Durham: Co-optation by Immigration Enforcement

The city of Durham does not have a policy addressing detainers or other interactions with federal immigration authorities, and North Carolina has an anti-sanctuary city law. Primarily for these reasons, our methodology found Durham to have Significant Room for Improvement in how they address federal immigration authorities’ attempts to co-opt their local law enforcement capacities.

We recognize that Durham does not administer a jail, which is under the jurisdiction of Durham County (see the county’s detainer policy, which states that it does not comply with detainer requests unless there is a court order or arrest warrant). According to the methodology for our analysis of all jurisdictions, we still answered the questions that ask about policies in relation to the jail for the cities that do not control a jail, such as Durham. Those answers reflect city policies and thus do not reflect county policies governing jail staff. We decided that these questions are still relevant because police departments have the power to detain and often hold a person for some time. In fact, other cities without jurisdiction over a jail in our analysis do indeed have policies related to law enforcement interaction with federal immigraiton authorities. It is our view that even a city without a jail can have the most ironclad protection of its immigrant residents if it enshrines policy limiting police interactions with immigraiton enforcement.

In consideration of feedback from local partners in Durham, we have removed our evaluation of their policies related to immigration authorities because of a disagreement about how certain policies should factor into our scoring methodology.