In 2016, Volusia County, Florida, voted for two seemingly contradictory candidates: anti-immigrant Donald Trump, and Michael Chitwood, “a sheriff bent on restoring trust within the immigrant community”:
"Where does crime come from? Crime comes from when you marginalize a race or a religion and you knock them out of mainstream society," said Sheriff Michael Chitwood, a political independent who was sworn in the same month as the president. "When I first got elected, I went to every church and asked the pastors to trust me and said there's a different way we're going to do things."
For Volusia County, that “different way” has been “a new anti-profiling policy and ... regular outreach at churches and schools, trying to convince the community that working with the police won't end with a deportation”:
Even though Volusia stopped honoring detainer requests in 2014, Chitwood is quick to argue that his county is not a sanctuary — his department communicates with ICE, it just doesn't do their work for them, he said, noting that the county receives few ICE detainer requests.
"If ICE tells me that I have somebody wanted for murder, we're going full force to get him. But if you're telling me, I've got to go get somebody who overstayed their visa? I’m not trained or equipped and I don't have the manpower to do that," Chitwood said.
But overall, it’s about trust. When undocumented immigrant residents trust local law enforcement enough to report crime without fear of being reported for their legal status, communities become safer for all. That’s why, contrary to Trump’s ongoing lies, so-called “sanctuary cities” are actually safer.
Sheriff Chitwood’s efforts have roots in economic fact—“$30 to $60 million [of the county's economy] comes from the farm fields in Pierson,” he told CNN. “Without immigrant or itinerant labor, those farms cease to exist”—but also in life lessons:
Chitwood, who publicly opposed Florida's anti-sanctuary city bill in an op-ed, said he learned the hard way what mistrust looks like in his community.
"We had a homicide here when I was police chief in Daytona," Chitwood recalled. "We screwed up."
Called to investigate domestic violence, he said, police were told that the victim was undocumented and officers asked her about her immigration status.
"She shuts down," Chitwood said, recalling what he saw on the responding officer's body-cam footage. "We come back eight hours later when her youngest child wakes up, and finds her throat slit by the husband. When you watch that video, you say if the officers had not been so overbearing about her immigration status … she might be alive today."
Already, Trump and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s war on so-called “sanctuary cities” is having devastating effects, with the Los Angeles Times reporting last year that fear of Trump’s mass deportation dragnet has led to a plummeting in the number of Latinos reporting domestic abuse to local law enforcement and courts:
In the first six months of 2017, reports of domestic violence have declined among Latino residents in some of California’s largest cities, a retreat that crisis professionals say is driven by a fear that interacting with police or entering a courthouse could make immigrants easy targets for deportation.
In Los Angeles, Latinos reported 3.5% fewer instances of spousal abuse in the first six months of the year compared with 2016, while reporting among non-Latino victims was virtually unchanged, records show. That pattern extends beyond Los Angeles to cities such as San Francisco and San Diego, which recorded even steeper declines of 18% and 13%, respectively.
It’s Trump’s anti-immigrant policies—not immigrants themselves—that are making our communities less safe and making the jobs of law enforcement more difficult. But, while immigrant “workers interviewed through a translator said they all feared law enforcement,” they said they “could cautiously trust the Galarza brothers”— Daniel, Roy and Billy Galarza, three Volusia County deputies who happen to be sons born to undocumented farm workers:
Because [dad] Pantaleon, 65, had worked as a military policeman in Mexico, Roy said, he didn't fear law enforcement as much as others in Pierson's immigrant community did, but he always told his children to stay out of trouble and focus on getting out of the fields.
"My dad was like, just don't cut fern," Roy said. "It was over and over again, 'I’m doing this for you.'"
Pantaleon beams with pride when his sons visit in their squad cars. His seven children have all left the fields for better jobs — one sister is an assistant principal, another works doing accounting for one of the fern distributors — and his grandkids are thinking big, too. Roy’s eldest son, 15, wants to be a doctor.
"Look where we're at," Roy said of himself and his siblings. "He's thrilled."