Putnam County Sheriff Eddie Farris said reports that his office has signed a task force agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are not true.
Farris said the county is participating in a jail enforcement agreement. Farris said participating in the jail model allows the sheriff’s office to vet violent inmates without getting the federal government involved.
“When individuals that are arrested and come into our jail facility that we have the capability now, of using ICE’s computer,” Farris said. “We have access to that now, to where we can actually check and see if someone’s in the country illegal, and if so, we have the ability to put a detainer on them.”
Farris stressed that the sheriff’s office will not be searching for illegal immigrants in the community.
“People who are not committing crimes are not the people that we are dealing with,” Farris said. “The sheriff’s office is not going out and looking for people that are illegal in our community. We just simply deal with the people that commit violent crimes that come through our jail facility, then we have the appropriate means to do what we can do without a lot of red tape. We’re able to actually have the authority to do that on our own now.”
The three parts of the 287(g) ICE program are the task force model, the jail enforcement model, and the warrant service model. Farris said Putnam will be the third county in Tennessee to participate in the jail enforcement model.
“As a lot of people know, it’s mandated in the state of Florida that every single sheriff’s office participates in the 287(g) jail model,” Farris said. “And so I don’t think it’ll get to that in Tennessee, but I do think most of the 95 counties will end up participating in the same jail model with the 287 ICE program that we are currently involved with.”
Farris said he doe not think participating in the warrant service and task force model would help the sheriff’s office.
“We’ve noted and talked about already a few individuals that fits in this group committing crimes, but we are not flooded with a bunch of criminal activity here in Putnam County,” Faris said. “And we certainly, if you take the seven or eight or nine percent of foreign people that live here, that is really not a large number, and so you start looking at the number that those folks that actually come through our jail facility is very very small.”
