Despite assurances to nervous immigrants, Sheriff's Department gave ICE assistance in jails

The L.A. Times reports:

Since President Trump laid out his plan for mass deportations, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has gone out of its way to reassure the public it had strict limits on cooperating with immigration officials.

As the president and others demanded, among other things, that local police work closely with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to hand over jail inmates suspected of being in the country illegally, the Sheriff’s Department took a defiant stand, saying ICE officers had to collect inmate information from a public website.

Behind the scenes, however, things were playing out differently.

Instead of keeping immigration officers at an arm’s length, Sheriff’s Department jail officials granted them access to the department’s inmate processing facility, allowing them to set up an office with computers that provided “a constant flow of information regarding prisoners who were soon to be released,” according to a report released Monday by the independent watchdog that oversees the Sheriff’s Department.

Imagine that.