ICE at the courthouse door

Luciano Sandoval, a 41-year-old farmworker living in the United States without legal status, went to the Kern County Courthouse in Bakersfield last month to pay a traffic ticket. A few days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained him as he was going to work and began deportation proceedings. Sandoval, who has six American-born daughters, said the agents told him he was targeted after paying a fine for driving without a license — a red flag for possible undocumented status.

The Sandoval case is one of a number of incidents in recent months, from California to Wisconsin, in which ICE agents have arrested or picked up the trail at courthouses of people living in the U.S. illegally. At first, such enforcement measures might seem like creative police work, monitoring the nexus between people and the legal system to find those don’t have the right to be in the country.

But in fact, the practice raises troubling public safety issues. If immigrants without legal status can’t feel safe going to a courthouse, they will be discouraged from cooperating with law enforcement generally — from sharing information about crimes with the police, from testifying in trials, from paying their fines, from seeking the legal protections to which they are entitled. The policy could set the stage for tragedy if domestic abuse victims fear deportation more than they fear their abusers, and opt not to go to court for a restraining order.

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The American Civil Liberties Union and immigration rights groups have asked ICE to rule courthouses off-limits in its enforcement efforts. The American Bar Assn. opposes the arrests of undocumented crime victims, though it has not taken a position on the broader issue of tracking them at courthouses. ICE says it doesn’t want to deter people from using the courts, but that there also are no plans to revise the policy nationally.

This page has often criticized Congress for its failure to address the nation’s illegal immigration problem, but this is an issue ICE could easily remedy with a simple memo from the director’s office. As a humane gesture, ICE already has a sound policy of not approaching people at such “sensitive locations” as schools, hospitals and houses of worship, or at funerals, weddings and public demonstrations. Notably absent from that list are courthouses. It’s a glaring omission.