The Honolulu, Maui and Kauaʻi police departments told Civil Beat late last year that they did not have partnership agreements with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, best known as ICE — the spearhead of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

That turns out not to be true. All three counties have agreements with Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI — which is in fact a unit of ICE — as does the Big Island.

In trying to defend previous statements, a Maui spokesperson again misspoke, saying that ICE is a component of Homeland Security Investigations, “which is a federal executive department.”

“The Maui Police Department does not have any MOUs with ICE,” said spokesperson Alana Pico, referring to memorandums of understanding.  “We do have an MOU with HSI.”

In Kauaʻi, police department spokesperson Tiana Victorino doublechecked, then said the previous statement had been a mistake.

Honolulu Police Department spokesperson Michelle Yu responded in an email: “While the two belong to the same department, their focuses are different. ICE focuses on immigration enforcement and border security, and HSI’s focus is on transnational crime, including drug and human trafficking, gang violence and financial crimes. HPD has MOUs with HSI, but not with ICE.”

Immigrants and their advocates have raised alarms about agreements with Homeland Security Investigations along with other federal law enforcement agencies as Trump’s crackdown on immigrants rolls on, saying any of them could be a path toward local police joining in federal immigration enforcement actions.  

It’s not clear yet whether that’s taking place more often since the White House changed hands, said Jack Chin, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. But, he said, the law allows local police departments to voluntarily join such operations if the U.S. Department of Justice asks them to, which, he said, is likely to happen.

“I think we’re going to see more and more requests, and more voluntary, on-their-own-initiative cooperation,” Chin said, “unless there’s some prohibition.”

‘That’s The Door’

Public knowledge about local police departments’ connections to ICE started to shift midway through the Hawaiʻi County Council’s governmental operations and external affairs committee’s March 18 meeting, where the Big Island police department’s longstanding agreements with Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI were a focus of concern. 

Council member James Hustace asked Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz: “Can you speak to why we seem to be the only county that has a … MOU?”

Moszkowicz responded that he actually believed Honolulu did have such an arrangement and would check with Maui and Kauaʻi as well. Minutes later he said he had just received a text message confirming that Maui and Kauaʻi did. In the following week, the Honolulu Police Department confirmed that it, too, had a signed MOU.

And so a fact not widely known became clear: Police departments in all four Hawaiʻi counties have agreements with Homeland Security Investigations, which has been increasingly active in immigration raids since Trump took office. 

“Previously HSI was appropriately separated from the immigration removal side, but now it appears that all of (the Department of Homeland Security), and most of the federal government, has been instructed to do enforcement,” Rick Su, a University of North Carolina School of Law professor who specializes in immigration and the criminal justice system, wrote in an email.

Hawaiʻi and Maui’s agreements “formalize the embedding of HSI Special Agents” in the respective police departments. Kauaʻi and Honolulu counties declined to release copies of their MOUs so precise details were not available. In Kauaʻi, Victorino said the agreement can only be released by the federal government. In Honolulu, Yu said the department had not determined whether it could release it. 

Maui council member Tamara Paltin said she did not know about the Maui Police Department’s agreement with Homeland Security until Civil Beat asked about it. Last year, she said, the Maui council let die a bill that would have approved an MOU allowing HSI to designate Maui officers to act as customs officers.

“We were working with stakeholders and did not come to a place we felt comfortable to … support it,” Paltin said in an email. Speaking about the existing MOU, which Maui Police Chief John Pelletier signed on Nov. 20, Paltin said she was going to look into but “I’m not sure that if this MOU went before the council it would’ve passed.”

The Big Island had been in the spotlight since early March, when its police department asked the council to approve a resolution allowing the mayor to sign agreements between the department and Homeland Security and the FBI that had been in place for at least a decade. Under the arrangement, two federal agents are embedded in the department, and five Hawaiʻi police officers are designated as Homeland Security task force officers.

Moszkowicz has said the department has no interest in participating in federal immigration enforcement operations. The partnership helps Big Island police better strike back against crimes such as drug and human trafficking and gang activity that cross county borders, he said. 

But as HSI agents step up involvement in immigration enforcement nationwide, including in Hawaiʻi, immigrants and their advocates say the MOUs are a means to the federal government’s end goal.

“That’s the door” to further participation, said Neribel Chardon, senior staff attorney for The Legal Clinic, referring to the MOUs. The Honolulu-based nonprofit has offered legal, education and advocacy services to immigrants since the first Trump administration.

The federal government needs local police to join its efforts, Chardon said. 

“They don’t have the staff to chase every single person,” she said. “But the more agreements they have … and the more agencies that they can cooperate with, of course that will make their scope of action broader.”

