Sheriff talks immigration

By ANDREW MCGINNa.mcginn@beeherald.com

Evoking the Gospel of Matthew, local clergy on Tuesday hoped that Greene County Sheriff Jack Williams might better clarify his suddenly public stance on the nation’s border crisis.

Williams garnered attention last month when he joined nine other Iowa sheriffs, and sheriffs from across the country, by attaching his name to a letter addressed to President Joe Biden from “America’s Sheriffs.”

In it, Williams and the other sheriffs criticize Biden’s border policies and the “dangerous impacts” of “unchecked illegal immigration,” citing transnational gangs, drugs, guns and human trafficking.

The letter calls on Biden to resume construction of a border wall.

“It does make it a fine line. We’re not standing up for criminals, but we are supposed to feed the hungry and take care of the children,” said J. Alexander, pastor of Central Christian Church in Jefferson and chair of the Greene County Clergy Association, referring to Matthew 25 in the New Testament.

Williams was asked to address the clergy association at its first in-person meeting in months, telling them the sheriff’s office isn’t “messing with” those illegal immigrants who have come to work and better themselves.

He said he’s also not against legal immigration “in any way, shape or form.”

But despite a distance of 1,200 miles between Greene County and the nation’s border with Mexico, Williams told the clergy he has reason to be concerned about the current situation.

He said Greene County law enforcement hasn’t had to seize or clean up a meth lab in at least five years, for the simple reason that Mexican cartels have flooded the market with methamphetamine that is up to 98 percent pure — making their ice as lethal as it is cheap.

“All of it through the DCI lab can be traced back to Mexico,” he said.

He said that meth, in turn, drives 99 percent of the county’s crime.

“All of this starts at the border,” he said.

While human trafficking hasn’t yet been a concern in Greene County, Williams said huge amounts of meth are being stored here for distribution elsewhere.

“They’re using Greene County as a storage facility for methamphetamine,” Williams said, noting the arrest in Greene County of a member of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel in 2010.

Williams told the clergy — who, for the most part, remained completely silent — that border patrol agents are so overwhelmed at present that cartels are offloading drugs in plain sight.

“In a myriad of ways,” their letter to Biden stated, “you and your administration are encouraging and sanctioning lawlessness and the victimization of the people of the United States of America, all in the name of mass illegal immigration.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, a wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico will prove “very likely ineffective.”

The ADL also says immigrants — regardless of immigration status or place of origin — are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes.

In March alone, The New York Times reported last month, agents encountered nearly 19,000 children at the southern border, most of them fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. The Times also reported that, according to government projections, there could be more than 35,000 migrant children in U.S. care by June.

Williams said he questions why parents are sending their children alone to the United States.

Whereas the previous Trump administration was criticized for making conditions for new arrivals at the border so horrible as to deter them from coming, the Biden administration is under scrutiny for not acting quickly enough to deal with a surge of migrants they knew would be coming in the spring.

Williams is sympathetic to a degree.

“It’s a great country,” he said of the U.S. “I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to come here.”

Williams went on record that neither he nor his deputies ask about a person’s immigration status should they be pulled over.

“We don’t really care. If you’re here working, not breaking laws, why bother them?” Williams said.

That said, Greene County is no longer regarded as a “sanctuary county,” Williams said, as it had been under his predecessor.

If those in custody for what Williams called serious crimes are found to be undocumented, the sheriff’s office will hold the suspect until receiving guidance from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

“If you’re breaking the law,” he said, “you should be held accountable. The illegal immigrants who are here to work, and better themselves and the community, we’re not messing with them.”

Williams pivoted during his discussion Tuesday to what he feels are the nation’s misplaced priorities.

“If you go to Las Vegas, Los Angeles or even Des Moines, how many homeless people do we have on the streets? And homeless kids?” Williams asked. “We’re doing nothing to help them.”

“I think we need to worry about our own first,” he added.

Julie Poulsen, pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Jefferson, took issue with that stance.

“I still love you,” Poulsen told the sheriff, “but I disagree that we should take care of our own first.

“I say let’s do both.”