Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird filed a lawsuit Thursday against Winneshiek County and its sheriff, Dan Marx, for allegedly violating Iowa law by discouraging law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration officials.
The lawsuit, filed in Polk County District Court, claims that Iowa law “requires stripping Winneshiek County of state funding until the sheriff follows the procedure to reinstate the funds” by disavowing his previous public statements on immigration enforcement.
The lawsuit acknowledges that Sheriff Marx “has complied with every Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer request made of his office since Nov. 26, 2018.”
In a Feb. 4, 2025, Facebook post, Winneshiek County Sheriff Dan Marx, a Republican, stated that if his office received “detainer” requests to hold suspected illegal immigrants, and those requests were not vetted and approved by the courts, they would be rejected by his office.
In his post, Marx distinguished between detainer requests of that kind and what he called “valid” judicial warrants and court orders. He wrote that “the only reason detainers are issued is because the federal agency does not have enough information or has not taken the time to obtain a valid judicial warrant.”
Bird claims that assertion by Marx is false.
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican like Bird, had sent the attorney general’s office an official complaint seeking an investigation into the Facebook post.
In a report summarizing her investigation, Bird...
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