Immigrant Communities

Goal: Grassroots Alexandria joins the Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC) and Tenants and Workers United (TWU) to demand that the Alexandria Sheriff end all forms of voluntary collaboration with ICE.

Background: The Alexandria Sheriff continues to go above and beyond what is required by law to voluntarily collaborate with ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). These practices facilitate transfers to ICE detention and speed up the deportations of Alexandria residents. Our immigration system is so broken that we now have a very large population of individuals and families who have been living here in the USA for so many years that they are culturally American. Deporting them would be cruel and unusual punishment.

Project: ICE out of Alexandria

Action Plan: We will reach out to Sheriff’s office to ask that they take three specific actions:

  • End “courtesy calls” to ICE: When the Alexandria Sheriff is preparing to release an individual who they know to be a noncitizen, they will make a “courtesy call” to ICE to advise them of the individual’s release date and time. That way, ICE can be ready to arrest the individual upon release from jail. We note that Arlington and Fairfax have recently ended this practice.
  • End transfers to ICE without a Judicial warrant. Under the law, the Alexandria Sheriff is only required to transfer custody to another law enforcement agency pursuant to a judicial warrant (signed by a judge). However, the Alexandria Sheriff provides special treatment to ICE, voluntarily transferring custody to ICE on the basis of purely administrative documents known as I-200 warrants and I-247 detainers. These documents are printed in ICE offices and not signed by a judge. A Virginia Attorney General Advisory Opinion states that these documents do not obligate or authorize local law enforcement agencies to detain or arrest individuals for civil immigration enforcement. We note that Arlington and Fairfax have ended this practice.
  • Stop holding individuals past their scheduled release times to facilitate transfers to ICE. Under the law, the Alexandria Sheriff cannot hold an individual past their release date in order to facilitate transfers to ICE. However, to facilitate the courtesy-call and detainer transfers described above, the Alexandria Sheriff voluntarily holds individuals for hours after their scheduled release times to facilitate such transfers. 

Project leads: Jonathan Krall, Zeina Azzam

Project Status: While it is true that as of January 1, 2023, ICE has been removed from the Alexandria Adult Detention Center’s Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA)–meaning that the Alexandria jail will no longer hold immigrants solely on the basis of civil immigration violations–removing ICE from the IGA is not enough.

Challenges: 

We believe that using our jail to turn formerly-accused or formerly-incarcerated Alexandrians into deportation cases is immoral. This practice is based on the myth of the good/bad binary. Experience shows that, when this myth is put into practice, BIPOC folks are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt; they are more likely to be labeled “bad.” The myth that we are only deporting “bad” people has been used to justify this cruel practice.

In practice, many sheriffs are hesitant to release a person when told to do so by a court.  They (the sheriffs) do not want to read a news story about a recently-freed person committing a crime. However, we believe that when someone is found not guilty or when they are released on bail, they should be released. Everyone, regardless of their immigration status, should be treated the same way.

No one should be deported because they happened to be accused of a crime. Just because our broken immigration system leaves undocumented people vulnerable to detention does not justify locking up any undocumented person who gets caught up in the criminal justice system, either by personal error or just plain bad luck.

To join a project team, please write to one of the project leaders or to grassrootsalexandria@gmail.com.