Lawsuit Counters Pima County Sheriff's Claims on Border Patrol

Civil rights lawyers are accusing deputies with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department of handing people over to Border Patrol, despite repeated claims from its top cop Sheriff Chris Nanos that it does not collaborate with federal police to enforce immigration violations.

Court documents filed by the ACLU of Arizona against Nanos on Wednesday detail incidents between 2021 and 2023 in which deputies contacted and coordinated with Border Patrol agents regarding people who were suspected of no crime.

In one incident, five men on a construction company’s property told a security guard they were looking for work. The guard called both the Sheriff’s Department and Border Patrol. When sheriff’s deputies learned that Border Patrol wouldn’t arrive for more than an hour, they offered the men a ride to a Taco Bell — then told Border Patrol agents to meet them there and take the men into federal custody, according to the lawsuit.

In another incident laid out by lawyers for the ACLU, a deputy made contact with a group of Spanish-speaking men on the side of a road, acknowledged the men were under no criminal suspicion, but still called Border Patrol to have them removed.

A third incident was triggered when a 911 caller reported seeing 25 to 45 Hispanic individuals with foreign accents congregating behind a Dollar General store — a location for “people who are not of the United States” to get picked up, the lawsuit quotes one deputy as saying.

“PCSD deputies appear to have engaged in unconstitutional coordination with federal immigration authorities, generally against Spanish-speaking individuals who cannot produce U.S. identification but are under no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing,” the ACLU brief states.

Nanos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The case unfolds against the backdrop of an intensifying national debate over the role of local law enforcement in federal immigration enforcement.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, the federal government has pushed state and local agencies to expand cooperation with immigration authorities, with local lawmakers often acquiescing to the request. (For example, state Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Flagstaff, sponsored a bill to mandate Arizona sheriffs cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

Pima County, which includes 130 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been a focal point of that pressure, with its sheriff among the local officials most vocal in resisting Trump’s requests. He has repeatedly told the public that his department does not enforce federal immigration law, that deputies have no desire to serve as de facto federal immigration agents, and that immigration status is “not a concern” to his office, according to the lawsuit.

He told the Arizona Daily Star last July, for example, adding that his agency specifically refuses to cooperate with ICE and considers detention requests “unconstitutional.”

But the incidents documented in Wednesday’s court filing tell a more complicated story.

Pima County Supervisor Jen Allen told LOOKOUT she found the incidents “very disturbing.”

“We have been repeatedly assured by the sheriff that his agency wants nothing to do with enforcing civil immigration infractions, yet the complaint shows a different story,” Allen said. “We need to be able to trust our sheriff at his word and know that his agency is dedicated to public safety for all Pima County residents, regardless of skin color, language, or what ID they may or may not have on hand.”

The incidents of deputies calling Border Patrol are drawn from Sheriff’s Department reports produced through litigation — records that the department resisted turning over for nearly five months after the ACLU first requested them last May.

Earlier that same month, this reporter wrote for Arizona Luminaria that the Sheriff’s Department was violating its own seven-year-old policy by not keeping track of how many people its deputies hand over to immigration officials. Soon after publication, the department changed its policy.

Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told the news outlet at the time that tracking such handovers was unnecessary: “The need does not exist,” Nanos said.

Following the ongoing lawsuit seeking disclosure of those reports, the ACLU is asking the court to declare that Nanos violated Arizona Public Records Law by not producing the records.

John Mitchell, immigrants’ rights attorney for the ACLU of Arizona, told LOOKOUT the findings so far in the lawsuit are “unsettling.”

“Equally shocking is that Sheriff Nanos appears to have no policies about when or how to contact immigration,” Mitchell said. “For a county that extends to the U.S.-Mexico border, this is unconscionable. If you don’t train deputies on the clear limits of their authority, how can you know if they are respecting those limits?”

Though the claims against Nanos date back as far as five years, local police leaders have echoed similar assertions since Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown over the past year. They have said they do not collaborate with Department of Homeland Security officers to enforce federal immigration laws. But multiple groups — including LGBTQ+ civil rights advocates focused on migrants — have documented anecdotal cases in which local police across the greater Phoenix area have handed people over to DHS during traffic stops.

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Organizations such as Trans Queer Pueblo in Phoenix, Mariposas Sin Fronteras in Tucson, and the national group Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement have raised concerns about police collaboration with federal law enforcement since the first Trump administration. At that time, the president issued an executive order expanding local police authority to detain undocumented people. A 2017 report from the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, warned the policy would increase police contact with LGBTQ+ people, and specifically transgender migrants who face higher rates of violence than their cisgender peers.

The revelations come at a particularly fraught time for Nanos, as recent reporting from the Arizona Republic claims he recently lied under oath, misrepresented his work history on a resume, and faced repeated suspensions for misconduct during his early years as a police officer in the 1980s.

The Pima County Board of Supervisors this week took the unusual step of compelling him to answer questions about his work history. Failing to do so could be grounds for his dismissal. A petition is also circulating calling for Nanos’ recall.

“In light of what we now know about his work history and willingness to give false testimony, I’m not all that surprised that he may not be fully transparent with the community about this issue,” Matt Heinz, Pima County District 2 supervisor, told LOOKOUT. He added that sheriff’s deputies turning over people to Border Patrol is “directly in opposition to what the vast majority of this community wants.”