Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been given the green light to open a field office in Flagstaff.

But during the City Council meeting Tuesday, agents will attempt to quiet any fears that agents will be in northern Arizona to conduct roundups of undocumented immigrants.

The move comes six months after agents arrested more than a dozen local undocumented immigrants without warrants who were caught up in a search for criminal aliens. Many happened to answer the door when agents attempted to serve warrants on someone else in the house.

According to a staff report, the agents who will staff the Flagstaff office will not be conducting “neighborhood sweeps in order to seek out undocumented citizens for deportation.”

Rather, the agents will combat a whole host of other crimes that are committed by undocumented immigrants, according to the PowerPoint presentation ICE agents will give during Tuesday’s meeting.

Among those primary duties are:

— Tracking down inbound drug smuggling and stash houses

— Tracking down inbound human smuggling and drop houses

— Tracking down outbound weapon and money smuggling

— Responding to violent offenses

According to information from ICE, removals of undocumented immigrants from the country rose between 2007 (44,000) and 2008 (73,000).

The presentation comes in the wake of a raid ICE agents made in Flagstaff in November 2008. The operation, according to ICE, was meant to find undocumented immigrants already adjudicated as being in the country illegally and ordered to leave the country. The reality was that when agents came across people during raids who were unable to provide documentation as they knocked on doors searching for fugitives, agents arrested those people, too.

During the raid, a local activist group went into a neighborhood where the raid was being conducted and later protested the ICE presence in Flagstaff. The Arizona Civil Liberties Union filed suit against ICE seeking documents generated after the raids following reports that ICE violated due process rights of immigrants and residents of northern Arizona.

Sixteen people were arrested in Flagstaff, with a total of 80 people arrested statewide.

Although neither Flagstaff police nor Coconino County sheriff’s deputies assisted the ICE agents, they were present in an observational role, according to police and sheriff’s officials.

Police will also give the council an overview of department special orders regarding when an officer inquires into the immigration status of a person.

Among the special orders, an officer:

— Will inquire about immigration status in the event of an arrest

— Will not inquire about immigration status of victims of crime unless the information is pertinent to the investigation

— Will not arrest based solely on immigration status

— Will not consider a traffic citation an arrest

Because the office in Flagstaff was recently approved, no staffing has been made yet, according to the PowerPoint document.

ICE has requested temporary office space at the Law Enforcement Administrative Facility on Sawmill Road and will pay rent while there if approved by the mayor and council, according to staff documents. Two other federal agencies — Drug Enforcement Administration and Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — already rent office space at LEAF.

As to whether ICE will be granted permission to rent space at the police department is unclear. But according to a recent proclamation issued by Mayor Sara Presler on May 1, she declared May “Civil Liberties and Human Rights Month.”

Included in the proclamation is wording that the city does not condone any action on the part of an organization or individual that is contrary to the city’s commitment to civil liberties, human rights and respect for all people.

Larry Hendricks can be reached at 556-2262 or lhendricks@azdailysun.com.

If you go

What: City Council work session

Where: City Hall, 211 W. Aspen Ave., downtown.

When: 5:30 p.m. Tuesday

Information: 779-7600