
A police unit responds to the scene of an emergency. (MattGush)
Albuquerque Chief of Police Harold Medina was sitting at home enjoying Saturday afternoon football on TV when he was startled to see an ICE recruitment ad specifically urging officers in his department to jump ship and sign up with ICE.
“A commercial comes out about how Albuquerque police officers are not allowed to do their job,” Medina recalled. “Very specific. Albuquerque. Because they took an oath and they are not allowed to enforce immigration law.”
Albuquerque is a sanctuary city, meaning local law enforcement is barred from working directly with federal immigration agents.
“My officers felt betrayed,” Medina said. “They asked me, ‘Why is a fellow law enforcement agency calling us out? Why are they pointing to us, saying we are not able to do our jobs, when we do our jobs every day?’”
Medina spoke at a recent conference organized by Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) and Migration Policy Institute at the Georgetown University Law Center. Noting that he speaks to officers across the country, Medina worries about “the relationships that are being strained with our federal partners at this time…let alone in three years and four months’ time.”
ICE is spending millions on recruitment ads like the one Medina saw, targeting police officers in sanctuary cities like Albuquerque. The effort is part of a $30 billion initiative—paid for with funds from the GOP’s Big, Beautiful Bill spending package signed in July—to hire 10,000 new ICE agents by the end of the year to support the president’s mass deportation campaign.
When asked about the ad by local reporters, Medina’s initial reply was, “My officers chose to take criminals to jail, not chase people around dairy farms.”
Indeed, he says, to date not a single Albuquerque police officer has taken ICE up on its offer. “Our officers are happy and believe in the mission and goal that we have,” he said. “I have not heard of one officer that applied.”
Medina is a lifelong cop. He rose through the ranks, spending years working night shifts patrolling the streets of a city where crime rates have long topped the national average and where, he says, two-thirds of residents stand opposed to the president’s immigration policies.

Those policies have led to the arrest and detention of nearly 70,000 individuals nationwide, the overwhelming majority (at least 70%) of them having no prior criminal record despite the president’s repeated insistence that they are targeting the “worst of the worst.”
Social media platforms, meanwhile, are inundated with a barrage of images and videos showing masked ICE agents tackling men, women, public officials, dragging parents off in unmarked vehicles as they take their children to school or descending on apartment buildings in scenes more akin to far flung war zones.
Medina says beyond the strained ties with federal law enforcement, the president’s increasingly militarized deportation agenda is chipping away at the very trust that local law enforcement agencies like his have worked to build with communities since the Covid pandemic and George Floyd protests in 2020.
“We were forced to evolve. We had to make changes to build public trust across this country,” he said, adding, “So much of what is going on now with immigration eats away at the public trust that we developed.”
In the minds of community members, Medina explains, distinctions between masked ICE agents, National Guard troops in fatigues and local police officers fade, with fear and apprehension replacing confidence, familiarity. Multiple studies have shown a link between stepped up immigration enforcement and a decline in crime reporting as communities withdraw from engaging with local police.
Jason Houser is a former ICE Chief of Staff who served under the Obama and Biden administrations. Like Medina, he says the administration’s approach has undermined efforts to combat crime and secure public safety.
“The volume of these at large arrests and the tactics being used provides no real public safety outcome,” said Houser, speaking during a virtual press conference on October 16 organized by America’s Voice. “It makes the work of focusing on public safety and national security threats harder.”
In a New York Times op-ed, Houser wrote that “Nearly 14,500 law enforcement agents have been pulled off their investigations to do civil immigration work, including agents taken off the border. Nearly 3,000 F.B.I. agents were reassigned to civil immigration enforcement, instead of focusing on their mission of national security and public safety.”
The result is to allow “fentanyl traffickers, child predators and foreign intelligence threats to operate with less scrutiny,” while federal prosecutions for drug violations “have dropped significantly.”
Calling the president’s approach “crisis construction,” Houser says the administration’s aim is to foment chaos on city streets to justify further escalation, including the deployment of national guard troops to cities including Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, and Portland.
Both men insist there are alternatives.
In April, New Mexico’s governor authorized the deployment of the state’s National Guard to help combat rising crime in the state. Medina says the decision—while not without controversy—has been a success.
“We did it in a way that works for us,” he said, describing efforts to ensure the community knew and understood what was happening. Soldiers were given six weeks of de-escalation training, were forced to wear polo shirts instead of military garb and were limited to auxiliary roles, including scene security, traffic direction, and watching cameras to report crime.
Recent data show that crimes in Albuquerque across the board are down, with homicides at a three-year low and violent crime and auto theft also decreasing.
“A lot of the officers I speak to… didn’t sign up to enforce immigration law. They signed up to investigate criminal activity, to serve their community,” says Medina. And to do that, “You have to respect the local community.”
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