When Los Angeles police arrested Jose Juarez-Basilio in March on suspicion of threatening his ex-wife’s new romantic partner, he was released after spending less than 24 hours in jail.
The short stay behind bars was all it took to trigger his deportation roughly three months later.
Even though no charges were filed against Juarez-Basilio, the seemingly routine run-in with police put the 35-year-old undocumented Mexican man on the radar of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which tracked him down and removed him from the country.
For months, L.A. Police Department leaders have gone out of their way to reassure the public that the department has strict limits on cooperating with immigration officials.
But the case of Juarez-Basilio and several dozen others identified in federal court records show how L.A. police are nevertheless enabling ICE to find new targets by routinely sharing fingerprints with federal law enforcement.
The basic question for the LAPD of what it means to cooperate with immigration authorities has taken on fresh urgency amid the Trump White House’s continued crackdown across the region. Hundreds of people have been detained in raids by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents, triggering protests and an ongoing court battle over the use of so-called “roving patrols” to indiscriminately round up suspects.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has frequently pointed to a longstanding policy known as Special Order 40, which bars officers from stopping a person for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status. The policy, implemented in 1979, seeks to assure the city’s growing immigrant community that they can come forward as witnesses or victims of crimes without fear of deportation.
But given how complicated the country’s immigration landscape has grown in the half century since, it’s time that the LAPD took steps beyond the policy, Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez said.
“I thought Special Order 40 was the right thing to do at that time,” he said in a recent interview. “Do I think it meets the moment right now? Of course not.”
Of particular concern, he said, is the LAPD’s handling of data collected from automated license plate readers, devices deployed around the city that track the movements of vehicles. Police officials have insisted that the information is not shared with ICE. But other local law enforcement agencies have flouted their own similar rules in the past, raising concerns that the LAPD may not keep its word.
“If there is even the slightest possibility that the LAPD is sharing any data with ICE,” then the city needs to take a look at such loopholes, Soto-Martinez said.
In the wake of recent federal immigration raids, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has frequently pointed to a longstanding policy known as Special Order 40, which bars officers from stopping a person for the sole purpose of determining their immigration status.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
This month, Mayor Karen Bass ordered the creation of a working group to examine — and possibly update — the LAPD’s immigration policy. At a news conference, McDonnell said he believed that Special Order 40 still achieved its original mission of building public trust.
“We can’t be effective if people are not willing to come forward and report crimes that they’re a victim of or a witness to,” he said.
But the chief reiterated that his officers would not interfere with federal law enforcement operations — even if they violate a recent court injunction that temporarily blocked federal agents from racial profiling. If Angelenos had concerns, he said, they could file complaints with the feds or pursue other legal remedies.
In a city whose population is more than half Latino, that stance is wearing thin with critics who claim that the department is tacitly supporting ICE by providing crowd control when raids draw angry protesters.
“You can’t go through something like this for a month and expect the public to trust any law enforcement that participates in this,” said longtime civil rights attorney Connie Rice. “The immigrant community is asking: ‘Aren’t you supposed to be protecting us?’”
Juarez-Basilio’s case shows how the LAPD indirectly enables ICE to conduct deportations even while abiding by Special Order 40 and officially staying out of immigration enforcement.
Records show he was taken into custody March 23 on suspicion of making criminal threats. Court filings describe an incident in which he was accused of holding an unknown object under his T-shirt while menacing his ex’s new partner.
When Juarez-Basilio was booked into a San Fernando Valley jail and fingerprinted, it pinged the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, an ICE facility in Orange County.
Court records show an ICE agent investigated Juarez-Basilio and learned that he had been deported three times previously and illegally reentered the country, which is a federal crime — not just a violation of civil immigration laws.
Juarez-Basilio posted bond and was released before ICE agents could arrest him. The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to file charges, citing a lack of evidence.
ICE agents were waiting to take him into custody after a hearing in federal court last month.
He was one of at least 30 people arrested by the LAPD in recent months who were subsequently detained by immigration agents for illegal re-entry after deportation, according to a review of criminal court filings.
In Juarez-Basilio’s case and several others, charging documents make no mention of past criminal behavior apart from their border crossings. In a handful of cases, the people arrested had prior convictions for violent felonies.
In several others, the LAPD alerted federal authorities to felony arrests, as in the case of two United Kingdom citizens who were arrested for possessing guns after being pulled over in Hollywood in late June for failing to halt at a stop sign in a black Rolls-Royce. Both men had overstayed their visas, court records show.
Police in some states, mostly in the South, have for years assisted ICE by handing over jail inmates accused of immigration violations. Trump has threatened to cut off federal funding to cities such as L.A. that refuse total cooperation on immigration enforcement.
Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor who once worked for the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, said cities that defy Trump face a choice. Refusing to back down risks losing federal funds. It also imperils cooperation with agencies such as Homeland Security Investigations, which sometimes partners with local law enforcement to take down drug cartels, prevent terrorism and investigate other major crimes.
Such ties are only expected to grow tighter with L.A. set to host the 2028 Olympic Games.
But working closely with the feds in this moment risks damaging hard-earned trust in vulnerable immigrant communities where people already are wary of cooperating with police, Lopez said.
“You cannot keep a city safe if a large swath of its population doesn’t trust the police,” she said.
Earlier this year, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a prominent watchdog group, sent a letter to the city’s Police Commission warning that information collected by LAPD officers during routine pedestrian and traffic stops is flowing into massive databases — where they can be mined by immigration authorities to aid in tracking down a wanted person.
“Immigration enforcement can’t happen without a vast network of local police and prosecutors who serve as the federal government’s eyes and ears on the ground, ensuring that any person booked into custody for any arrest — no matter how trivial and no matter if ultimately false or thrown out in court — is immediately put on ICE’s radar,” the letter said.
Since it was enacted nearly 50 years ago, Special Order 40 has faced repeated attacks both from factions within the LAPD as well as anti-immigration activists who have challenged it on constitutional and practical grounds, saying it gives a free pass to criminals in the country illegally.
Stephen Downing, a former LAPD deputy chief who helped draft Special Order 40, said that it was intended as more of a “law enforcement tool” to address the city’s encroaching gang violence than a means “really to protect immigrants from immigration.”
“It recognized that these people were in the community, they were part of the community, and we needed them for crime control. We needed them to report crime,” said Downing. “It wasn’t so altruistic as it may have seemed at the time.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
