for salary increases. But immigrants didn’t raise the cost of food. Immigrants didn’t raise the cost of housing. And immigrants aren’t the ones creating hardships for working-class Wyomingites. (If you need a scapegoat, you should be looking at some of our elected officials and the wealthy people who support them.)

But Kopp and a growing number of other Wyoming sheriffs are now paid jailers for the Trump administration’s deportation machine. Making local government dependent on the federal government’s immigration system and the promise of a steady stream of detained immigrants is a dangerous game to play.

You see, while some Wyoming sheriffs have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE, effectively turning local officials into ICE agents, Kopp has not yet. But his arrangement provides a more direct financial incentive to collaborate with federal immigration enforcement — and that poses significant threats to immigrant communities and the foundational principles of justice in Wyoming. 

That’s because most people ICE arrested this year in Wyoming did not have a criminal history, according to data obtained from ICE, published by the Deportation Data Project, and analyzed by The Colorado Sun and WyoFile. The ICE arrest data contradicts the purported goals of the Trump administration to target the “worst of the worst.”

But this is not just about undocumented immigrants. This is about every immigrant in Wyoming — citizen, resident or otherwise — who now has to wonder if going to work, speaking Spanish or some other language, or just trying to exist in Wyoming makes them a target. And if the history and current reality of racial profiling in this country and here in Wyoming tells us anything, it’s that law enforcement will almost always lean on the “easiest” factor — skin color, accent or language — when making arrests. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a temporary ruling earlier this month allowing federal immigration enforcement to use profiling to decide who to stop and detain. 

Most of us can agree that the federal government needs to do much better on immigration policy and identify real solutions that are orderly, humane and fair. But turning local law enforcement into an extension of the federal government is none of those things. Rather, it puts officers and their communities at risk and depletes much-needed resources.

Local law enforcement agencies that willingly carry out the business of the federal government are losing vital community support and trust while diminishing their efforts to improve public safety. Community policing, after all, works best when law enforcement has the trust and cooperation of its constituents. However, this cooperation is easily eroded when communities believe they cannot safely disclose criminal activity to local law enforcement for fear of deportation or imprisonment or that they may be the subject of racial or ethnic profiling. We warned lawmakers this would happen, but our warnings were not taken seriously and ignored.

Safer communities should not come at the expense of our immigrant friends and family. County budgets shouldn’t depend on detaining immigrants. Immigrant families are part of our communities, our congregations, our schools and our workplaces. Treating them as enemies to be rounded up and detained for dollars is unacceptable. Local authorities like Sheriff Kopp have no business contributing to that effort.

Uinta County and Wyoming stood up against immigration detention in the past, and we will do it again. Immigrants belong in Wyoming, and we’ll never stop fighting for them.