What is the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (“SCAAP”)?

It’s a federal grant that pays Washington County to provide our undocumented neighbors’ names, release dates, and home and work addresses to Immigrant Enforcement Control (ICE) / Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We only get reimbursed for undocumented people about whom we provide specific notice within a specified time frame to the Department of Homeland Security. Information like their name, release date, his/her home and work addresses.

1. IT IS VOLUNTARY.

2. SCAAP incentivizes the Washington County Sheriff’s Office to hold undocumented individuals, and oftentimes, individuals whom they “believe” are undocumented.

3. Our participation in this program invites the threat of ICE and the prospect of deportation into immigrants' neighbors' lives.

4. SCAAP participation erodes our immigrant communities’ trust and creates a two-tiered system of justice in which immigrants are treated differently in the criminal “justice” system.

5. We should not be selling information to ICE that allows them to target our immigrant community. Law enforcement should keep us safe, not funnel our friends and neighbors into the ICE deportation machine for money.

Last year when the SCAAP grant came up, I spoke against it as a community member, and then after I spoke, JP Lisa Ecke spoke FOR it. Her comments start here in the video here. Transcript below:

“The previous speaker obviously does not work with the Immigrant Community (me: actually, I do) like I do the Latinos and the Marshallese I work with them every single day and when I tell them what they did in 2020 and how they don't want ICE to come into their neighborhoods, they're going, “We want them to because these are gang members. (me: how does she know this? Facts, please?) These are deviants and they come in and they recruit our sons and sometimes our girls impregnated and we're sick and tired of this and they need to be deported. We don't want them in our Communities. They don't hold our hands and sing Kumbaya and let's make a better Society. These are deviants some of them have raped their daughters. Some of them have even been deported and come back and commit murder. (me: Facts, please…) We're talking about those kinds of people and the Immigrant Community does not want them. They want the sheriff's department to keep them safe. They came to the United States of America so they could have Liberty and if we don't have safety we don't have Liberty and that's what our community wants. Thank you.”

All opinions. Zero Facts.