Sheriff Swank says it’s safe for anyone to call 911. How he undercut his message | Opinion

It’s a laudable goal to reassure Pierce County residents that they can call the police without fear of deportation. That’s what Sheriff Keith Swank tried to do when he told The News Tribune this week that his department doesn’t run the information of crime victims to see if they have legal status.

It’s essential that anyone who needs to call 911, especially for their own safety or the safety of others, should be able to do that without hesitation or fear. (And it should be said that 911 doesn’t lead directly to the Sheriff’s Office. It’s a dispatch service that’s connected with first responders throughout the region.)

But the sheriff’s policy isn’t the only thing that matters when it comes to making people feel confident when calling law enforcement. Perceptions are important, too. So it’s odd that Swank would make his comments the same month he traveled to Washington, D.C., where he briefly met with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Swank wants to focus on criminals, and that’s good. But to make residents comfortable calling the Sheriff’s Office, what Swank really needs to do is publicly say he supports due process for undocumented immigrants. As of now, he’s aligned himself with an immigration policy that says the opposite.

Bondi is helping defend and carry out the Trump administration’s deportation agenda. That’s the agenda that, in just 100 days, has racked up court challenges, raised constitutional questions and unleashed chaos on the lives of immigrants and visitors. It’s an agenda that argues that non-citizens aren’t owed due process in the United States.

Swank wasn’t in D.C. to meet with Bondi. He was traveling with a group of Washington sheriffs to show support for Adams County Sheriff Dale Wagner, who is fighting for the ability to assist federal officials with immigration enforcement. Wagner is facing a lawsuit from Washington Attorney General Nick Brown for allegedly holding people in custody based solely on their immigration status and aiding immigration enforcement officials in other ways that violate state law.

Still, the photo op with the U.S. Attorney General sends a very specific message about where Swank is aligned on immigration.

Nationally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has deported people in its custody to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned with no chance to defend themselves from claims that they belong to gangs. Multiple federal judges have questioned the legal basis of those and other recent deportations.

In the Tacoma region, University of Washington international students saw their legal status terminated with no notification and little explanation. In one case, immigration officials based the termination on an unproven allegation of a non-violent crime, when federal law requires a conviction of a crime of violence in order to strip a student’s legal status. The government gave back legal status to many students, but not before turning their lives and education upside down.

Again, it’s important that Swank doesn’t want to scare undocumented residents away from calling the police and reassuring to hear he doesn’t run the information of crime victims. But when people are being threatened with deportation based on unproven allegations of crimes, who can be sure they won’t be called a criminal once law enforcement gets involved?

Posing in a picture with Bondi while in D.C. to discuss how sheriffs can cooperate with federal immigration enforcement undermines Swank’s reassurances. Acting like it’s silly for undocumented residents to worry is also not reassuring, given the disregard for due process on display from federal immigration officials.

If Swank wants undocumented residents to feel safe calling in his department, he’ll need to do more to prove it. He could start by saying he supports due process for all residents, regardless of their legal status.