The Fairfax County Sheriff's Office in Virginia has announced it’s terminating an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in May and will no longer hold inmates wanted by the federal agency past their release date.
FOX5DC is reporting at least one area school board member is not happy with the change.
“They had to enact and take action to break the relationship with the federal government and for the life of me I can't understand, not only for the adult population, but for the children in our schools – girls who are potentially subject to sex trafficking issues,” Fairfax County School Board member Elizabeth Schultz said. “Everything that we are trying to educate and protect children about, this seems to fly in the face of.”
The sheriff's office will soon no longer honor requests to detain individuals with a detention order unless there is a corresponding criminal detainer issued by a court.
"I am pleased with Sheriff Stacey Kincaid's decision to take this step," said Fairfax County Board of Supervisors chairman Sharon Bulova in a news release. "The Sheriff and her Deputies operate the County jail and are not federal immigration officials."
Schultz disagrees.
“That's an inexplicable, right now, position to hold that I really do think needs to come clean in terms of the thought process that went behind that and the potential risks,” she tells FOX5. “Here we are in a pattern up and down the Eastern Seaboard that goes from here all the way up to Long Island of an increase in MS-13 and other gang activity, and you have people cheering on breaking the relationship with the federal government and potentially releasing people who have federal detention orders under ICE. I don't understand it.”
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