Dearborn, Michigan has cut ties with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, declining to renew a contract to jail immigrant detainees for the agency. Mayor Jack O'Reilly Jr. made the decision “following backlash by immigration advocates and religious groups,” The Detroit News reports. “The department has renewed contracts annually with Calhoun County and ICE for more than 10 years. Dearborn police would hold detainees for ICE in Dearborn's 20-bed facility in an undisclosed location,” though detentions stretched into the thousands over the years.
Michigan Reps. Debbie Dingell, Rashida Talib and Andy Levin were among the leaders that have called for an end to local collaboration with ICE, with demonstrators as recently as last week gathering outside the Dearborn Police Department to protest mass deportation policies."This country is being divided by fear and hatred, and it's wrong," Dingell said. "We stand here today of members of all faiths that are being targeted.”
The activists won. ICE tried to throw cold water on the victory, with the agency’s Detroit leader, Rebecca Adducci, claiming that "the city's decision to no longer house ICE detainees at its facility will have minimal impact on local ICE operations, as a short-term facility. However, these policies do little to enhance law enforcement partnerships. Any policy that put politics before public safety is ill-conceived.”
Some big claims coming from Adducci, an ICE official who is not well-known nationally but has inflicted untold trauma on immigrant families for years now. In the first months of the Trump administration, Adducci refused to show mercy to Jesus Lara, a dad deported after nearly two decades in the U.S. Lara was a dad of four U.S. citizen kids, had no criminal record, was a taxpayer, and followed ICE’s rules by checking in regularly for years.
But it didn’t matter, and in heartbreaking footage, Jesus’s weeping children could be seen clinging to their dad and as they said goodbye at the airport. Immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice reported that it’s also under Adducci’s watch that agents have swept up Iraqi Christians, with advocates saying that they would be deported to certain death. This is the sort of havoc that ICE is committing, and Dearborn has made the right move. More communities across the U.S. should be following.