Chair Hudson questions DHS on sanctuary city training and ICE incidents

Last year, there were reports that ICE had entered DHS shelters without judicial warrants in violation of the city's sanctuary city laws.

What training does DHS give staff in relation to DHS policies in general and sanctuary city policies?

Specifically and how frequently does that training take place?

I know it's one thing to have the policies written down in the books somewhere that people read maybe some years ago, but how frequently are you reminding people what the policies are?

Thank you.

We have quite a number of trainings that are required across the system, and we do have refreshers both internally, and we require the provider to be refreshing with their own staff.

I think in addition to the book of policies and saying everybody was trained, in the moment at 2 o'clock in the morning, it might all go out the window.

So this is also about how we're implementing this in real time.

And sorry, do you track?

Compliance or efficiency in terms of the providers giving the training or refreshing their training?

We track refreshers, yes.

Okay.

Do you have the numbers?

Not with me, no.

Okay.

And I would add, and I believe this to be true, but we can confirm, I mean,

whenever there's been an incident.

with ICE at any of our DHS shelters.

We take that very seriously.

Our council gets involved.

We review what happened in that case.

We deal with it as it's happening on the ground.

There's a direct number to call to us to get advice as needed.

And then I think we have been pretty good at sharing lessons from each of those individual incidents and communicating them to providers because things are changing in the ways that

This has happened over the period.

And so I think we've been in really good communication with our provider network about what to do, how to do it, in addition to the kind of more formal trainings.

Okay.

Thank you for that.