JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The Justice Department is offering nearly $1 billion in public safety grants to cities and police departments across the country. The grants aren't entirely new, but this time, there's a catch. Local officials have to be willing to work with federal immigration officers. NPR criminal justice correspondent Meg Anderson is here with more. Hi.
MEG ANDERSON, BYLINE: Hey.
SUMMERS: So, Meg, just start by telling us about this money. What's it for?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So one bucket of the money is what are known as COPS grants. These have been around since the '90s. Historically, they're a big source of federal funding for police. This year, it's $700 million, and it can go toward hiring new officers and things like school safety and police mental health. And then there's this new set of funds called the Model Cities Initiative. That's 300 million going to just a handful of mid-sized cities for similar things. Here's acting Attorney General Todd Blanche talking about that fund in a recent video statement.
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TODD BLANCHE: The strongest applications will not come from one office or one representative acting alone. They will come from jurisdictions that offer true partnership.
ANDERSON: So the thing to note here is that phrase, true partnership. That becomes a little clearer once you read the fine print.
SUMMERS: And the fine print says what exactly?
ANDERSON: Yeah. So in the application for the Model Cities Initiative, the DOJ essentially says any applicant that fails to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement won't get the money. And when the DOJ announced those new COPS grants, they said something very similar. Here's Tahir Duckett summing it up. He runs the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown University.
TAHIR DUCKETT: They are trying to take dollars that local agencies have been depending on for years and saying, oh, well, if you want these dollars, then you need to help us out with our immigration enforcement work.
SUMMERS: Is it common, Meg, for this type of federal money to be tied to a political agenda?
ANDERSON: You know, it's not uncommon. So during the Obama administration, for instance, the DOJ gave additional consideration to agencies that said they wanted to build trust in communities. That was just a few years after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. During Biden's years in office, priority was given to cities that used community approaches to violence intervention. That was in the years after the George Floyd killing. And, you know, the first Trump administration already linked some grants to immigration enforcement, but that was challenged in court and ultimately revoked by the Biden administration. So now criminal justice experts tell me the return to this idea of linking federal immigration enforcement with local policing, it's really troubling to them.
SUMMERS: And why is that?
ANDERSON: Well, for one, the experts I spoke to say immigration and crime are not linked. Studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crime than their citizen counterparts. And two, immigration enforcement is normally the job of the federal government, not local law enforcement. And many police chiefs say there's a good reason for that. They say it erodes community trust. And I should note, these aren't the only opportunities for local police to make money doing immigration work. The Department of Homeland Security is also offering big incentives too.
SUMMERS: So what does the Department of Justice have to say about all of this?
ANDERSON: So the Justice Department declined an interview, but in a statement, they said that the suggestion that immigration is not linked to public safety is, quote, "ludicrous" and said that ICE has arrested hundreds of thousands of criminals. However, recent data shows that more than 70% of immigrant detainees have no criminal convictions.
SUMMERS: That is NPR's Meg Anderson. Thanks so much.
ANDERSON: You're welcome.
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