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The Milwaukee Police Department says it doesn’t have a plan in place if federal immigration authorities mobilize into the city at a scale similar to operations in nearby Chicago and Minneapolis.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched one of the largest operations in its history last week, sending about 2,000 agents into the Twin Cities. That mobilization resulted in an ICE agent shooting and killing 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good Wednesday morning in Minneapolis. Minneapolis schools were closed Thursday because, in a separate incident, ICE agents deployed tear gas at a high school as students were being dismissed.

Late last year, ICE’s “Operation Midway Blitz” similarly sent a large number of federal agents into the Chicago area. While the operation was underway, ICE and other federal agents killed a 38-year-old Mexican man during a traffic stop and in another incident rammed into the car of a woman who was warning neighbors about ICE presence before shooting her five times.

The Chicago operation included at least another dozen incidents in which federal agents pointed their guns or fired less-lethal weapons at residents, according to data compiled by The Trace.

In both cities, the massive presence of immigration authorities has caused significant ripple effects through local communities, straining the ability of local law enforcement to control crowds of observers and protesters and respond to the disruptions in traffic caused by caravans of federal SUVs traveling over city streets.

“Local police departments and many state governors have been very firm in their communication to federal law enforcement that federal law enforcement is not welcome in their cities conducting these sorts of major operations because of the fact that it is so disruptive,” says Ingrid Eagly, a law professor at UCLA who focuses on immigration enforcement. “Because people you know can be injured and harmed, and communities are living in fear. It’s causing a great amount of disruption in communities to have this kind of strong law enforcement presence.”

In cities across the country where ICE agents have been deployed in large numbers, local officials have had to decide how local cops engage with the operations and what that engagement communicates to local residents. Eagly says that operating as “a backup service for unprepared ICE agents” would be using local resources to legitimize ICE’s presence.

“To send in local law enforcement, as backup, as sort of part of the enforcement team, would be essentially being part of the of the federal police force conducting ICE operations,” she says.

The operations in Chicago and Minneapolis, two largely Democratic Midwestern cities that are frequent targets of rhetorical attacks by Republicans, are prominent displays of force in communities similar to Milwaukee. Even though Wisconsin has so far avoided the brunt of the Trump administration’s stepped-up immigration enforcement efforts, that could change.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that the city had to be prepared for the “eventuality” that an ICE surge is coming.

“Given what happened [Wednesday] and the young woman who was killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis, we got to prepare on the ground,” Johnson said.

But when asked if the Milwaukee Police had a plan for managing a potential ICE operation in the city, a spokesperson for the department only pointed to the department’s existing immigration policy.

The department’s immigration policy states that Milwaukee Police officers are not allowed to cooperate with ICE’s civil immigration enforcement actions.

“Proactive immigration enforcement by local police can be detrimental to our mission and policing philosophy when doing so deters some individuals from participating in their civic obligation to assist the police,” the policy states.

But the written policy does not include any provisions for how police personnel should respond in the event of massive ICE presence in the community. Having a noncooperation or “sanctuary” policy could make Milwaukee a target for Trump’s mass deportation program. Despite that, when pressed for clarification because the policy does not state now the department would manage the fallout of an ICE surge, the spokesperson refused to answer.

“It states what our policy [is] in regards to immigration enforcement,” a Milwaukee police spokesperson said in an unsigned email on Tuesday, before the Minneapolis incident. “We do not have an operation like Chicago therefore cannot provide information about a policy of something that we do not have in our city.”

Pressed again for an answer to the specific question about managing the traffic and crowd control implications of a massive ICE operation in Milwaukee, the spokesperson again refused to answer.

“We have an immigration enforcement policy just because you do not like the answer does not mean we are going to answer different to you,” the spokesperson wrote.

After the shooting in Minneapolis, in answer to a follow-up question from the Examiner, the MPD spokesperson again cited the department’s existing policy preventing cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Originally published by Wisconsin Examiner, a nonprofit news organization.

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