Nassau County will lock up 3,000 illegal immigrants this year, thanks to a special pact with the feds that has county cops teaming up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, officials said.
The agreement calls for ICE to rent up to 50 cells at the East Meadow jail at $195 a night — and county officials said Tuesday that they will have held thousands of migrants in the US illegally by the end of the year.
“Every community, especially the Hispanic American community in Nassau County, supports our cooperation with ICE so that their neighborhoods can be safe and their schools free from being overcrowded,” Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said in a statement Tuesday.
Blakeman announced the deal earlier this year, and said it not only opened up local jail space for illegal immigrants, it also called for 10 county cops to be designated to train with the feds and gives them unprecedented authority to detain migrants without warrants.
“Nassau County is the first county in America to have a fully comprehensive agreement with ICE under the 287(g) program, and will continue to work with ICE to keep our county safe from unvetted illegal immigrants who commit crimes such as poisoning our young people with fentanyl,” Blakeman said then.
The 10 detectives have since been trained by ICE, but have not been called on or deployed by ICE to assist in any of their operations, county officials said Tuesday.
Nonetheless, Nassau officials said in July that the joint effort yielded quick results, and said 1,400 immigrants had been held at that point — with the figure up to 2,188 detainees to date, and rising.
So far, an average of 274 immigrants have been locked up every month — with June the busiest month so far with 437 immigrants detained, followed by 380 in April and 363 in August, the county said.
Among the migrants locked up was Santos Banegas Reyes, a 42-year-old Honduran immigrant who had been deported three times but continued to cross the US border illegally, according to ICE.
Reyes died in Nassau County custody last month, with the federal agency reporting that he likely died from “liver failure complicated by alcoholism.”
Meanwhile, the New York Civil Liberties Union is suing Nassau and the county PD and police Commissioner Patrick Ryder over their deal with ICE.
The NYCLU claims it violates state law, which prohibits local police from arresting those only accused of civil immigration offenses.
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