Chardon said she had not known until learning from Civil Beat that counties other than Hawaiʻi had agreements with Homeland Security. She said she suspects, based on the accounts of clients detained by ICE, that local police may already be at least tangentially involved in enforcing immigration laws.

Her clients, she said, have begun to report that ICE showed up at their home or job to detain them after they were arrested for motor vehicle-related violations such as driving without a license or driving under the influence. That suggests, Chardon said, that police might be checking immigration status and reporting undocumented immigrants to ICE.

“I haven’t confirmed that,” Chardon said, “but the circumstantial evidence is not good.”

Asked for comment, Honolulu police spokesperson Yu emailed a single sentence — “HPD is in agreement with the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s policy on immigration enforcement” — and a link to the association’s immigration policy fact sheet.

The six-page fact sheet, which includes a section on building trust with immigrant communities, says the association “strongly opposes” being mandated to play “a significant role in the enforcement of federal immigration law.” It also “strongly opposes state or local laws that prohibit state and local police agencies from communicating with or supporting federal agencies in addressing criminal activity in the community.”

Controversial Resolution Approved

The Hawaiʻi County Council on Wednesday concluded its wide-ranging monthlong discussion about the MOUs by allowing its mayor to approve the existing agreements. It had to formalize what had been a standard renewal process after being advised that all agreements with the federal government need council approval.

But the council’s vote was close – 5-4 in favor. And despite Moszkowicz’s insistence that the MOU did not give the department authority to engage in immigration enforcement, the council added an amendment to the resolution to try to guarantee that. The amendment said nothing in its agreements with the FBI, Homeland Security or ICE “authorize(s) Hawaiʻi Police Department officers or other personnel to take any enforcement action against administrative violations of federal immigration law.”

The Hawaiʻi Police Department helped craft the amendment, and advocates for the immigrant community said they will press the other counties’ police departments to make similar commitments.

“Given all we are currently seeing with the federal administration running roughshod over due process and detaining and deporting people because of their political beliefs who have lawful status, every opportunity we have to clarify our role at the county level we should take,” said Liza Ryan Gill, co-coordinator of the Hawaiʻi Coalition for Immigrant Rights, who opposed the Big Island resolution.

As with Hawaiʻi County, police officials in the state’s other three counties said the MOUs they have with Homeland Security Investigations do not give their officers the ability to take part in immigration raids.

“We just sat down and broke bread with them multiple times and talked through tough issues.”  

Aparna Patrie, Roots Reborn

Maui police spokesperson Pico said in an emailed statement: “The Maui Police Department does not enforce immigration operations. Our priority is to uphold and enforce the law equally, regardless of an individual’s immigration status.” 

And in Honolulu, Police Chief Joe Logan acknowledged growing public interest in the matter at a March 19 Honolulu Police Commission meeting.

“We’re not participating in HSI or (Immigration and Naturalization Services) operations regarding enforcement of administrative non-criminal immigration rules,” Logan told the commission, which is responsible for reviewing the department’s rules and policies.

Kauaʻi police spokesperson Victorino said in an email: “The MOU restricts (the Kauaʻi Police Department) from participating in immigration enforcement operations.” She said because the MOU does not give the department authority to enforce administrative violations of immigration law, the department does not have its own policy against that.

“I’ve had conversations with our federal partners as it relates to immigration enforcement,” Logan said, “and we fully understand each other’s roles and responsibilities and we’re continuing to operate as we were eight years ago when the first administration of the Trump era was on.”

None of the four Hawaiʻi counties have what are known as 287(g) agreements in place. Those exist in several hundred jurisdictions nationwide and allow local law enforcement officers to be deputized to perform some federal immigration officers’ duties, such as questioning immigrants in custody about their immigration status, and arresting and turning them over to ICE.

Still, Esther Yoo, director of the Refugee & Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Richardson School of Law, said the HSI agreements are a slippery slope, especially if they do not contain explicit provisions.

“If you don’t have really good guidelines or policies, then there’s a lot of confusion about ‘What are we supposed to be doing to cooperate with ICE or HSI, or what are we not allowed to do?’” said Yoo, who also learned from Civil Beat that all four counties had agreements with Homeland Security Investigations.

“So then it just becomes up to every line officer to interpret for himself or herself what they’re supposed to be doing in order to follow this agreement,” Yoo said. “That’s one of the big dangers of these agreements, that they’re very vaguely worded and don’t provide a lot of guidance to line officers.”

Referring to the amendment to the Hawaiʻi County resolution, Yoo said, “To the extent that language tries to acknowledge or respond to the community’s concerns about the MOUs with HSI, it’s a step in the right direction.”

