Thread: I.C.E. Enforcement and Removal Operations Sensitive Locations

Enforcement and Removal Operations



Sensitive Locations FAQs
ERO

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have made available Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to supplement existing guidance concerning enforcement actions at or focused on sensitive locations and clarify what types of locations are covered by these policies.

The ICE and CBP sensitive locations policies, which remain in effect, provide that enforcement actions at sensitive locations should generally be avoided, and require either prior approval from an appropriate supervisory official or exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action. DHS is committed to ensuring that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so without fear or hesitation.

Do the Department of Homeland Security's policies concerning enforcement actions at or focused on sensitive locations remain in effect?

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have each issued and implemented policies concerning enforcement actions at or focused on sensitive locations.

The ICE Sensitive Locations Policy and the CBP Sensitive Locations Policy remain in effect, and these FAQs are intended to clarify what types of locations are covered by those policies.

What do the Department of Homeland Security policies require for enforcement actions to be carried out at sensitive locations?

The policies provide that enforcement actions at or focused on sensitive locations such as schools, places of worship, and hospitals should generally be avoided, and that such actions may only take place when (a) prior approval is obtained from an appropriate supervisory official, or (b) there are exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action without supervisor approval. The policies are meant to ensure that ICE and CBP officers and agents exercise sound judgment when enforcing federal law at or focused on sensitive locations, to enhance the public understanding and trust, and to ensure that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so, without fear or hesitation.

What does the Department of Homeland Security mean by the term “sensitive location”?

Locations covered by these policies would include, but not be limited to:

• Schools, such as known and licensed daycares, pre-schools and other early learning programs; primary schools; secondary schools; post-secondary schools up to and including colleges and universities; as well as scholastic or education-related activities or events, and school bus stops that are marked and/or known to the officer, during periods when school children are present at the stop;
• Medical treatment and health care facilities, such as hospitals, doctors’ offices, accredited health clinics, and emergent or urgent care facilities;
• Places of worship, such as churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples;
• Religious or civil ceremonies or observances, such as funerals and weddings; and
• During public demonstration, such as a march, rally, or parade.

What is an enforcement action?
An enforcement action covered by this policy is any action taken by ICE or CBP to apprehend, arrest, interview, or search an individual, or to surveil an individual for enforcement purposes.

Actions not covered by this policy include activities such as obtaining records, documents, and similar materials from officials or employees, providing notice to officials or employees, serving subpoenas, engaging in Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) compliance and certification visits, guarding or securing detainees, or participating in official functions or community meetings.

Will enforcement actions ever occur at sensitive locations?

Enforcement actions may occur at sensitive locations in limited circumstances, but will generally be avoided. ICE or CBP officers and agents may conduct an enforcement action at a sensitive location with prior approval from an appropriate supervisory official, or if the enforcement action involves exigent circumstances.

When may an enforcement action be carried out at a sensitive location without prior approval?

ICE and CBP officers may carry out an enforcement action at a sensitive location without prior approval from a supervisor in exigent circumstances related to national security, terrorism, or public safety, or where there is an imminent risk of destruction of evidence material to an ongoing criminal case.

When proceeding with an enforcement action under exigent circumstances, officers and agents must conduct themselves as discreetly as possible, consistent with officer and public safety, and make every effort to limit the time at or focused on the sensitive location.

Are sensitive locations located along the international border also protected?

The sensitive locations policy does not apply to operations that are conducted within the immediate vicinity of the international border, including the functional equivalent of the border. However, when situations arise that call for enforcement actions at or near a sensitive location within the immediate vicinity of the international border, including its functional equivalent, agents and officers are expected to exercise sound judgment and common sense while taking appropriate action, consistent with the goals of this policy.

Examples of operations within the immediate vicinity of the border are, but are not limited to, searches at ports of entry, activities undertaken where there is reasonable certainty that an individual just crossed the border, circumstances where DHS has maintained surveillance of a subject since crossing the border, and circumstances where DHS is operating in a location that is geographically further from the border but separated from the border by rugged and remote terrain.

Are courthouses sensitive locations?
Courthouses do not fall under ICE or CBP’s policies concerning enforcement actions at or focused on sensitive locations.

Where should I report a DHS enforcement action that I believe may be inconsistent with these policies?

There are a number of locations where an individual may lodge a complaint about a particular DHS enforcement action that may have taken place in violation of the sensitive locations policy. You may find information about these locations, and information about how to file a complaint, on the DHS, CBP, or ICE websites.

You may contact ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) through the Detention Reporting and Information Line at (888)351-4024 or through the ERO information email address at ERO.INFO@ice.dhs.gov, also available at https://www.ice.gov/webform/ero-contact-form. The Civil Liberties Division of the ICE Office of Diversity and Civil Rights may be contacted at (202) 732-0092 or ICE.Civil.Liberties@ice.dhs.gov.

You may contact the CBP Information Center to file a complaint or compliment via phone at 1 (877) 227-5511, or submit an email through the website at https://help.cbp.gov.

https://www.ice.gov/ero/enforcement/sensitive-loc

This is an absurdly stupid policy, so stupid and so absurd that it wreaks of a "sanctuary policy" for illegal aliens by ICE.

Fire everyone and anyone who had anything to do with this stupidity, and the discrimination it creates against Americans who do not have the same "sanctuary" when law enforcement is after Americans for breaking the law.

Can You Still Claim Sanctuary in a Church?

