ICE arrest in Ogden as police officer looks on sparks intense City Council discussion

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Ogden Mayor Ben Nadolski said discussion is afoot on tweaking police policy related to interactions with immigration authorities.
He spoke at an Ogden City Council meeting a week after an ICE agent detained an immigrant as an Ogden officer looked on.
Last week's incident has sparked heated debate and numerous residents and City Council members also addressed the issue.

OGDEN — A week after the detention of an immigrant in Ogden that sparked controversy stemming from the presence of a police officer during the encounter, Mayor Ben Nadolski said a policy is in the works dealing with police interactions with federal immigration authorities.

"I want to tell the community here tonight the same thing I've told everybody who has reached out, that I have listened to your input and I will take it under consideration," he said at Tuesday's Ogden City Council meeting. A policy, he continued, "is something that we have been talking about for a while and have actually put work into already before this event took place."

He didn't elaborate, and his comments were interrupted by an audience member who spoke out and pressed for a timeline for creation of the policy, causing a brief recess in the meeting in a bid to restore order. Indeed, ahead of his comments, numerous community members addressed the City Council on the matter during the meeting, some pressing for a clearer policy governing police interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and some criticizing the federal immigration crackdown.

Trust with police "requires predictability and transparency," said Kim Haslam. "We need clear guidelines defining exactly how OPD is to interact with ICE in these situations, what officers are prohibited from doing and what happens when an immigration operation intersects with a call for police services."

Others criticized police for what they perceived to be the cooperation of the Ogden officer involved in the Aug. 25 incident with the ICE agent, who was tracking a man from Venezuela who federal authorities say was in the country illegally. The incident was caught on video by a member of the Ogden City Council who happened to be present, Kevin Lundell, and the Ogden Police Department later released footage of the encounter from the officer's body camera.

"Now we don't know if we can trust them because they cooperated with ICE when they were called for help, and that break in trust is going to be so hard to build back," said Emily Fox.

The controversial arrest of an immigrant last week by an ICE agent as an Ogden officer looked on sparked intense discussion at an Ogden City Council meeting on Tuesday. In the photo, Emily Fox addresses the council. (Photo: Tim Vandenack, KSL)

In the incident last week, an ICE 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 of acting as their go-between. The ICE officer ultimately detained the Venezuelan man as the Ogden officer stood by and as Lundell recorded the encounter on his mobile phone camera.

While city officials took no formal action at Tuesday's meeting, the turn of events sparked plenty of discussion among City Council members after the public sounded off during the meeting's public comment section. Despite the flareup as Nadolski spoke, the meeting folded largely without major disruptions.

"This isn't about politics. This is about people. And in this case, it's about a wife who's separated from her husband and a daughter who won't be tucked in tonight by her dad," said Lundell, referencing the detained immigrant. He unsuccessfully pressed earlier this year for a city policy spelling out the city's intent not to enter into a formal cooperative agreement with ICE.

Councilwoman Flor Lopez said she doesn't trust ICE. "I understand why families are afraid of ICE, and I will never dismiss those fears," she said.

However, that doesn't mean she distrusts Ogden police, she said, also pushing back against apparent criticism she's faced from some that she isn't sufficiently critical of local law enforcement on the immigration issue.

"You can criticize me. You can tell me I'm wrong. That's democracy," said Lopez, who's of Mexican descent. "But bullying, intimidation and calling me a traitor and question(ing) my loyalty to the Latino community will not determine who I am."

Councilwoman Alicia Washington called for a "full review" of the Aug. 25 incident and a review of pertinent policies with an eye to possibly adjusting them.

Councilman Ken Richey defended the Ogden officer's handling of the situation and noted the difficulty in crafting policy to cover every potential scenario a police officer may experience.

In an incident like the one that unfolded on Aug. 25, with an officer present by happenstance during an immigration enforcement action, the police official "could stay on the scene and do the best he can to try and de-escalate and maintain site security, and that's what I saw him do," Richey said. The officer, he continued, "was not involved in the ICE enforcement."

Councilman Ken Graf blasted the ongoing immigration crackdown as "a cavalcade of violations of our constitutional rights and disregard for our humanity." Like Richey, though, he questioned the notion of trying to craft police policy to cover every possible sort of encounter officers might experience. "I think we can try, but it isn't going to be perfect," he said.

Darick Fisher, president of the Weber Fraternal Order of Police and a sergeant in the Ogden Police Department, also addressed the City Council, offering a law enforcement perspective.

"Our officers should be able to make lawful, responsible decisions based on the circumstances in front of them, not how those decisions may later be characterized politically," Fisher said. "If another law enforcement agency needs assistance or a situation needs to be stabilized, officers should be able to protect the public without first wondering whether the decision will become the next political controversy."

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.