Posted on 07/12/19
| News Source: The Hill
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) moved this week to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials' access to the city's police databases following news of possible raids in Chicago and other major U.S. cities.
Lightfoot said Wedneday that the city has taken steps to ensure that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) will not cooperate with ICE ahead of sweeps that are expected to begin Sunday.
"They will not team up with ICE to detain any resident. We have also cut off ICE access from any CPD databases and that will remain permanent," she said, adding that she had spoken with the agency's leadership to object to the planned raids.
"Chicago is and will always be a welcoming city that will never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart," she said.
Chicago police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told The Chicago Tribune that ICE agents will not be able to access the city's Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting, or CLEAR, database, but other federal agencies will still have access. ICE would be restricted from seeing the department's incident narratives, arrest information, crime mapping systems and other databases.
“All other federal agencies still have access to these systems, as sharing this information is crucial to active criminal investigations in which we are partnering with federal agencies along with intelligence sharing functions that are vital to national homeland security functions," he told the newspaper in a statement.
Some in Chicago have expressed concerns that ICE could still access the city's data through those federal agencies that use incident and arrest data collected by police. The paper reported that it is not clear whether these other federal agencies will share the data with ICE.