BY MARK HAY
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2015


Last month, a bizarre criminal-legal odyssey in Vancouver drew to a close. Mikhail Lennikov, an ex-KGB agent facing deportation from Canada back to Russia, where he feared persecution and prosecution alike, came out of hiding and agreed to leave the nation. A tale of spies and immigration law, studded with details about the wife and child Lennikov would be forced to leave behind, it was an emotional saga.

But perhaps the most interesting tidbit was how the fugitive evaded justice for so long: In 2009, he wandered into Vancouver’s First Lutheran Church and claimed sanctuary, which the Canadian Border Services Agency didn’t challenge for six years, until Lennikov decided he no longer feared his fate in Russia and left his sacred hideout of his own accord.

It’s a tale that should leave all of us scratching out heads, bemused by the fact that religious sanctuary is apparently still a thing in the modern, highly secular world.

Most of us were probably introduced to sanctuary as a Christian concept via Victor Hugo’s 1831 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (or, more realistically, the 1996 Disney adaptation of the book), a tale set in France in 1482. It is, to us, a thoroughly medieval institution. But sanctuary is actually even more ancient than that, going all the way back to pre-Christian traditions in classical Greece and Rome, in which certain areas were so holy that those who entered them had protection. The Romans thought at times that these institutions were being abused by criminals, but never managed to break the practice, allowing it to seep into the Old Testament, which suggested that church altars ought to be a safe space for those who’d committed accidental murders and called for the establishment of sanctuary cities. This basic plea evolved by 300 C.E. into a Christian doctrine, whereby if a criminal got a body part into a church, onto its edifice, or upon its grounds, then so long as he or she had not committed sacrilege, some clemency was granted.

Medieval European states, legitimized by the powerful Christian church of the era, wound up writing sanctuary into their legal codes. Some states, like the Germans, compelled criminals to renounce sanctuary if officials agreed to forego the death penalty, while the church itself in Catholic canon law promoted sanctuary as an often-temporary solution to allow cooler heads to prevail in the name of due process in violent or hot button crimes. But the institution reached its zenith in England, where by the 700s criminals could avoid punishment by paying a fine to a church to attain sanctuary or, barring payment, use the church as an avenue to become a religious servant for life or flee into exile. By the 1200s, the state had expressly chartered sanctuary sites. Sometimes kings pushed on this tradition, but up to 1,000 criminals a year achieved clemency.

Yet as the Protestant Reformation spread through Europe in the 16th century, local rulers started pushing harder on sanctuary, which robbed them of the chance to control their legal system in total. Even the diehard pro-sanctuary English started chipping away at regulations on who could seek sanctuary until in 1623 King James I abolished the institution for criminal offenses, and in 1697 William III did the same for civil offenses, setting a precedent for other Western nations. This means that America, and many other modern nations, were born with no tradition of officially sanctioned sanctuary protocols. It took a few hundred years more, but by 1983, the Catholic Church even abandoned sanctuary, deferring to modern legal systems for due process.


Despite the slow decline of sanctuary, a few churches still continue to offer this protection in theory into the modern day. Anglican, Lutheran and United church leadership actually issues regulations for local churches to use in deciding whom to grant protection to, as dozens of criminals of one stripe or another still flock to them seeking protection every year. In the 1800s, most of these “criminals” were slaves or abolitionists. Then in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were conscientious objectors fleeing the draft for the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, hundreds of North American churches banded together to form a united sanctuary movement, seeking to protect Central American refugees, rejected by the United States government, from political violence in the region. Most recently in America, the 2006 case of Elvira Arellano, an illegal Mexican immigrant trying to avoid deportation and subsequent separation from her seven-year-old son, an American citizen by birth, drew attention back to the self-proclaimed right of sanctuary, which has since been used by dozens of churches and illegals to draw attention to American immigration policies and the very human plight of those caught up in the system.

In Canada, too, churches today use sanctuary mainly to offer stopgap protection to raise political awareness of deportation cases that local congregations think highlight serious flaws or negative trends in national immigration policies. In 2009, when Lennikov sought asylum, two other individuals sought sanctuary: Gankhuyag Bumuutseren, a Mongolian who spied on Chinese dissidents in the U.S. for Beijing, who sought refuge in Toronto, and Rodney Watson, an Iraqi war deserter from America avoiding extradition back home for trial in a Vancouver church. But Canadian officials have recorded dozens of sanctuary claims across the nation in the past few decades—and church officials claim that criminals come seeking aid on a weekly basis.

American, Canadian, and other authorities often don’t act on these cases because of the bad P.R. that would be involved in raiding a church. On a case-by-case basis, they decide whether to violate this tacit allowance, usually acting only when the sanctuary seeker is violent or dangerous, in their estimation, to national security or the local community. (The Canada Border Services Agency’ enshrined this principle in a new 2010 policy, which requires a review process to approve an officer’s judgment of a criminal’s threat before he or she acts against a church’s sanctuary claims. They maintain that if they ever see abuse of the practice, then they will clamp down harder, though.) Yet given church scrutiny of the background of asylum applicants, that’s rarely an issue.

That leaves us with a de facto system of sanctuary in place in many nations, fueled by the continued moral position and rigorous vetting of churches. But it’s not a blanket institution that you can use if you get into trouble. Churches use this system as a political tool, raising awareness around what they see as injustices.

So unless you’ve got a strong case that you’ve been wrongfully accused of a crime, or that you’re part of a controversial political witch-hunt or the victim of a disputed policy of which you know a local church disapproves, don’t go seeking sanctuary, because it probably won’t be granted. But if you are embroiled in a very political scandal, like espionage or illegal immigration, then by all means go for the sanctuary route—if you don’t mind endless publicity and living in one room forever on very limited local charity.

http://modernnotion.com/church-sanctuary/