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Peter Mancina, "On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State" (NYU Press, 2025)
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Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read, and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers, and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
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Steven Pimpire
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Steven Pimpire
Phew.
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Peter Mancino
So good, so good, so good.
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Marshall Poe
Score.
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Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Steven Pimpire
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Steven Pimpire, host of the Public Policy Channel, and we are joined today by Peter Mancino, who is the author, author of on the side of Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State from New York University Press. Peter, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
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Peter Mancino
Thank you so much for having me, Stephen.
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Steven Pimpire
I wonder if we might start by asking you to tell folks a little bit about who you are and what brought you to this book.
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Peter Mancino
Absolutely. I'm a visiting scholar at Rutgers Law School in the center for Immigrant justice. And I'm also an anthropologist by training. My work is anthropology work, doing fieldwork, working with historical documents. And I've been studying sanctuary city policies and how local governments implement them for about 15 years. I also studied immigration and have a lot of my work has been spending day in and day out with people, immigrants, with police officers, with local government officials in sanctuary cities, in city hall, with nonprofit organizations that often are the ones who are advocating for sanctuary policies. So I've studied for 15 years the life of these policies and not just the paper text of the policies.
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Steven Pimpire
So I wonder if we might start by rooting this conversation in time. We are recording on December 9, 2025, and if I can, I want to read you a headline and just the first paragraph from a story that was published today by a site called Documented, which focuses on immigration issues in New York. The headline is New Yorkers Ral to Strengthen Sanctuary Protections. And the article begins as follows. On Monday, immigration advocates testified before members of the City Council recounting harms to immigrants. New Yorkers followed following what they alleged was collaboration between New York City agencies and immigration agents. One immigrant who was referenced was a recently arrived mother who had requested therapy services and was instead flagged to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by the city's Child Child Welfare Authority. Another was a father who was thrown into immigration detention after the New York Police Department and ICE officers stormed his family's apartment, guns drawn, according to testimony. So given that where we are at the moment, I wonder if you might do a little bit of table setting for us, tell us a little bit about ICE as an organization, what a sanctuary city is, and what I think most people think of when they think of what it means to be a sanctuary city. And then we will dive into the specifics of your book and look at your investigation into the relationship between those federal and local agencies.
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Peter Mancino
Absolutely. So ICE now with more and more news coming out about the immigration enforcement actions that are happening around the country in big cities, in sanctuary cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and soon to be returning back to New York City, according to border czar Tom Homan.
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Steven Pimpire
I can tell you that they're already here.
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Peter Mancino
Yeah. So ICE is the main, the primary deporter, the people who go and capture people throughout the interior of the country. They've been around since the reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security in the early 2000s after the September 11th terrorist attack in New York City. And they are the people that have been most closely working with local law enforcement throughout the country to identify people in the daily interactions that Immigrants have with local police in the streets, during traffic stops, during routine tickets, ticketing on the streets, when there's a call to the local police. Oftentimes local police will get requests from this agency, ICE to assist them in finding people, detaining people in local jails and then turning them over to ice. Because it's really easier for ICE to go find people when they're already in a carceral setting in a local jail than were ICE to to go and use intelligence sources to then find people in daily set ICE to have found people. So they're also way more local police officers than there are ICE officers in this country. And so ICE is now they've since for the past 20 years, they've been looking to local police officers to help them find people, detain people and deport people. And this is why ICE calls local police officers by and large force multipliers, people who are auxiliary forces. They can act as partners in the street who are not themselves ICE agents, but who can act in an auxiliary, auxiliary supportive manner to ice. So they can collect