Sheriff Dan Coverley
An agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement won’t result in Douglas County patrol deputies checking people’s citizenship papers at random, Sheriff Dan Coverley said on Thursday.
“We are not going into the community and checking papers, or seeing if employees are citizens or not,” he said. “We don’t care about that. If you commit a crime and you are here illegally, then you might have an issue with immigration.”
As of Thursday, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office is the only agency in Nevada that is participating in agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but that could change soon.
On Feb. 19, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office signed the Warrant Service Officer Model of Section 287(g)—a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that permits federal agreements with state and local law enforcement agencies. Under this model, designated officers are granted legal authority to execute civil immigration warrants in the jail.
Coverley said that on the ground, Douglas County’s participation will not change.
“We’ve always cooperated with ICE,” Coverley said. “We would contact someone when we had a suspect booked into the jail, and through the investigation or the booking questions, it was determined they might be in the country illegally. Then ICE was contacted and what they did with it was up to them.”
During the Biden administration, Coverley said that the Sheriff’s Office contacted the agency, but there didn’t seem to be any response.
“All this program does is formalize this process and provide training to the jail deputies,” Coverley said. “It’s only in the jail. It has nothing to do with patrol.”
Coverley started his tenure as sheriff in 2019 with two Gardnerville Ranchos murders that turned out to have been committed by Salvadoran Wilber Martinez-Guzman.
“That case was solved by our relationships with federal agencies,” Coverley said. “The FBI was how we figured how to track the Apple watch that ultimately led to us locating Martinez-Guzman.”
But the ability to take Martinez-Guzman, who was later convicted of killing Sophia Renkin and Connie Koontz along with a Washoe County couple, into custody through an immigration hold gave investigators the ability to follow up on the case and saved a woman’s life, he said.
“The initial arrest of Guzman was on an immigration violation,” Coverley said. “That absolutely saved a woman’s life in Carson City, who we know he was targeting as his next victim. Once we identified who he was we surveilled him 24 hours a day for at least 2-3 days and he was scoping a residence in Carson City that was a home of an elderly lady who fit the profile of Sophia Renkin and Connie Koontz. We felt that was his next victim.”
Coverley said he remembers meeting with the Washoe and Carson City sheriff’s, along with the rest of the team, to find out how best to arrest Martinez-Guzman before he killed someone else.
“Allowing ICE to arrest him on their immigration case allowed us to interview him and organize our case and charge him on our timeframe,” he said. “That’s why this is important to me.”
In addition to four life terms, Martinez-Guzman, 26, was sentenced to 86-200 years in prison from the three jurisdictions where he’d committed crimes, according to the Nevada Department of Corrections. His sentence end date is Sept. 23, 2222.
On Thursday morning, there were two Douglas County Jail inmates with immigration holds, including Minglong Chen, who is accused of exploiting an elderly Minden woman. The other person is in custody for driving on a license that was suspended due to driving under the influence and failure to maintain lane at Lake Tahoe on Tuesday.