Ogden official seeks clearer guidelines for police working with ICE after incident with immigrant

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

Ogden City Council member Kevin Lundell seeks clearer guidelines for police on dealing with immigrants after an incident earlier this week.
In last Tuesday's encounter, an Ogden officer was unexpectedly called on to serve as middleman between an ICE agent and an immigrant the agent planned to detain.
The incident highlights debate about police cooperation with immigration enforcement.

OGDEN — An Ogden City Council member filmed part of an encounter this week between a police officer, an immigration agent and an immigrant, and he's now calling for clearer guidelines on police involvement in immigration enforcement actions.

The Ogden police officer "didn't have clear enough guidelines about what he was supposed to do and how he was supposed to interact with the ICE officer," said the City Council member, Kevin Lundell, who happened upon the encounter near his home and filmed part of it. "We need better policy. ... The community's been asking for that, we've been asking for that and haven't gotten that clear direction."

In the incident last Tuesday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was pursuing an immigrant on an Ogden street when the Ogden officer got caught in the middle. Both the ICE agent and the man, identified by federal officials as an immigrant in the country illegally from Venezuela, asked the officer for assistance, putting him in the position as acting as their go-between.

In a statement, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, stressed the importance of cooperation with local law enforcement.

"Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country," the DHS said. "We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement works together with us, including 40,000 arrests in Florida and a two-week operation in West Virginia that resulted in the arrest of over 650 illegal aliens."

Lundell, though, thinks the cooperation went too far, underscoring an ongoing debate in the city and beyond amid the ongoing federal immigration crackdown about the level of collaboration local law enforcement should have with ICE agents. Some like Lundell worry too close collaboration can make immigrants fearful of reaching out to local police for help lest they fall on the radar of immigration officials, while others stress the importance of working together as a matter of enforcing the law and seeking out criminal immigrants.

The man ultimately detained "had actually reached out to the police officer because he felt like he was being followed, which he was, by a man in a black SUV," Lundell said in a Facebook post a day after the encounter, referencing the ICE agent's unmarked vehicle. "He reached out to his neighborhood police officer for help, and instead he got detained. That's a breach of community trust."

Some law enforcement agencies, including several Utah sheriff's departments, have formal accords with ICE, known as 287(g) agreements, to cooperate in identifying and detaining immigrants in the country illegally, particularly those involved in crimes. The Ogden Police Department, like the vast majority of Utah police departments, has not inked an accord, and Police Chief Jake Sube has previously said he has no plans to enter into such an agreement.

Ogden police on Friday declined comment on the matter, but the department stressed in a social media post on Tuesday that police officials didn't initiate the stop of the immigrant or carry out the arrest. The Ogden officer involved had been on the scene responding to an unrelated report of a dangerous dog.

"The officer's involvement was limited to maintaining safety and attempting to de-escalate an unusual and potentially escalating interaction," reads Tuesday's post, accompanied by footage of the encounter from the officer's body-camera. The ICE agent had asked the officer to stop the immigrant's auto, which he didn't do, while the immigrant had expressed concern to the officer about being followed by the agent.

Lundell, though, says the end result of the interaction between the officer and the agent, whether intended or not, was formulation of "a plan for the person to be detained."

Immigrant advocates critical of how the encounter unfolded are calling on the public to speak out on the matter at next Tuesday's Ogden City Council meeting, and Lundell is expecting debate. "I'm sure we're going to get some good conversation happening at the council meeting," he said.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Venezuelan immigrant at the center of the incident had been the target of Tuesday's operation. The agency says he illegally entered the country near Eagle Pass, Texas, on July 8, 2022, and "was later released by the Biden administration," referencing then-President Joe Biden.

"He will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings and will receive due process," the DHS said.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.