The American Civil Liberties Union and officials of South Tucson signed a comprehensive settlement this week overhauling the South Tucson Police Department’s policies with respect to immigration enforcement, bringing to a close a racial profiling complaint filed last year on behalf of student Alex Valenzuela.
Valenzuela was detained by police and transferred to Border Patrol last summer without having been accused of a crime under state or local law.
Alex was a passenger in a parked car on July 13, 2013, when South Tucson police officers detained him in order to question him about his citizenship. The ACLU filed a notice of claim under state law on his behalf in November 2013, the first legal challenge to Section 2(B) of SB 1070 since the law went into effect.
Settlement discussions followed, and South Tucson agreed to the following policy provisions, according to the ACLU:
•South Tucson and all of its agents, employees and officers acknowledge that unauthorized presence in the United States is not a crime.
•Officers are prohibited from relying on race, ethnicity, lack of English fluency and/or speaking with an accent, possession of foreign documentation, lack of identification or dress as a reason to believe that a person is unlawfully present in the United States.
•Officers are prohibited from prolonging stops, detentions or arrests in order to determine immigration status.
•Officers shall not question students, victims or witnesses of crime, or people filing police behavior complaints, about their immigration status.
•Officers will not transport a person to a federal immigration facility (including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection facilities) for the purpose of investigating the person’s immigration status.
•At the beginning of each vehicle stop, officers are required to contact dispatch and state the reason for the stop.
•Officers, when practicable, must check with a supervisor before making an immigration-related inquiry to confirm such questioning is justified.
•All officers must participate in continuing education on bias-free policing and the limits of officers’ immigration enforcement authority.
South Tucson’s must now meet a data collection requirement. The new policy requires that officers collect, and supervisors aggregate monthly, data about pedestrian and vehicle stops that result in a citation or arrest, including the perceived race of individuals stopped. Officers must document extra information about every immigration-related inquiry, including the reason for making the inquiry.
The ACLU filed a similar notice of claim against the Tucson Police Department in early April. Tucson officials have until early June to respond before a lawsuit can be filed.