How a deportation law could break an Iowa city’s immigrant community – and its trust with police

Since becoming the police chief of Storm Lake, Iowa, four years ago, Chris Cole has done everything he can think of to convince people who come from around the world to work in his town that he is not their enemy.

Cole and his officers have hosted barbecues in parks and get-togethers at taquerias. They’ve dubbed a Hummer H2 seized from a drug dealer the “YumVee”, and driven it to events around town, its trunk full of ice cream, soccer balls and other sports gear for kids. And in a town where Spanish is widely spoken, Cole has found time every day to study the language and uses it in conversation when he can.

His efforts have created a level of trust between the department and Storm Lake’s immigrant community, one that Cole and his officers have relied on to police a town in which many residents arrive from countries where law enforcement is feared. But tension in the community has risen since the state legislature passed a law earlier this year intended to allow police to charge people suspected of being in the country illegally.

The looming threat of the law put Cole in a bind. He has policed Storm Lake’s streets for three decades, adapting his techniques as waves of immigrants have arrived and settled in the city. He views their trust as essential to keeping the town safe. But should the immigration law ever go into effect, his duties as a police chief obligate him to enforce it.

“This particular law is troubling for us, just because there hasn’t been a lot of guidance on how it will work. And so we have a lot of questions, and not many answers,” Cole said.

Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law, which Iowa had enacted amid a push by Republican-led states to take over enforcement of immigration laws from the federal government. Donald Trump, the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, has also made promises to take a hardline approach to undocumented migrants a central part of his campaign.

Border crossings have surged since Joe Biden became president in 2021, and though many who arrive in the United States seek asylum, Republicans argue that migrants are a national security threat. Polls indicate that immigration is a top concern for the public ahead of the November presidential election.

Last year, Texas’s Republican governor signed a bill allowing the state’s police to arrest suspected undocumented migrants, and judges to order them deported. Months later, Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature passed its similar, but less expansive, legislation.

“The Biden Administration has failed to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, putting the protection and safety of Iowans at risk. Those who come into our country illegally have broken the law, yet Biden refuses to deport them. This bill gives Iowa law enforcement the power to do what he is unwilling to do: enforce immigration laws already on the books,” Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said after signing the bill in April.

News of the law sent a chill through Storm Lake. With just over 11,300 people, the town is perhaps Iowa’s most diverse, thanks to a pork and turkey plant that have in recent decades relied on immigrant workers. It’s also an island of political moderation in north-west Iowa, the most conservative part of a state that has lately become friendly territory for the GOP. For nearly two decades, the region’s congressman was Steve King, a Republican who made a name for himself with rhetoric so extreme – he characterized immigrant children as potential drug mules, and displayed a confederate flag on his desk – that party leaders eventually spurned him.

Decades of immigration have created a community in Storm Lake of first-generation Americans, naturalized citizens and guest workers, as well as some undocumented people, though no one is sure how many. When the state immigration law, known as SF2340, came up for a vote before the legislature in Des Moines, the two Republican lawmakers who districts cover the town – representative Megan Jones and Senator Lynn Evans – supported it. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Today, many in the town fear being singled out by the police, whether within its borders, or when traveling elsewhere in the state.

“I already struggle at times driving in Iowa, because you don’t know what’s gonna happen when you’re driving around, and then add on this new law that we don’t know how people are going to enforce,” said Joanne Alvorez, a therapist and board member of Salud, a group that works to promote inclusivity in the city.

“It’s easy for some of us to say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, because we’re prominent members of the community. Chief Cole knows me, and … his officers are probably not going to stop me because they know who I am. But is that the same for everyone in my family?”

Cole said he’s been holding meetings at churches and elsewhere in the community, specifically to let people know about the law, and how his department may enforce it. “We’ve told them that we don’t know how this is going to affect the community, because we don’t know how this law will work. If it goes through, we don’t know how we’re going to get this information to determine who’s documented and who’s not. But this is what the law is.”

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The meatpacking plants that form the backbone of Storm Lake’s economy were once staffed by an overwhelmingly white, unionized workforce. A closure of the pork plant busted the union in the early 1980s, and when its new owners reopened it, they slashed pay and started attracting more immigrant laborers. The first to work at the plant were refugees from war-ravaged parts of south-east Asia, who were later joined by workers from Mexico and others from Latin America.

“Storm Lake is a much more interesting place today than it was in 1975 when I graduated from high school, but it’s relatively poorer than it was and that’s not the immigrants’ fault,” said Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns exploring the town’s challenges. (Cullen has occasionally written for the Guardian.)

