Protesters descended on the Prince William County Government Center at 1 p.m. Tuesday, before the scheduled Board of Supervisors meeting.
The group made up of Hispanics demanded the end of the 287(g) program inside the county’s jail. The program allows trained deputies of the Prince William County Sheriff’s Department check the legal presence of those who have been arrested as they are processed into the jail.
Prince William police officers once received training from federal Immigration and Customs (ICE) officials to administer legal presence checks during street arrests. The police department’s participation in the 287(g) program ended in 2012, leaving the job of checking jail inmates’ immigration status up to sheriff’s deputies at the county jail.
“We’re here to ask the leadership of Prince William County to end their relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement… 287(g) is an old, draconian program that is responsible for racial profiling across the country, in a time when the conversation is about criminal justice reform…,” said National Day Laborer Organizing Network Legislative Affairs Director Salvador G. Sarmento.
Sarmento lead a group of about 15 protesters who, after organizing in front of the government center, filed into the Board Chambers to speak to government officials. The man whom they want to speak to the most, Board Chairman, At-large Corey Stewart, took a scheduled absence from Tuesday’s meeting for a trip back to his hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich.
Armed with a list of talking points, the protesters denounced presidential candidate Donald Trump’s immigration policies. As his Trump’s state-level campaign organizer, they also tied Stewart’s policies to the Republican presidential frontrunner.
As a new face on the Board of Supervisors in 2007, Stewart led the charge to require Prince William police officers to check the legal status of immigrants. At a political debate last fall, Stewart said his views have changed.
“When I first came into office I was out there throwing bombs and a lot of things, but I’ve learned that in a community as diverse in Prince William County you learn to work together to get things done,” he told a crowd at the Manassas Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.
In 2014, a total of 26 suspected illegal immigrant aliens were arrested and charged wit crimes in Prince William County, according to page 39 of the department’s annual report.. Those arrests represent 1.5% of major crimes arrests in the county that for offenses like rape, murder, robbery, and aggravated assault.
