Phil Torrey

The First Circuit ruled that a man born in India and brought to the U.S. as a child is deportable, finding that his involvement in…

For years, the Boston Police Department’s notorious gang database has troubled local elected officials and civil rights advocates, who have raised serious concerns about the list of suspected associates of criminal street gangs: What makes someone land in the database? How exactly it is being used by police and other law enforcement agencies? How effective is the list overall in preventing crime? ... But the changes haven’t satisfied critics. “To be honest, in terms of the what exactly [BPD] has changed and how effective that’s been, it’s still a little opaque,” said Phillip Torrey, director of the Crimmigration Clinic at Harvard Law School. The clinic offered expertise in the recently won case in the Appeals Court. “And to my knowledge, they still use this arbitrary point system where I’ve seen cases of people who get X amount of points for talking to somebody who BPD thinks is a gang affiliate. And then another person does the exact same thing and they get Y amount of points. So, I haven’t seen consistency within that sort of arbitrary point system.”

The Trump administration is going to send Border Patrol agents to “sanctuary” cities around the country, including the Boston area. The Department of Homeland Security said the extra personnel will help ICE agents with immigration enforcement. The Trump administration is going to send Border Patrol agents to “sanctuary” cities around the country, including the Boston area. The Department of Homeland Security said the extra personnel will help ICE agents with immigration enforcement. “This is like a SWAT team basically coming in,” said Philip Torrey of Harvard Law School. “These are folks with sniper certifications, they’re really designed for counter-terrorism, going after significant drug cartels.” Torrey believes the plan creates a bigger risk to public safety. “It has a chilling effect in terms of people reporting crimes, folks being willing to go to the police,” he said. DHS said the officers “have also been trained in routine immigration enforcement actions which is what they have been asked to do.” Sanctuary cities in the area include Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Newton and Lawrence.

Local officials and advocates are condemning the Trump administration’s decision to send federal border patrol agents to Boston and other so-called sanctuary cities in coming weeks to support immigration enforcement, calling the move an intimidation tactic that could harm public safety. “None of this makes us safer,” said Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins. The initiative, she said, aims “to strike fear and terror throughout our immigrant communities." ...Dispatching border patrol agents to Boston would represent “an incredible waste of resources,” said Phil Torrey, director of the Crimmigration Clinic at Harvard Law School. The tactical unit, Torrey said, is “designed for counterterrorism-type operations or large safety concerns like the Super Bowl.” It typically hasn’t been used for local enforcement efforts, he said. “It’s yet another example of the Trump administration using scare tactics on municipalities that don’t abide by detainers,” Torrey said. Detainers are requests from federal authorities for law enforcement to hold an individual in custody. Boston, Torrey said, has a policy that states Boston police are not authorized to abide by a request to hold someone solely for immigration purposes.

The state has received more than $160 million in funding from federal immigration authorities since 2012, mostly in exchange for keeping and transporting ICE detainees in jails run by four Massachusetts sheriff’s departments, a Globe review has found. The sum, brought into the state’s coffers through controversial contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has raised the eyebrows of some advocates and immigration attorneys who oppose the agreements and think there are better alternatives. The sheriff’s offices, meanwhile, have defended the arrangements, with at least two departments saying their relationship with ICE has made Massachusetts residents safer...Philip L. Torrey, managing attorney for Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, said that immigration detention has not always been a part of the country’s immigration enforcement system. “It’s concerning that in just the last few decades it has become the centerpiece of immigration enforcement system,” said Torrey. Torrey’s program recently completed a study that found that there was a “potentially flawed accounting system across Massachusetts sheriffs’ offices that fails to fully account for all of the costs associated with immigration detention at their facilities in a consistent and comprehensive manner.” “There is a concerning lack of transparency, accountability, and oversight in the immigration detention systems in Massachusetts,” read the report.