information from them, from local people that they interact with in the street. They can then send that to ICE through various channels. And then ICE can either go find them at a local jail or they can go find them at their home or their workplace. Because the information that local police give them 287 agreements, which are more formal contracts between local police officers and the federal government so that they're trained as federal officers to act legally as federal officers to go out and search for people and detain them and arrest them for immigration purposes and not on the basis of local crimes. In sanctuary cities, they take what has seemed like a very opposite approach to that. So in sanctuary cities, the local agencies are given policies by the city council or by a department head. And those policies typically try to get local officers or local government officials to effectively only do the work and the mission of that local department and not to get involved in immigration enforcement. So instead of enforcing federal immigration laws that are civil immigration laws, and there are immigration laws that are some criminal immigration laws, typically sanctuary policies try to limit the ability of local agents of enforcing civil immigration law. Federal law, which is by and large the purview of the federal government alone, now local agencies can choose to participate if they voluntarily want to, but they're not required to enforce federal civil immigration law. So given that local states, which have control over their policing bodies, by and large, local law enforcement are state, state, they're given their authority through the state, but also through localities they have the legal right to say we choose to not voluntarily cooperate. And so they'll pass laws that say under certain circumstances we will cooperate and under certain circumstances we will not cooperate. So they prohibit this cooperation. But then they choose based on their own prerogatives at the local level, which people they want to help ICE find and assist. And typically those policies will say people who have serious and violent crimes on their rap sheets, certain people who have, they might have been booked into a local jail for one of these crimes, or they might be convicted of one of these crimes. Each locality makes a choice as to who they want to target. And for that reason, what ends up happening is in sanctuary jurisdictions, while it seems like a very pro immigrant policy to pass, what ends up happening is local law enforcement often will take advantage of these exceptions in these sanctuary policies which say we will support ICE for targeting these particular people. And they end up transferring and helping deport a lot of people in sanctuary jurisdictions for this reason. I don't think of them really as restrictionist policies, but rather as immigration enforcement cooperation policies with an immigrant friendly face. So they do facilitate local agents involuntarily cooperating in something they don't need to cooperate in immigration enforcement. And so when they write these policies in this way, they have to make the procedures very explicit for local agents as to how to help ICE when these exceptions apply. So it in a way institutes immigration enforcement practice at the local level. When the public and the media is getting this barrage of news saying sanctuary policies are restrictionists, Tom Holman is saying they're getting in the way of ice, the doj, the dhs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of justice, they're saying, no, these people are getting in the way of ICE and we should sue them. Actually, the research on the ground that I've used, public records from police agencies, body cameras, internal records, really shows that local police in sanctuary cities do a lot of cooperating. And they do that not because they're necessarily violence violating sanctuary policies, but because they're actually enacting sanctuary policies. They're actually enacting public safety policing where they can show up at an ICE arrest. They won't actually do the arrest themselves, but they'll park their cars so that the individual can't get away. They'll direct traffic, they'll get in the way of local pedestrians who are immigration advocates trying to tell immigrants about their rights, that they cannot go and proceed towards the immigration scene. So in effect, they're helping ICE make the arrest more efficient to get the person in their cars and get them away. And we're seeing a lot of this also in the news now, where the nypd, like you mentioned before, will be cooperating in some way that's actually not in violation of their sanctuary policy, but is in accord with their sanctuary policy. They're there doing public safety policing, protecting the public from potential violence. They might be protecting police officers from a crowd of people. They might be doing crowd control. And those are things that might be allowed by their sanctuary policy. Nonetheless, what it gets turned into is immigration enforcement assistance. So in this way, again, we see that sanctuary policies from a different angle, have thought about differently from the ground. They're actually in many ways pro immigration enforcement policies, but ideologically, symbolically, they're pro immigrant. They stand for immigrants.
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Steven Pimpire
They.
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Peter Mancino
They tell people that they're there to make people safer, to foster trust between the police. When you. When you talk to a lot of immigrants who have. Have faced situations like this, they see the police. What they see is police violating them. They're not actually violating the policies. They're violating the spirit of the policy.
