Photo from Facebook/Pima County Sheriff’s Department
A civil rights organization is taking the Pima County Sheriff’s Department to court to force it to reveal how often deputies contact federal immigration officials during routine traffic stops.
The Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in Pima County Superior Court on July 21 accusing Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and his department of violating the state’s public records laws.
In mid-May, the ACLU submitted a public records request for documents relating to when and how officers are verifying a person’s immigration status after pulling them over, including radio traffic logs and incident reports. But, according to the lawsuit, department officials have failed to even establish a timeline of when they might be able to start sharing that information.
“The public has a compelling and broad interest in, and is legally entitled to, prompt disclosure of the documents,” wrote ACLU immigrant rights attorney John M. Mitchell. “Defendants have failed entirely to provide records responsive to Plaintiff’s request—submitted over two months ago.”
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The lawsuit comes as public scrutiny of the relationships between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration officials increases amid President Donald Trump’s aggressive mass deportation campaign. In Tucson, immigrant advocates have disseminated videos on social media of police officers calling Border Patrol agents for backup or partnering with them during traffic stops.
And while Nanos, a Democrat, has repeatedly vowed that his department won’t enforce federal immigration laws, the agency has still contributed to the deportation process. According to an investigation by Arizona Luminaria, at least 16 undocumented people were turned over to Border Patrol by sheriff’s deputies between January 2022 and June 2023.
Key dispute: Missing call logs with feds
At the heart of the lawsuit filed by the ACLU is a record-keeping process at the sheriff’s department that was recently ended. It mandated that all “requests for assistance” made to federal immigration officials during traffic stops or other interactions with the public be tracked and compiled into a monthly report.
That tracking stopped in June of last year, despite the policy remaining on the books, according to reporting by Arizona Luminaria. The policy was abruptly removed from the department’s rules and regulations posted online earlier this month, shortly after the nonprofit news outlet’s reporting. Nanos told Capitol Media Services that it was eliminated because it was a holdover from his predecessor, Republican Mark Napier, as part of an effort to make the department eligible for federal funding under a now-defunct program called Operation Stonegarden for assisting with border security, and had, in practice, already been stopped.
Mitchell, writing for the ACLU, urged the court to compel the sheriff’s department to fulfill the organization’s records request, which includes a request to view any existing records having to do with how the now-eliminated policy was implemented, as well as any other documentation that may provide insight into how often, over the past four years — including the two years during which the policy wasn’t being complied with — deputies contacted federal immigration officials.
“Plaintiffs and the public have the right to understand Defendants’ degree of compliance with PCSD’s own rules, regulations, policies, and procedures,” Mitchell wrote.
Sheriff: call tracking policy was burdensome and useless
Nanos waved away the lawsuit as premature, noting that most records requests take weeks to compile, redact and approve. The ACLU’s request covers four years. Nanos noted that the department’s records team is also tied up with other assignments, including transcribing all police reports.
And while critics may point to the lack of data as proof that the department isn’t being transparent about its interactions with federal immigration officials, Nanos said the information that was being gathered from that policy mandate was virtually useless. In Napier’s campaign to prove to the federal government that the department was overwhelmed by border activity, he logged every call that originated near the border, or was an interaction with immigration officials, without relevant context, Nanos said. That included times that the department reached out to Border Patrol agents to coordinate a rescue effort. Nanos added that tracking calls to a single law enforcement agency is unreasonable and creates unnecessary work for dispatchers.
“(We get) 140,000 calls a day and I have to track an agency’s calls? We don’t track (Tucson Police Department),” he said. “We don’t track when we call (the Arizona Department of Public Safety).”
Instead, Nanos pointed to his department’s data on traffic stops as evidence that it doesn’t engage in discrimination. Migrant advocates have long been concerned that racial profiling during routine traffic stops could increase the risk of people being turned over to federal immigration authorities. Data provided to Capitol Media Services showed that, of the people deputies have pulled over since January, 55% were classified as white and 35% were Hispanic. Those percentages are in line with the 2023 American Community Survey, which estimated 50% of county residents identified as White and 37% identified as Hispanic.
But traffic stop data doesn’t provide insight into what happens when a deputy decides to involve immigration officials. Nanos said that concern is easily resolved by incident reports. The guidelines for arrests in the department’s rules and regulations prohibit deputies from inquiring about a person’s immigration status unless it’s a “valid element of a criminal investigation” or a “reasonable suspicion exists” that they’re in the country without authorization and they must document that suspicion in a case report.
In the lawsuit, the ACLU pointed out that PCSO, along with eliminating the call tracking policy, also removed a portion that banned deputies from considering race, color or national origin when establishing reasonable suspicion unless it’s part of a “specific suspect description.” Nanos has since said that was an overcorrection, and that the edited regulations are still undergoing a review.
The public can also serve as a check on the behavior of deputies, Nanos added.
“If you’re stopped by a deputy and you believe the stop was unlawful, unnecessary or it just was wrong, call us,” he said.
For Nanos, the lawsuit is another example of the backlash against the Trump administration negatively affecting the public’s perception of local law enforcement agencies. Once uncontroversial drug bust investigations or partnerships between local agencies and federal officials are now a source of suspicion, he said, and the Trump administration is to blame for the furor.
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This post was originally authored and published by Gloria Rebecca Gomez from AZ Mirror via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.
