ICE VS AMERICAN VALUES:

Much attention has been paid to Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the fear of a repeat in the upcoming midterms. Less examined, however, has been Russia's abuse of Interpol and the American court system to persecute the Kremlin's rivals in the United States--a problem that the Atlantic Council described in a recent report as another form of "interference" by Russia. Russia's requests to Interpol to issue Red Notices--the closest instrument to an international arrest warrant in use today--against Kremlin opponents are being met with increasing deference by the Department of Homeland Security, according to immigration attorneys and experts in transnational crime and corruption with whom I spoke.

Interpol cannot compel any member country to arrest an individual who is the subject of a Red Notice, according to its guidelines, and "the United States does not consider a Red Notice alone to be a sufficient basis for the arrest of a subject because it does not meet the requirements for arrest under the 4th Amendment to the Constitution," according to the Justice Department. But the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. immigration courts are effectively facilitating "backdoor extraditions," as one immigration attorney said, in their reliance on Red Notices as a basis for detention and, ultimately, removal.

Dave Schmidtke, at the Refugee Council, doesn't see how migrants can learn to see police as friend and helper, given the current system.

"[Migrants] are afraid of talking to police people, especially as a witness or something, because they are always thinking, 'Maybe some of the information is getting used to deport me some day.' "

In the U.S., the response to this problem is often the "sanctuary city" approach, in which local police avoid participating in immigration enforcement, and county jails restrict how much information they share with federal officials about foreign-born inmates. In Germany, though, that idea seems to be a non-starter.

"I can't believe that would be a German idea," says Sven Hüber, a chief inspector with the German federal police and an official with the country's biggest police union, the Gewerkschaft der Polizei. He's strongly pro-immigration, but he doesn't see how you can put up a barrier between police work and immigration enforcement.

"It's a matter of security. Especially because during the wave of migrants in 2015 and 2016, we realized there are some people coming whom we need to watch very, very closely and keep tabs on them," Hüber says.

He says German police shouldn't be shielded from the unpleasant reality of deportations. Cops should know what it's like, for example, to roust a peaceable family out of their beds at 5 a.m. to put them on a plane. And he's suspicious of any suggestion that deportations should be handled by some kind of separate, specialized law enforcement agency, such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in the U.S.

"If those officers' job consist of nothing but catching people to deport them, people whose only crime is being in the country without permission -- what does that do to those officers?" he asks. "What does it to their heads and their souls?"

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