Still, Yoo cautioned, “The devil is always in the details and the implementation.” 

Are Officers Already Involved?

Worries about individual officers crossing unclear policy boundaries were illustrated, Yoo said, in a March 6 raid in South Kona led by Homeland Security agents in which a mother and her three children were arrested.

In that case, Moszkowicz previously told the council, the police department supplied a conference room for the family to use while they waited to be taken to Oʻahu, instead of having them wait in a van for hours.

However, Yoo said a Hawaiʻi police officer denied requests from the mother’s supporters that she be allowed to call her attorney at Yoo’s legal clinic.

Usually, Yoo said, the person wishing to speak to their attorney has to invoke that right themself, and it’s not clear in this case if that happened. However, for supporters to make that request on her behalf, “is a reasonable request.”

Assistant Hawaiʻi County Police Chief Sherry Bird said Wednesday she could not comment on the allegation.

“I am not aware of any such situation,” she said. “None was reported to us.”

The mother and children were quickly deported, Yoo said, adding that training will be critical to maintaining a firm line between what police can do or not do when it comes to immigration enforcement.

“Otherwise it does really fall onto the line police officer to try to figure that out for themselves,” she said.

Asked by council member Michelle Galimba at Wednesday’s Big Island council meeting in Hilo whether task force officers go through special training, Moszkowicz said they are given “some training from the federal partner” but did not specify what kind. 

Asked Thursday whether Hawaiʻi police officers assigned to the Homeland Security task force are trained in what the agreements do and don’t authorize, Bird said she couldn’t speak to that question because “I don’t know exactly what is discussed with regards to immigration law and violations.”

On Maui, where Homeland Security agents were reported to have conducted operations last weekend in which several people were arrested, advocates said they started talking to local police about a year ago about their concerns over the department’s agreement with HSI. 

Those talks were productive, said Aparna Patrie, an attorney with Roots Reborn, an immigrant advocacy organization. 

“We just sat down and broke bread with them multiple times and talked through tough issues,” she said. 

“We’ll see what happens or mandates we get or dictates, but I’m not interested in going places where we don’t have to go.”

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi

Since those conversations began, she said, the Maui department authored a policy that allows crime victims who cooperate with police to apply for a visa. Also, she said, police officials came to a Roots Reborn “Know Your Rights” workshop and said “our job is to protect you just like anybody else.” 

Patrie later added in an email: “Law enforcement serves a valuable role in our society at large and in our community in particular, but if our community loses trust in law enforcement, that hurts everyone. We are grateful that MPD has made a concerted effort to build trust with our community. If we lose that trust, then at the end of the day everyone is less safe.”

Up To Local Agencies

Experts on immigration law and policing said it is up to local departments whether they join in immigration enforcement — unless state law or other restrictions are in place prohibiting it.

“It entirely depends on what they are willing to do,” said Su, the University of North Carolina School of Law professor. “So if they want to hold the line, there is probably good insulation even if HSI redirects their focus” to immigration enforcement.

But Su added that local police can become “entangled without their knowing” if Homeland Security has a less apparent immigration-related agenda.

Prohibitions against enforcing administrative violations of immigration law might be sidestepped if, for example, “gang membership and accusations of criminal (acts) are thrown around without proof or due process,” Su said. That’s because alleged violations could rise from administrative to criminal in nature, which local police do have the authority to enforce.

Chin, the UC Davis law professor, said he was “slightly dubious” about whether the amendment the Hawaiʻi council added to its resolution was enough of a guardrail against Big Island police participating in enforcement of administrative violations of federal immigration law.

“First, many immigration violations are criminal as opposed to administrative,” such as entering the country without approval, Chin said. “Second, federal law grants (local officers) the right to investigate and report immigration information and these sorts of task force agreements facilitate that.” 

“The larger question is the immigration enforcement restriction imposed by Hawai’i law and agency policy — if there is a firm prohibition backed by sanctions, maybe that would be effective,” he said.

Two bills proposed by Hawai‘i state lawmakers that would have limited or prohibited local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal immigration authorities went nowhere in the current legislative session.

There are between 41,000 and 51,000 undocumented immigrants in Hawaiʻi, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Migration Policy Institute, roughly half from the Philippines.

In the state’s population center on Oʻahu, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said that his concern is with people committing serious crimes, not undocumented immigrants in general.

“A lot of those people are people who came here and let visas lapse and (they’ve) taken jobs, and are working on neighbor islands and living quiet lives and haven’t been problems,” Blangiardi said in a March 26 interview with Civil Beat’s editorial board. “We’ll see what happens or mandates we get or dictates, but I’m not interested in going places where we don’t have to go. We have all we can do just to keep things safe here right now.”