By a razor-thin margin, a Hawaiʻi County Council committee on Tuesday voted to leave it up to the full council whether to allow the mayor to sign agreements between the Big Island’s police department and federal law enforcement agencies after its top cop insisted he had no interest in enforcing immigration law.

“We don’t want to to be involved in immigration. That’s not our role,” Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz told the Council Committee on Governmental Operations and External Affairs. He said his officers had become “tangentially” involved with two recent ICE enforcement operations only for “humanitarian” reasons.

Because two committee members were absent, the resolution was sent on for a full council vote April 2 with an “unfavorable” recommendation, which appears to be largely a technicality in this instance.

The resolution involves longstanding Memorandums of Agreement between the department, the FBI’s Honolulu Safe Streets Task Force and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit that drew attention for the first time this year.

The MOUs with ICE call for embedding two Homeland Security Investigations agents in the police department and designating some police officers as customs officers. Moszkowicz said language remains in the MOUs that they are not conveying to police officers “the authority to enforce administrative violations of immigration law.” 

Where MOUs Could Lead

Although the MOUs had been in place for at least a decade, supporters of immigrants had raised alarms that they could make it easier for local officers to be enlisted in mass deportations as President Donald Trump presses his campaign against millions of people he has characterized as foreign invaders.

They focused not just on on small language changes in the agreements but also the larger changes in the national political scene.

“Since the November election we’re in a completely different world,” said Big Island attorney Shawn Nakoa. “We must step back and analyze this resolution” against the backdrop of the “campaign by the Trump administration to tear apart our communities.”

“I trust our local police department. I do not trust our national government.”

Hawaiʻi Council member Rebecca Villegas

She and other immigrant advocates had the support of council member Rebecca Villegas, who said she believes the police chief but fears the White House, which has enlisted a range of federal agencies in its immigration enforcement efforts and recently defied a judge’s orders to turn back deportation flights.

“I trust our local police department,” she said. “I do not trust our national government.”

But the committee forwarded the resolution to the County Council.

“Do the new MOUs reflect at all an agreement to participate under the 287(g)?” council member Matt Kaneali’i-Kleinfelder asked county attorneys, referring to agreements in place in several hundred jurisdictions nationwide — though not Hawaiʻi — that would allow the state’s law enforcement officers to be deputized to perform some federal immigration officers’ duties, such as questioning immigrants in custody about their immigration status, and arresting and turning them over to ICE.

“Definitely not,” said Deputy Corporation Counsel Dakota Frenz. If there was a move to update the MOU to a 287(g) agreement, “absolutely it would come back to Council,” she said.

“That makes me more comfortable,” Kaneali’i-Kleinfelder said.

Moszkowicz too said the MOUs “are certainly not an entrée to this 287(g) relationship; that would require some sort of additional agreement that I will tell you I, as the chief, am not interested in.”

He added: “There certainly are anxieties that are realistic and I don’t know that we can do much to assuage this.” But through consistent communications with community groups and advocates, “we can certainly work to alleviate other anxieties” that are not realistic.

Big Island Cops Assisted ICE

Hawaiʻi Police Department officers were asked to assist ICE recently, the chief said, because a man federal agents arrested had a child in a local elementary school. His said his officers worked with the school and the state education department to locate and reunite the child with his father.

In another case, he said, after a woman was arrested and detained along with her children in South Kona, his department provided a conference room for the family to use while they waited for a contractor, hired by ICE to take care of the family, to arrive from Oʻahu. Otherwise, he said the family would have had to spend hours in an ICE van.

“No one was in a cell block, no one was in a handcuffs, and the immigration folks were in charge the total time.”

Hawaiʻi Police Chief Benjamin Moszkowicz

“No one was in a cell block, no one was in a handcuffs, and the immigration folks were in charge the total time,” Moszkowicz said.

Council members — and even some advocates — appeared reassured by Moszkowicz’s explanation of the arrangement under which two embedded Homeland Security Investigations agents are given space in the department’s offices. He said the agents are in a second floor office of the department’s Hilo headquarters, in a section occupied by a unit that investigates vice crimes such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.

“I’m relieved,” said Liza Gill, co-coordinator of the Hawaiʻi Coalition for Immigrant Rights, who had warned that seeing federal law enforcement agents in the police department would deter immigrant residents from reporting crimes. “One of our concerns was where the desk … would be in the station.”

Council members Kaneali’i-Kleinfelder, Heather Kimball, Dennis Onishi and Holeka Inaba voted to forward the resolution to the full council with a recommendation it be approved. Villegas was joined by council members Jenn Kagiwada and James Hustace in voting no.

Council members Ashley Lehualani Kierkiewicz and Michelle Galimba were absent, leading to the lack of adequate votes for a favorable recommendation despite the 4-3 vote.

Correction: This story has been updated to correct and explain the “unfavorable” vote of the committee and the name of the deputy corporation counsel quoted in the story.