In 2012, former South Carolina governor and current United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley praised the state’s Immigration Enforcement Unit (IEU) police force for helping stomp out “immigrant flesh peddlers, gangsters and drug runners,” The Post and Courier reports. But in reality, the secretive police force, which regularly works side-by-side with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has “jailed dozens of landscapers, maids and restaurant workers … working-class Hispanics who used bogus paperwork and identification cards to get hired for jobs.”
“In fact,” the Post and Courier continues, “roughly 100 of the 123 cases reviewed by the newspaper involved fraudulent documentation of some sort. Just nine cases had any mention of gangs, drugs or human trafficking.” The state has shoveled nearly $5 million into this force, created by Haley and state lawmakers during Republicans’ tired accusations that former President Barack Obama wasn’t tough enough on immigration, despite his record deportations.
Yet, despite the millions in taxpayer dollars going to this force—“believed to be the only team of its kind in the nation”—it has “resisted outside attempts to examine its activities, insisting that releasing information about its cases and methods would compromise investigations. It took the Post and Courier five months to obtain arrest warrants and basic incident reports from the unit.”
It shouldn’t even be up to states to pull shenanigans like this, because immigration enforcement is the job of the federal government, and the federal government is already spending billions funding ICE. “It sounds to me like it’s just raw politics,” said Bill Nettles, “the former U.S. attorney who challenged the state law that created the unit,” the Post and Courier continues. “There is a whole agency out there that does this,” he continued. “It’s called ICE. It’s baffling to me why we need this duplicative law enforcement.”
In one 2016 case, IEU swept in on a landscaper named Israel Garcia as he was pulling into a gas station. “They swarmed me, guns drawn,” he said. “I wasn’t hiding. I wasn’t doing nothing wrong.” When “officers scanned Garcia’s fingerprints and realized they had the wrong man. They released him with a ticket for driving under suspension.” It turned out that “the entire operation, according to a police report, resulted from a complaint lodged by Garcia’s former boss of 15 years. The man contacted authorities after Garcia left to start a competing landscaping company.”
“Personally I think it’s a huge waste of time,” said former U.S. attorney and chief of the State Law Enforcement Division, Reggie Lloyd. “We have way more important stuff to do than looking at the guy who works in the chicken plant. It was never going to do anything to make the state safer. That’s a federal issue not a state issue.”