Anti-Immigration hysteria in Kent County: Part I

Within the last week there has been a great deal of hysteria over the murder of Ruby Garcia, a young woman who was murdered by a man who was in a relationship with the victim. The death of Ruby Garcia is a tragedy, but her death has nothing to do with the killer’s immigration status.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump was in Grand Rapids on Friday and he certainly used the opportunity to demonize immigrants and refer to them as predators. This anti-immigrant sentiment and jingoistic ideology that undocumented immigrants are destroying the US is not only patently absurd, it is simply not true. Numerous elected officials have weighed in on this issue, including members of Congress that represent West Michigan, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party and several Republican members of the Kent County Commission. There are essentially two separate immigration-themed issues at hand, both the death of Ruby Garcia and the recent designation of Kent County as a “sanctuary county” by a national anti-immigration organization. We’ll deal with the later in today’s post.

On Thursday, MLive ran a story with the headline, Kent County leaders deny ‘sanctuary’ claims after Mexican citizen charged with murder. This story is centered around the fact that the Center for Immigration Studies, a far right immigration think tank, gave Kent County a designation as a sanctuary county. The Center for Immigration Studies created a sanctuary cities map, which includes Kent County, with the following information shown here on the upper right, when you click on the yellow square over Kent County on the map. There is no blog post on the site that gives this designation to Kent County, so I’m not sure why the Republican members of the Kent County Commission responded to the claim.

However, the Republican members of the Kent County Commission did respond to the designation of by a sanctuary county with the following comments in the MLive article: 

“As individual county commissioners, we want to set the record straight. Kent County is not a sanctuary county,” the Republican county commissioners wrote. “As the elected representatives for our respective districts, we will never support any policy that encourages illegal immigrants to make their home here.”

As someone who has directly been involved in making the area a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants since 1986, when my community house was a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, and as someone who has been working with Movimiento Cosecha, an undocumented immigrant-led movement, the GOP members of the Kent County Commission are telling the truth. The truth being, that the GOP commissioners have actively opposed any welcoming policies for undocumented immigrants since Cosecha began working on a campaign to end the County’s contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2018.

When Movimiento Cosecha and GR Rapid Response to ICE began organizing a campaign to end the ICE contract with the Kent County Sheriff’s Department, in June of 2018, they discovered immediately that the Kent County Commissioners were not interested in ending the contract. And to be clear, both the Republican and Democrats on the County Commission refused to end the ICE contract. In fact, the ICE contract with the Kent County Sheriff’s Department was ended by ICE in 2019, primarily because of all the negative attention that the campaign generated. All of this history can be read in a GRIID post from 2021, after some Democrats wanted to claim (falsely) that they ended the contract.

The MLive article did, however, provide some insight into the ongoing relationship between ICE and the Kent County Sheriff’s office, who also publicly refuted the designation of Kent County as a sanctuary city. The MLive article provides some background on the County’s policy of holding undocumented immigrants at the Kent County Jail until ICE decided what to do with them. When the Kent County Sheriff decided to end the policy to no longer honor federal immigration holds without an arrest warrant signed by a judge. This when the Center for Immigration Studies gave the county the sanctuary designation, but Kent County, as the Sheriff acknowledged, never ended their cooperation with ICE, and still hasn’t to this day. You can read the letter from the GOP Kent County Commissioners and the letter from the Kent County Sheriff’s office, both of which were included on a post by WOODTV8. What is instructive about the Kent County Sheriff’s letter, is the fact that they provided the number of people they turned over to ICE in 2023 (26) and the number they have turned over to ICE since the beginning of 2024 (10). 

The irony of this story is that the far right think tank, the Center for Immigration Studies, essentially embraces the same ideological framework that the Kent County Republicans embrace, which doesn’t tolerate undocumented immigrants living in this area.

In Part II, GRIID will discuss the response to the immigration hysteria coming from members of Congress that represent West Michigan.