“Everybody wants to blame the immigrant rather than blame the man.”

Today, the flags of countries as far flung as the Republic of Congo, Eritrea and Myanmar fly over the plants, which are owned by Tyson Foods. More than 30 languages are spoken within Storm Lake’s borders, and in the most recent census, the Hispanic population for the first time eclipsed the white population. Its downtown is lined with boutiques selling Latin American fashions, markets with goods from Mexico and Micronesia, and merchants with signs advertising financing in both Spanish and English.

Gricelda Vazquez hated Storm Lake when she moved from Mexico’s Jalisco state at the age of 11, brought by her father who worked in the meatpacking plant. Vazquez and her sister spoke only Spanish, but at school, all the students spoke English, and there were hardly any Latinos. Soon enough, they were asking their father to go back to Mexico.

“He would say like, ‘if you guys would have stayed in Mexico, I don’t know what life you guys would have had. But I know that here you guys are gonna be better,’” Vazquez recalled. Now, she thinks: “thank God we’re in Storm Lake”.

“My dad could have not chosen a better place for me to raise my kids. And now I understand what he was trying to tell me,” said Vazquez, a facilitator of family and student services for the school district.

When she arrived in town, the police chief was Mark Prosser, who, as the community’s demographic changes began accelerating in the early 1990s, knew his department needed to adapt. He started holding outreach sessions in apartment parking lots, side streets and city parks, which worked at creating relationships to combat crime, and also gave Prosser the opportunity to remind residents that the Storm Lake police department was not in the business of immigration enforcement.

“As it applies to immigration related, they don’t need to be afraid of us. We’re there to take care of them on the local level,” said Prosser, who stepped down as the town’s police chief and public safety director at the end of 2019. “These new laws these states are passing are going to drastically interrupt that philosophy that’s been preached in that community for decades.”

As the current chief, Cole has navigated challenges both common to departments across America – like the constant struggle to hire and keep police officers – and unique to Storm Lake. On his 20-person force, he has employees who speak Spanish, as well as a civilian community service officer who speaks the south-east Asian language Hmong. It is common for his officers to encounter people who speak a language none of them know and have to look for an interpreter.

Cole’s own willingness to learn and speak Spanish publicly has endeared him to many in the town’s Hispanic population.

“He has worked so hard to build that relationships with our community, not only with Hispanics and Latinos, but everyone that’s here,” said Vazquez.

But it was no match for the fear that spread through the community after the immigration law was initially passed. People asked Cole about it on the street, wondering if they have to start carrying around their birth certificates. Residents told him that they were thinking about leaving the state or were emptying their bank accounts in preparation – talk that continued even after the judge’s ruling to temporarily halt the law, news of which has been slow to filter through the community.

“I think there’s a lot of people who are documented, who are worried that they’re going to be harassed and questioned and detained,” Cole said.

The federal government keeps track of foreigners’ status and tasks agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) with arresting and deporting people in the United States unlawfully. In staying Iowa’s law, the US district court judge Stephen Locher wrote that he found it likely the justice department and civil rights groups who sued would prevail in their argument that federal law pre-empts the state’s legislation. A US appeals court reached a similar conclusion in March, when it temporarily blocked Texas’s law.

If he does win the November election, Trump has promised to carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history”, and mulled deploying the military, national guard or state and local police.

Facing pressure over both the high number of border crossings during his presidency and the protracted stalemate over immigration reform in Congress, Biden this month announced plans to both temporarily stop new asylum seekers from entering the country, and to create a pathway for undocumented spouses and children of US citizens to obtain permanent residency.

Related: ‘The other Ellis Island’: the US border area that sees the whole of global migration

To Cole, Iowa’s new law was never clear. With no access to federal immigration databases, how was he supposed to know who is undocumented? If a judge orders someone to be deported, who will pick them up from Storm Lake and who will pay for their transportation? And since the law specifically targets people who have been deported once before and then returned to the country, what was supposed to happen if his officers encountered a former deportee who had been able to obtain a visa?

Cole said he heard nothing from state officials about these questions, but he had little doubt what the law could do to Storm Lake.

“We want the community to trust the police and to come to the police when they need help or are victims of crimes. So if there’s that fear present and a reluctance to call, then we have victims that we don’t even know are being victimized. And the criminals know that, so they take advantage of that,” Cole said.

“We’ve worked very hard for the last 30 years that I’ve been here to try and build trust within our community. We want to try and maintain that.”