ACLU sues Pima County sheriff seeking transparency about calls to Border Patrol

The ACLU of Arizona has filed a lawsuit against Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos and the department he leads, demanding response to a records request surrounding deputies’ calls for assistance to federal immigration authorities. 

Community observers in Tucson have reported instances where Border Patrol or ICE arrived shortly after sheriff’s deputies stopped vehicles — a pattern the ACLU says must be explained.

“Arizona’s Public Records Law is central to maintaining a robust democracy; holding public officials accountable is vital to this policy goal,” the legal complaint, filed in Pima County Superior Court, reads.

The previous policy of the sheriff’s department, as laid out in its rules and regulations and posted publicly on its website, required the communications department to track all calls 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 an article about the department not following the policy. On May 21, the policy was updated to no longer require that such calls be tracked.

“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 in an email to Arizona Luminaria on July 8.

Sheriff Nanos maintains that his department does not proactively cooperate with immigration enforcement: “We specifically will not hold someone for immigration authorities,” he told Capitol Media Services. 

He said that while some records of interactions with Border Patrol exist — largely inherited from his predecessor, Republican Sheriff Mark Napier — they were linked to federal grant requirements and not reflective of current practice.

From January 2022 to June 2023, according to records obtained by Arizona Luminaria, Pima County Sheriff deputies requested Border Patrol assistance at least eight times, and turned over at least 16 undocumented migrants. 

ACLU has also been seeking these records, but, according to the complaint, more than two months had passed and no records have been produced.

“Our lawsuit is about transparency: Public agency records are public for good reason,” ACLU attorney John Mitchell told Arizona Luminaria in a statement on July 28. “But our lawsuit is also about accountability,” Mitchell said. 

He said that if the sheriff maintains his department’s deputies are not calling Border Patrol, then the sheriff should “have no issue showing proof of that position across all department records. Instead, the ACLU of Arizona has waited two and a half months and received no answers. PCSD’s lack of responsive records and its intervening policy revisions should raise eyebrows for Pima County residents.”

Nanos told Arizona Luminaria on July 28 he could not comment about ongoing litigation.

Patterns of delay

Arizona Luminaria is waiting for additional records from an official request made to the sheriff’s department on April 30. The records sought are the synopses of calls made to immigration authorities from 2018 to 2022. After repeated follow ups with the records department, inquiring about the status of the records, Nanos told Luminaria on July 28, “You will receive your records request as soon as they are ready for release.” 

This isn’t the first time Nanos has come under scrutiny for withholding public records. In 2021, former Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckleberry said Nanos’s failure to release public records was “unacceptable.”

Today, Mitchell and other advocates argue that without tracking, the public cannot meaningfully verify if or how often the sheriff’s department interacts with Border Patrol.

“Law enforcement holds a whole lot of power over people’s freedom, so the standard around transparency and communication needs to be really high,” said Supervisor Jen Allen, of District 3. Allen emphasized that trust hinges on clear, documented policies.

While Nanos has yet to release the documents to ACLU about working with Border Patrol, he told Capitol Media Services that demographic data on traffic stops, internally tracked by the department, shows stops in the first half of 2025 align with county demographics — 35% Hispanic, 50% White — suggesting no racial targeting.

As the transparency case moves forward under Judge Greg Sakall, ACLU is waiting to see whether the sheriff’s department will supply the requested documents. 

Mitchell says the case may shape expectations for sheriff’s departments statewide: how and whether local agencies document immigration interactions — and how much the public demands to know.

Nanos told Capitol Media Services that he understands ACLU’s concerns about the policy change and that his team may have moved too quickly in making the changes. 

“Mea culpa, that’s on me for not being clear,’’ he said. “But we are not done with that policy review.”

Pointing to the bigger picture, as well as the political climate under the current immigration crackdown, Mitchell said, “Our lawsuit is about justice for community members who fear the abject cruelty of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.” 

“Neighbors hear one story from the Sheriff but then witness police interactions that tell a different story. Instead of answering through the public records process, the Sheriff will now answer to the Court.”

This article first appeared on AZ Luminaria and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.