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Peter Mancino
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Steven Pimpire
So that's sort of a perfect segue, because it's. From your perspective, is that in fact the spirit and the intent of the policy, or has the public been duped all along? How do you make sense of that duplicate disconnect between what I think even relatively well informed citizens think of if they inhabit a sanctuary city and what you document as actual practice?
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Peter Mancino
Yeah, I think it comes down to the fact that there's these very durable relationships that have been built over decades between federal agents and local police, and the role of the police as public safety officers makes it so that sanctuary policy can't actually be enforced in a way that disallows cooperation with ice. So there's this aspirational component to sanctuary policies, and that's why politicians champion them. That's why advocates have worked to draft them, why lawyers have drafted them, because, by and large, we feel that policy should be implemented as written. And if we write into it these restrictions that have values from the sanctuary movement, of protecting people who are vulnerable, who are fleeing violence and wars in Central America and other countries, that's the source of these policies in the 80s. We think that police can just implement them and local officials can implement them as written. The fact is that because of the role of the police and how they are supposed to be doing public safety policing, it actually makes it really impossible for them to not cooperate in any manner, shape or form, because they still are in charge of doing this crowd control work, this public safety side of things. So I don't think that it was necessarily the disconnect there comes from the fact that we have this desire for writing laws that really allow us to reform the world in the way that we want to see it. And so we put these values into these laws and they actually cannot be implemented by police in the role that we've given police in society. And a lot of people, they don't realize that because they don't see it on the ground from the perspective of police. And so police are put in a situation where they're given this. They're given a directive to do something on behalf of immigrants, and in practice, they can't. So, I mean, they can do it up to a certain extent, but then there is always going to be this procedural wall which puts them in a situation where they cannot actually just walk away from a violent situation or a crowd control situation without violating their own mission as police officers.
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Steven Pimpire
So, I mean, this is an unfair question, but I will ask it anyway. It's sort of, well, what do we do with this? As a political scientist, my instinctive response is to say, well, the problem is in the policy itself or the institutions and in the way they function. I assume that as an anthropologist, you're more inclined to look at those institutions, the culture of those institutions, how they develop over time. An even harder fix, perhaps, than where I might look, given the, the, the deep kind of knowledge that you have about these practices. And we should say that your book focuses on New Jersey rather than New York, which we've been talking about a little bit. How do you think about how we might make the actual practice better conform to at least the face that the public policy presents to people?
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Peter Mancino
Yes, I think that there are a lot of things that we can do, even within places that are sanctuary cities, to continue to support immigrants at a policy level, at a governmental, bureaucratic level, there's a lot of agencies which are not actually given the mission of doing that kind of public safety policing that often brings them to ICE events and that take over, in effect, their capacities for the purpose of immigration enforcement in a lot of local agencies and public health departments and hospitals in social services. These are agencies which don't have to have that direct confrontation, you could say, or that direct collaboration with ice, local hospitals, if they're private spaces, they can implement these policies without being obstructionist, because they are private spaces. They can demand that officers stay out. And those public health officials are not going to be called by ICE to come to an ICE arrest and provide public health services, for instance. So there are policy realms which this policy does work in. Law enforcement is not one of them. But on the other side of it, you also have community involvement. You have people who are getting involved in protecting people, in assisting people who have family members who have been left behind in the wake of a raid. For instance, there's been a lot of community organizing in all of the sanctuary cities that have been targeted, like Chicago, where they were alerting community members to ICE presence in a neighborhood and then bringing people out of their homes to directly talk to ICE and watch what ICE doing, document what ICE is doing. So policy is just one instrument for the transformation of society. And so you have to recognize its limits, you have to recognize its benefits, how it does still help in certain ways, and you also have to recognize the consequences of it. And so I would say that within the realm of policing, it would take a dramatic change in the role of police in society to make it possible for police officers to actually not cooperate. And you have to have other structures, other institutions, be those governmental or community based, that are doing the work of maintaining safe communities in our cities. So it would take a dramatic change to then need to make that possible. But in the meantime, I think that promoting sanctuary policies and other agencies is still a possibility, and community organizing around assisting immigrants is the best way to go.
