The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
As masked federal officers raise fears by raiding workplaces and courthouses and detaining elected officials who object, Ohio’s Geauga County is fighting to keep secret its contract to jail immigrants those officers arrest.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio last month sued Geauga County when the county failed to provide a copy of its contract to jail people detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The ACLU is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to issue a writ mandating that Geauga County, which is just east of Cleveland, turn over the contract.
The ACLU contends that such a contract between two public entities is a public document. For its part, the county is arguing that only ICE can release it.
In a court filing Tuesday, Geauga County lawyers said “they have not denied that they possess these records at the time of this filing, and that they have asserted that the requested records are prohibited by disclosure under federal law, and therefore exempted from disclosure under the Ohio Public Records Act, specifically, RC 149.43(A)(1)(v).”
The provision cited under the Ohio public records law says that state officials can’t release “records the release of which is prohibited by state or federal law.”
However, Geauga County didn’t cite any part of state or federal law saying that ICE detention contracts are exempt from release.
As a general matter, government documents can usually only be withheld or redacted if they contain sensitive personal information, business secrets, would compromise a law-enforcement investigation or if their disclosure would endanger public safety or national security.
None of the nine exemptions the Department of Homeland Security says it has from federal open records law appears to apply to the ICE contracts.
Geauga County can’t simply hide behind federal immigration officials to avoid its obligations under Ohio open-records law, said Amy Gilbert, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU.
“Tellingly, Geauga doesn’t dispute that it is withholding public records from disclosure,” she said in an email. “The county’s supposed reliance on ICE to tell it what to do does not relieve the county of this statutory duty. As a clear legal matter, their duty is governed by Ohio law.”
Meanwhile, the lawfulness of ICE’s conduct has been called into question elsewhere in Ohio — and across the country.
ICE officers — some of them masked — on Tuesday handcuffed New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander when he asked to see the warrant they had to arrest a migrant who had appeared for a hearing at immigration court.
The tactic in those and other courthouses has deprived migrants of a traditional safe space to engage with the legal system, critics say.
Federal agents last week took U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla to the ground and handcuffed him as he tried to question Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference. Noem, who has struggled to explain fundamental legal protections for individuals, oversees ICE.
In Butler County in Southwestern Ohio, supporters of Emerson Colindres had been demonstrating outside the jail against his ICE detention. Born in Honduras, Colindres, 19, had been living on Cincinnati’s West Side since he was eight.
On June 4, the recent high school graduate and soccer standout was arrested during a routine ICE check-in. CityBeat on Tuesday reported that ICE had moved Colindres to a private jail in Louisiana — even though his attorneys a day earlier had filed a motion to stop the deportation.
In a written statement, Ohio Immigrant Alliance founder Lynn Tramonte said that if the goal of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation program was to make people feel safer, it’s not working.
“No one benefits when masked ICE agents arrest immigrants at their immigration court hearings, while they are following the process,” she said. “When ICE tricks a high school soccer star into showing up for an appointment, and arrests him on the spot. That doesn’t help anyone at all.”
Tramonte added, “Emerson Colindres has a U visa waiting for him. One branch of the federal government is processing it, while another branch of the same government is trying to deport him.”
In Mahoning County, Sheriff Jerry Greene is one of the officials who offered jail space to ICE earlier this year to help house detainees.
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