Brookline votes to bar ICE from town property, study end to federal intelligence sharing

Brookline Town Meeting members voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bylaw that restricts ICE agents from conducting warrantless arrests in town buildings and bars them from using town property to stage raids.

The resolution passed during a May 28 town meeting where residents also voted to send to a study committee a resolution calling on Brookline to withdraw from the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) and refuse federal Urban Area Security Initiative grants that require the town to share information with federal authorities. The resolution also called on the town to stop sharing fingerprints of people arrested for non-felony charges with federal authorities.

“We are happy that there’s going to be a stud of the BRIC and the fingerprint issue,” said Town Meeting member Chi Chi Wu, speaking to a reporter after the meeting.

Wu and several other Town Meeting members advanced the resolutions in May. Members of the Brookline Select Board as well as police and fire department officials expressed reservations about withdrawing from the BRIC and refusing the UASI grant. Those federally funded programs have come under increased scrutiny over the last two years as federal immigration officials have increased deportations, targeting immigrants who have no criminal record and many who are in the United States legally.

Town Meeting member Alex Lebovitz said ICE has “devolved into a rogue agency that has shown total disregard for the rule of law, the safety, civil rights and due process rights of our fellow citizens and neighbors and has wantonly killed Americans in our streets.”

Brookline Police Chief Jennifer Paster told Town Meeting members that the town leans heavily on the BRIC for policing.

“Operationally, we’d be decimated if we were to pull out of the BRIC,” she said. “We rely on the BRIC every day for identification, sharing of crucial intelligence and intelligence, wanted bulletins, BOLOs (be on the lookout bulletins),” she said. “Every day we share all our warrants of people we’re looking for.  We need the BRIC to keep all of you safe and to keep our officers safe.”

The BRIC is a fusion center, a federally funded office that was among dozens across the country set up in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to facilitate information sharing between local police and federal law enforcement. Critics have said that federal authorities working in fusion centers rarely share useful information with local police and that the centers are now facilitating information sharing with ICE.

Department of Homeland Security officers sit in the BRIC office with local police. While local officials say they are not sharing information directly with ICE, they have shared reports on local protests and protest movements with federal agencies such as the FBI through the BRIC. Under the Trump administration, the FBI works with and shares information with ICE. ICE, therefore, has access to information including the Boston Police Department’s controversial gang database, which is housed in the BRIC office.

Fatema Ahmad, executive director of the Muslim Justice League, told Town Meeting members that the BRIC has conducted surveillance on her organization, which advocates for the civil rights of Muslims and immigrants.

While the BRIC and the UASI grants that fund the office and other local law enforcement initiatives channel $500,000 annually to Brookline, Wu said she would rather the town forgo the funding.

“There’s a lot at stake,” she said. “It’s a lot of money. We just passed an override. I get it. Every dollar is precious. But I’d rather see my taxes go up than accept blood money.”

The BRIC includes the towns of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy, Revere and Winthrop. The city of Newton, which borders Brookline and has a similar population size and a similarly low crime rate, is not in the BRIC.

The town’s study committee will review the Town Meeting proposal to withdraw from the BRIC and end the practice of sharing fingerprints with federal officials over the summer. The Select Board is expected to make a decision no later than November.