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Steven Pimpire
So the bulk of the work that you did, Peter, for this book, was undertaken prior to the second Trump administration. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about whether you are continuing to examine the operations of this particular interplay between federal and local institutions, or any additional observations you might have about the moment that we inhabit now.
- [20:44]
Peter Mancino
Yeah, the thing about it is that what's new about now during Trump 2.0 are these massive citywide sieges that were not happening. The rest of the stuff that's been happening, the bulk of immigration enforcement, actually, where ICE continues to still get most of the people it was through the same mechanisms as the Biden administration, through local jails or the Obama administration. Obama and Biden and the previous Bush administration, they were all in this. They put this machine in place where it was automated effectively for fingerprints to be sent from local jails. Anytime somebody was booked in a local jail, it was automatically sent to the FBI and then from the FBI to ICE to do a background check on a person. ICE could then send a request to a local jail to ask that local jail about a person they suspected was undocumented. They didn't know for sure. The person might not be known, a known person in their databases, but they would communicate to the local officials to ask them to hold that person, and then they would come to that local jail, maybe interview them, and then pick them up to arrest them and put them in deportation proceedings. That still is the mechanism, the primary mechanism that the federal government uses to capture people. And so whether it's the, the Republicans or the Democrats, that is still the predominant way that deportation and deportation focused arrests happen in the country. So what's new about it is this new siege approach. And from my perspective, it is, by and large, for winning campaigns. It's, it's, you know, it's to rile up a base that wants to see punishment upon cities that are not, that are openly and from my perspective, more symbolically trying to defy the federal government. But as my book shows, actually these same cities are still doing a lot of deportation assistance. So it really is a theater, an arena that is causing a lot of damage. It has a real effect. They are deporting a lot of people. So it's not just a symbolic PR stunt made in some kind of a, you know, a studio or something. It is real and it is affecting people's lives and it's terrifying everybody. And so, so that aspect of the siege like mentality is, is new at a citywide level. It's always, of course, the siege like mentality has always existed in the form of raids, in the form of local people's going into local people's homes without their consent and attacking their families effectively. So that siege like feeling has always been there and it's always been widespread. And this siege upon an entire city is different. And it is going into suburban neighborhoods where people who are not, don't have immigrant family members are part of it. Now it's coming to their doorstep. They're feeling it and getting involved now, which is a new thing. And secondly, the expansion of 287 program, the 287 program, but it's expanded from 135 agencies throughout the country to about 1200 agencies throughout the country that are police. I think about half of those, most of the new contracts are police agencies and sheriff's agencies, which are able to now go out into the field, you could say, and find people in the course of their daily activities. In terms of my work, I think that the use of body cameras and body camera videos, which is a primary part of my book showing these kinds of policing events in sanctuary jurisdictions is going to continue to be an area that I would focus on. I have a lot of videos from San Francisco, for instance, which is a totally different sanctuary city scenario than New Jersey, and I'll be continuing to look at that. But also ICE officers now have body camera videos and that is going to be a new territory where people will be able to, if they can get their hands on them, if they can actually make the FOIA requests to get the ones that they want to see, which is a hurdle and a challenge for people, I think, especially with ICE in the past, since the first Trump administration, really attempting to obscure the ability of the public to get a hold of documents released publicly. But that is another realm where I think that that scholars, researchers will be able to use their skills and analyze immigration control in this new administration and see what's actually happening on the ground from the perspective even of ICE officers chests from these body camera videos that they're carrying around with them.
- [25:35]
Steven Pimpire
You are listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network and we have been speaking with Peter Manchina about his new book on the side of ice, Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State from New York University Press. Peter, thank you very much for joining us today. Much appreciated.
- [25:51]
Peter Mancino
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Peter Mancino
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- [26:26]
Marshall Poe
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Peter Mancino
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