Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced that the relationship between Boston’s Police Department and ICE is being reviewed. This comes days after he took away Boston Police Sergeant Detective Gregory Gallagher’s Task Force Officer (TFO) role as liaison to ICE. The move to strip away Sgt. Det. Gallagher’s TFO status came about after pressure mounted on the heels of a report by Boston radio station WBUR, that revealed a series of “regular correspondence” between Boston PD and ICE that seem to fly in the face of Mayor Walsh’s public statements on restricting the city’s police cooperation with ICE to violent crimes and suspected felonies.
Mayor Walsh told reporters that "My responsibility as mayor and the police department's responsibility is to make sure people are safe, and there's a role there to play in making sure that we share and get information, really, from federal immigration officials, just like we work with the New York Police Department, we work with the State Police." Walsh says he wants to make sure that the liaison role is only being used for “serious criminals,” and not exploited to find out people’s immigration status.
At the end of October, WBUR reported on the more than 800 pages of Boston Police Department email correspondence they had received—the result of a public records request made by the station. WBUR highlighted emails to and from Sgt. Det. Gallagher and ICE agents, exposing a comfortable, loosey-goosey information sharing. Legally, while TFOs are trained in federal law, “they are not authorized to enforce administrative violations of immigration law.” Things like lapsed visas and other low-level infractions are not in their purview, but for some reason Sgt. Det. Gallagher was fine handing over private citizen information to ICE for what seemed to be clear fishing expeditions. One email highlighted includes this ask of Gallagher:
"I do not need prints. She has multiple Boston Larceny cases. She bailed out I would like to see if her parents names are located on any police reports. She appears to be a F-1 Student Overstay."
Sgt. Det. Gallagher was happy to oblige. Emails like this show the Boston TFO to be very interested in helping suss out questions of immigration status, which is not the role he is supposed to be playing in searching to find violent felons. The relationship also included Gallagher sounding like he wants to be an ICE agent more than a police officer.
According to documents obtained by WBUR, Gallagher has offered to cover U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) special agent shifts. He also occasionally receives requests for identity confirmation from federal immigration offices as far away as Texas.
Department of Homeland Security’s Boston office has come under the threat of litigation for its handling of immigrants seeking legal avenues of citizenship, and the city itself has tried to balance what its citizens want with the more fascistic elements of law enforcement located within their ranks. A review of the expectations, and the moral and legal boundaries, is something every city could benefit from.