Retired Iowa police chief promotes national immigration reform

When Mike Tupper made the decision more than a year ago that he would be retiring as Marshalltown Police Chief at the end of January 2025, he didn’t know how the timing of his retirement would coincide with an increase in fear and uncertainty — especially among the diverse population of Marshalltown — surrounding local law enforcement’s role in immigration enforcement.

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“I’ll be honest with you, I kind of regret leaving when I did,” he said.

Tupper doesn’t feel that way because he doesn’t trust Chris Jones, the longtime Marshalltown officer who replaced Tupper as chief. He expressed sincere confidence in Jones and his devotion to the job.

Tupper has a long history of supporting his community, and he said he wishes there was more he could do to support them now.

Marshalltown, according to data from the 2020 U.S. Census, has the 11th largest minority population in Iowa with 42.5 percent of its 27,591 residents being a race other than white. The largest non-white race is Hispanic, which is 31.3 percent of the city’s residents.

“There’s a lot of fear about what’s going on at the state and federal level in terms of legislation that’s being discussed,” Tupper said of legislation and executive orders that have enhanced enforcement of immigration laws. “It’s very difficult now for local law enforcement to build trust in the community, because there’s so much uncertainty about what might happen and what local law enforcement is going to be required to do.”

Tupper was police chief in Marshalltown for about 13 years. He started his law enforcement career in the Ottumwa Police Department and worked for several years as police chief in Nevada, Iowa before taking the role in Marshalltown.

Early on in Tupper’s career in Marshalltown, he started working with the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit that promotes immigration reform across the country. Tupper had been looking for ways to build trust with the Hispanic community in Marshalltown, and got connected to the National Immigration Forum through Bibles, Badges and Business, a network of faith, law enforcement and business leaders around the country who support immigration reform.

In 2015, the immigration forum launched a more law enforcement specific group, the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, which Tupper joined and later co-chaired.

“The thing that I really appreciated about the forum and the task force is it's non-partisan. We're just looking for common sense ways to maintain public safety in our communities, to build trust and transparency in our communities, and we advocate for common sense approaches to immigration,” Tupper said. “It would be nice if we could have comprehensive immigration reform in our country, but right now it's kind of difficult to have those conversations, because everything is so partisan.”

Tupper said those common sense policies include things like strengthening border security while also making the immigration process easier to navigate so there are fewer people attempting to enter the country illegally, and so that people who were brought to the country illegally as children can have a clear path to citizenship.

“Our country needs a way to find workers, and I think having an immigration system that works would help small business. It would help our country economically,” Tupper said.

When Tupper was co-chair of the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, he was in charge of coordinating efforts with the National Immigration Forum to provide immigration-focused training opportunities to law enforcement agencies around the country and to advocate for immigration legislation at the national level.

When he retired as chief in Marshalltown, Tupper gave up his role as co-chair of the task force, but he has maintained relationships with the organization and still volunteers his time occasionally as a subject-matter expert.

“We continue to try to educate elected officials and we try to work with law enforcement agencies to steer the conversation toward more a bipartisan, or less partisan, approach to these issues, and looking for long-term solutions instead of just doing things for short-term resolution that don’t really solve problems,” Tupper said.

Tupper first became interested in fostering better relationships between immigrant communities and police when he was a new officer in Ottumwa, where there also is a community of immigrants and refugees, many of whom arrived while Tupper was employed there.

When he left to become chief in Nevada, Tupper said he missed the diversity that he saw in Ottumwa, and that was part of why he decided to later take the job in Marshalltown.

“I learned as a young police officer that … we can’t arrest our way out of problems. We need to build trust in the community,” Tupper said. “We need people to be willing to call us when they need help, and just as important, we need people to be able and to be willing to call us when they can help us. And that all starts with building relationships.”

One immigration policy that Tupper says can play a key part in helping law enforcement build and maintain those relationships is ensuring that local law enforcement agencies are not involved in immigration enforcement, something that has been pushed recently by the Trump administration.

The Iowa State Patrol is the only agency in Iowa that currently has a 287(g) agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agreement is a contract that gives local law enforcement agencies authority to perform immigration enforcement. ICE has been encouraging departments to adopt the agreements since Trump took office.

“There’s a lot of pressure on local law enforcement agencies across the country from the federal government to be more involved with the immigration enforcement mission. I don’t think that that’s an appropriate use of local tax dollars, and I think it will actually diminish public safety in our communities,” Tupper said.

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com