Cheektowaga, N.Y. (WBEN) - The Cheektowaga Police Department says they want to clear the air on concerns residents brought up this week over whether police are working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Captain Jeffrey Schmidt says there's been a little bit of a mischaracterization over concerns raised by citizens at this week's board meeting, and he wants to address a couple things head on.
"One of the more important things to understand is how little contact we have with our federal partners, just in the overall scheme of things," explained Schmidt in an interview with WBEN. "It's not actually ICE that we interface with directly when it comes to issues of immigration and the rare times that we actually are inquiring about someone's immigration status, it's actually U.S. Customs Border and Protection that we deal with directly."
He adds over the course of the last year, in 2025, Cheektowaga Police responded to 52,000 calls for service, making some 3,500 arrests.
"Going through and looking back, we can only find about 20 times that we had a reason to contact Customs in order to inquire about someone's immigration status," Schmidt noted. "Every single one of those times was related to some type of a New York state criminal action that then developed into our need for an inquiry."
Related
Schmidt says there's another important thing to note.
"We are not engaged in going out into the community to look for immigration violations. We are not working in concert with any organization in order to stop people based off of their skin color or how they speak in order to try to find out immigration status. None of those things are happening," he said.
According to Schmidt, the closest Cheektowaga has had to a relationship with ICE would be through having an officer on the Human Trafficking Task Force through HSI, under the same umbrella, but under a different wing.
"We don't have a formal partnership with ICE. We do not have anyone in the building who works as an immigration officer, and we do not enforce immigration law. ICE does operate in our town, but when they do, it is not something that we're always made aware of ahead of the time they will come in, they'll conduct their operations, and we don't have a ongoing interface with them in order to aid or support those operations," Schmidt explained.
Schmidt adds Cheektowaga Police has had roughly six interactions with ICE over the past year.
There's one other important concern that has been raised, according to Schmidt.
"What about a victim of a crime who is not a United States citizen? We want to make sure that everyone understands that if you are a victim of a crime and you come to our agency to report it, it is not going to lead to an immigration check. If you are a non resident, if you are even here illegally, and you come to us to report a crime, our first priority is going to be to support you as a victim and to make sure that New York State law is enforced the best that we can in your situation. And we do not want anyone, regardless of their immigration status, to ever be frightened to come forward and report that they're the victim of a crime," Schmidt said.