Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Shrader took on federal immigration authorities in an open letter Friday, defending his jail against claims by Department of Homeland Security officials that the county hasn’t been fully cooperative when it comes to holding foreign-born inmates.
He said the agency’s recently started weekly , which names local jails and jurisdictions that Immigration and Customs Enforcement says have not cooperated with detainer requests, is “replete with errors” and that Jefferson County “cooperates with ICE to the full extent of the law.”
Four jurisdictions in Colorado . Shrader said the report blamed Jefferson County for declining three retainer request for inmates that weren’t even housed in the county at the time of the request.
“Every day we provide ICE a list of foreign-born individuals in our custody and we notify ICE when a foreign-born individual is booked into our jail,” Shrader wrote. “We provide qualifying inmates’ names, dates of birth, places of birth, physical descriptions, charges, and arrest and booking dates and times. We also enter detainee fingerprints into the Colorado Bureau of Investigation database, which is shared with the FBI and ultimately ICE.”
He said he is barred by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment from holding inmates, including foreign-born inmates, past their release dates without a warrant signed by a judge. ICE holds sent to Jefferson County have been signed by an immigration official, Shrader said, not a judge.
“In 2016, we reported to ICE that 1,109 foreign-born inmates were booked into the Jefferson County Detention Facility,” he wrote. “ICE indicated interest in 94 of those individuals, but did not present a single judicially authorized warrant on any of them. Repeatedly, the courts have ruled that local sheriffs have no authority to hold arrestees without a judicially approved warrant.”
Shrader wrote that Jefferson County was successfully sued by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2009 for holding an inmate beyond his release date at ICE’s request.
The sheriff began his letter by emphatically declaring that despite his disagreement with ICE assessments of the county’s holding practices, Jefferson County is not a sanctuary county. President Donald Trump has said he
Earlier this week, Aurora’s elected officials . One in 5 residents living there are foreign-born.
