David Mahoney went to the White House last week with a whole bunch of issues to discuss. But President Donald Trump was focused on one thing: building a wall on the border to keep Mexicans out.
“The wall is my priority,” Mahoney recalls Trump saying. The other issues that Mahoney came to talk about, not so much.
Bill Lueders
Dane County Sheriff David J. Mahoney.
Mahoney, the sheriff of Dane County, Wisconsin, which includes Madison, recounted his February 13 meeting with Trump at the White House in an interview with The Progressive. He was there, for the second time in as many years, as a representative of the National Sheriffs’ Association, which includes more than 3,000 sheriffs offices throughout the country. Mahoney is the group’s treasurer as well as secretary of the Major County Sheriffs of America, a subset of the group that represents about 300 sheriffs offices from counties with 500,000 or more residents.
Eight representatives of the group met in the Roosevelt room for about an hour with Trump, his Chief of Staff General John Kelly, and White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway. Afterward, the sheriffs met in the Oval Office for another 30 minutes with Conway and Trump. Mahoney took part in a similar meeting with Trump in February 2017, soon after his Inauguration.
Eight representatives of the sheriffs' groups met in the Roosevelt room for about an hour with Trump, his Chief of Staff General John Kelly, and White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway.
Mahoney, a Democrat who has been elected sheriff three times since 2006 and is up for reelection this fall, says he raised two main issues with the President. The first was the opioid epidemic—which led, he says, to an average of twelve overdoses a week in Dane County last year. The second was the need for better mental health treatment of jail inmates.
According to Mahoney, 48 percent of inmates in the Dane County jail have some form of mental illness and “we could really use some assistance.” Allowing Medicare to continue to cover mental health treatment after a person becomes incarcerated “would be a big step in assisting sheriffs with the overwhelming health and treatment needs within our jails.”
But Trump’s mind was focused elsewhere. “He talked about his priorities,” says Mahoney. “Immigration is his number-one priority.” Especially the wall.
Mahoney acknowledges that his associations “represent sheriffs on the southern border who are very adamant about deporting non-U.S. citizens and building a wall.” He disagrees with the objective, though, saying he told the President that the wall is not a “cost-effective means of accomplishing his objectives.” He also argues that Trump’s rhetoric and policies are actually making the country less safe because people who can’t prove they are in the country legally are afraid to call law-enforcement when they become crime victims, robbing law enforcement of opportunities to look criminals up.
“A better means to address immigration is to find an expedited means to citizenship,” Mahoney says. The Dane County Sheriffs’ Office, under his watch, does not detain inmates with questionable immigration status past their legal release dates, as federal officials would like. But it does sometimes assist Border Patrol and immigration agents when they conduct “lawful actions” in Dane County.
Indeed, Mahoney supports the hiring of additional Border Patrol agents, which he believes can be useful in drug-interdiction efforts. He notes approvingly that Trump’s budget, released the same day as last week’s meeting, calls for adding 5,000 agents.
Trump has said he wants to address the opioid issue, and the sheriffs tried to engage him on it. As Mahoney tells it, “We brought up pharmaceutical painkillers, and it was Kellyanne Conway who then said, ‘Well, that’s a bigger problem.’ I interpreted this [as a reference to] money coming in from the pharmaceutical representatives.”
One topic that did not come up was gun violence. Mahoney says the sheriffs would have surely raised the issue had the meeting taken place after the mass school shooting that killed seventeen people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, the following day.
One topic that did not come up was gun violence.
Mahoney believes the sheriffs in his associations agree that mentally ill people should not have access to firearms. He supports a bill now before Congress, HR 2598, which would make it easier for family members and the courts to prevent certain persons from obtaining weapons and improve law enforcement access to databases. And he thinks that the need is overwhelming to ban high-capacity magazines and bump stock devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to spew bullets faster.
Do such sensible measures stand a chance in Trump’s America?
Mahoney believes that they do. He sees reason for optimism in the response to last week’s shooting, including by the students at Parkland, which has spurred plans for several major protests. He hopes that Congress and the administration have “gotten a wake-up call listening to this next generation of voters, the kids of Parkland, who have said that they are going to do what their parents could not do.”
In fact, Mahoney sees opportunities to make progress in all these areas, even if Trump has tunnel vision on the wall: “For every one of these issues—immigration, the opioid epidemic, mental-illness treatment in our jails, access to weapons—the answer is to be involved. Be engaged in the government process to make your elected officials know what your priorities are. That is the only way [to get things done] with this administration.”
Bill Lueders is managing editor of The Progressive.