The Baton Rouge Metro Council accepted a $1.16 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Wednesday to renovate a space in Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) headquarters to better facilitate cooperation on a gang task force with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
BRPD works with HSI to crack down on gang-like organizations. Baton Rouge Police Chief TJ Morse said the agreement won’t change anything operationally since the department already works with HSI and other federal agencies, but allows HSI to house agents in Baton Rouge.
The measure passed with 7 votes in favor of it. Two council members, Jen Racca and Cleve Dunn, were absent. Despite accepting the grant, the council will have to sign off on various steps of the construction process before the renovation is complete.
Dissent came from some of the Democratic council members who wanted to defer the motion to give BRPD a chance to talk with community members, but Morse said if the council pushed the motion further back, it ran the risk of federal officials going to another agency that didn’t need to go through them.
HSI operates under ICE’s direction, investigating international drug and arms smuggling and other various crimes. But community members are worried that the agreement could open doors for future cooperation with ICE and its Enforcement and Removal Operations team, which handles immigration enforcement. They also worry that information collected by HSI and BRPD could be handed over to ERO because of the partnership. Morse said that with or without the partnership, BRPD records are public.
Morse tried to quell those fears by reminding the public that the agreement does not mean BRPD will be working with the immigration enforcement part of ICE, describing HSI as a separate branch entirely.
“I use the example of the Secret Service,” Morse said. “You have the people that protect the president, and you have the people that go after fake money. What we’re looking at is the task force that specifically goes after gangs, guns and violent crime.”
He also said BRPD doesn’t work with ICE, and doesn’t have a 287g agreement with the agency, which would allow BRPD officers to do immigration enforcement on its behalf. Morse said when ICE reached out to BRPD about signing on as other law enforcement agencies have around the state, he declined.
“We don’t have anything here for y’all,” Morse said he told ICE. “The immigrants are not the ones doing violent crime in Baton Rouge.”
Morse, however, added he can’t do anything to stop ICE from coming to Baton Rouge. He added on a personal note that his wife is Latina, and he delivered food to people who were afraid to leave their homes during the immigration enforcement operation in the parish late last year.
For Morse, the agreement is solely about cracking down on violent crime in Baton Rouge, highlighting for the metro council that of the 34 homicides in Baton Rouge this year, most of them appeared to be retaliatory killings.
Community members, however, are still skeptical of this solution.
“I think everybody needs to ask themselves: ‘Are they trying to find criminals or are they criminalizing our community?” Marcela Hernandez said. “[Federal agents] come here, they don’t know our community. They don’t know our neighbors. And they don’t know the effort we have put into building a well-established community.”
These fears speak to a larger sense of mistrust and fear in the immigrant community. She said people who are victims of crimes are afraid to call the police.
“My community is already terrified, so this adds another layer of distrust to the system,” Hernandez said.
A lot of people brought up this sense of fear to the council, including Morse.
“I know we have a lot of unreported armed robberies …, construction workers carrying around cash, and they’re easy targets for people,” Morse said. “And they don’t want to call the police because they are afraid of deportation. We gotta build those bridges and break down those walls by having those open and honest conversations.”
