Pima County Sheriff, Chris Nanos.
Originally published on AZ Luminaria on July 9, 2025.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department changed its policies about tracking deputy’s calls to federal immigration officials less than a week after an Arizona Luminaria article revealed it wasn’t following its own rules.
The department is no longer required to track when deputies make requests for federal immigration authorities to assist them.
The previous policy, as laid out in the rules and regulations of the department and posted publicly on its website, required the communications department to track all calls that deputies make to federal immigration authorities and for the department to create a monthly synopsis of those calls. The policy had been in effect since 2018.
But a records request made by Arizona Luminaria earlier this year showed that the department had stopped tracking such calls in June 2023.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told Arizona Luminaria in early May that he was unaware of the policy. On May 16, Arizona Luminaria published a story about the department not following policy. On May 21, the policy was updated to no longer require that such calls be tracked.
“The ‘policy’ you referred to was put in place by [former Pima County Sheriff Mark] Napier when trying to justify his need for Stonegarden funds,” Nanos told Arizona Luminaria in a July 8 email.
Operation Stonegarden is a federal grant program that funds collaboration between federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to focus on border and immigration issues. Pima County is no longer participating in the program.
“This sheriff never saw a need and thanks to you, we recognized that the old policy was really a [standard operating procedure] for our Communications Section and should never have been in our Rules and Regulations that dictates actual ‘policy’,” Nanos wrote.
Nanos said the practice ended when he came into office in January 2021. “As to why we would or would not continue such a practice is simply the need does not exist,” Nanos added.
However, the practice continued until at least June 2023, according to records obtained by Arizona Luminaria. In an 18-month period, from January 2022 through June 2023, the sheriff’s department turned at least 16 people over to Border Patrol, according to agency records.
Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen, of District 3, emphasized the need for transparency.
“At a time when moms, dads, sons, and daughters are falling prey to ICE disappearances, it’s more important than ever that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department is transparent about when and why they work with immigration enforcement agencies,” Allen said in response to the policy change.
Allen founded the Border Action Network in 2001, a nonprofit organization that defended the rights of people affected by border and immigration policies.
Keeping records
A photograph from March 2025 included in Arizona Luminaria’s May 15 article showed a Pima County Sheriff deputy working beside a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Records show that the incident stemmed from a drug enforcement operation, and was not, at least initially, related to immigration enforcement.
Arizona Luminaria also requested records related to an April 2025 traffic stop in which a sheriff deputy told a community member that he called Border Patrol for backup. Despite repeated requests for those records, the sheriff’s department has not provided any records or clarified why Border Patrol was called.
The files, obtained through a public records request, show when Pima County Sheriff Deputies called Border Patrol for assistance from December 2022 to June 2023.
Brad Bartos, an assistant professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said a lack of sufficient and consistent record keeping makes substantive police reform difficult. The author of two books, Bartos studies and publishes on criminology and policing.
“That’s the main reason why we don't have the information to productively discover more efficient, less painful, and more cost effective” means of enforcement, Bartos said.
“How do you compel the sheriff to track and provide the data so they can be scrutinized?” Bartos asked. He added that when such information is not tracked, people’s imaginations are “left to fill the gaps. That’s not an ideal outcome when people are concerned with collaboration with Border Patrol and ICE.”
Allen, meanwhile, said “the sheriff's department shouldn't be collaborating with immigration enforcement, period.”
The department’s rules state: “Department members shall NOT proactively pursue investigations regarding Federal immigration law.”
However, the rules also state: “When reasonable suspicion exists that a person is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made to determine the immigration status of the person.” That requirement is a vestige of SB1070, the state law passed in 2010 which authorized state and local law enforcement officers to police some immigration violations. The law remains in partial effect.
The controversy over local law enforcement's collaboration with federal immigration authorities comes amid a nationwide crackdown against migrants – one of the pillars of the Trump administration’s agenda.
“The fear crippling immigrant families right now has ripple effects throughout our entire community,” Allen said.
She added: “Families are afraid to go to the hospital, to work, to school, and to call law enforcement when actual crimes are happening and they need law enforcement's support. This is antithetical to the sheriff's department mission and meaningful public safety.”
This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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