In addition to deploying tens of thousands of federal agents from across the federal government to carry out his deportation agenda, President Donald Trump is rapidly expanding the network of state and local police going after immigrants through partnerships with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The aggressive, nationwide law enforcement regime, all taking place under orders from the White House, amounts to what scholars, attorneys, and now a federal judge say are steps toward the creation of a national police force. And the ranks of ICE partners won’t be filled with just local cops: In at least three states, the administration is joining forces with agencies typically tasked with environmental and marine protection, lottery control, and gaming to target immigrants.
“This is quite a common tactic,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who studies immigration and crime. ”There’s this idea that we’re going to get local, not just police officers, but nurses and teachers and other public officials involved in enforcing immigration laws.”
It started largely with immigration, using federal agents and a little-remarked-upon program known as 287(g) to funnel funding to local law enforcement for partnerships. The widespread ICE incursions and local police partnerships, however, have also been justified by the myth of an immigrant crime wave.
“The research is pretty unequivocal that these policies have no impact on public safety.”
“There is this moral panic now about migrant crime. This is rhetoric that is at odds generally with what we know about immigration and crime,” Kubrin said. “The research is pretty unequivocal that these policies have no impact on public safety whatsoever.”
“We didn’t really need this increased cooperation,” she said. “The foundational assumption of this widespread immigrant criminality upon which all of these policies and practices are based, is patently not true.”
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Recruiting and paying local police to do immigration work, however, is just one part of the bigger project of creating such a national police force, said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Naureen Shah. And critics are worried that with Trump’s willingness to leverage state power for his own ends, such a security force could become a tool for carrying out the president’s political agenda.
Shah, who leads the ACLU’s policy and advocacy work on immigration, said, “Their larger project is to blur the lines between different law enforcement agencies in the military and create one national police force that is essentially under the command of the president.”
Local Partners
By funneling money to local police to do immigration work that falls under the federal government’s purview, Trump is effectively bolstering a police force answerable to his own authority by slowly buying up state and local police on a massive scale. The administration announced last month that 1,000 agencies had partnered with ICE to help target people for deportation.
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The money is coming through a program that was falling out of favor prior to Trump’s first term: the 287(g) program, named for the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that forms the legal basis for local partners to detain and begin the process of deporting people targeted by the federal government.
For an administration eager to increase its sway over local law enforcement, immigration makes for a good starting point because the government has allocated astronomical sums of cash toward arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants.
Paired with Trump’s military deployments to U.S. cities, the expansion of federal control over local police is the first step down a slippery slope, said Shah.
“It starts with immigration, and it’s through immigration, but it’s not limited to immigration.”
“They’re having federal law enforcement agencies scale up taskforces with state and local law enforcement so that when they talk about deploying into whatever city it is, they are not deploying on their own just as an invading force,” she said. “It starts with immigration, and it’s through immigration, but it’s not limited to immigration.”
The Fall and Rise of 287(g)
287(g) agreements were on the decline before Trump was first elected in 2016. During his 2020 campaign, former President Joe Biden pledged that he would end all 287(g) agreements made by Trump. And, in recent years, local sheriffs ran for office on promises to refuse to work with ICE.
“There’s a reason why the federal government has largely been tasked with policing immigration, and that’s why there was a lot of resistance to 287(g) including among police chiefs,” said Kubrin, the UC Irvine professor.
Both tacks to reduce the agreements faltered. Biden ended a handful of contracts but largely left the agreements in place. And political pressure on law enforcement mounted to form agreements. Several Republican governors, for instance, sued sheriffs who refused to work with ICE and, in some cases, won cooperation with Trump’s deportation agenda.
Now, the mixture of financial incentives and politics are driving a surge. Since Trump took office, partnerships that deploy state and local police to go after immigrants have increased 600 percent.
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The number of law enforcement agencies signing on to aid Trump’s deportation machine is surging in part because local police agencies strapped for cash welcome additional funding. The Department of Homeland Security announced in September that it would pay out “performance awards” and fully reimburse police for annual salary and benefits for each 287(g) officer, including partial overtime coverage.
ICE is also offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000, along with student loan forgiveness, for new recruits, and airing ads to attract police in at least a dozen cities.
In addition to shoring up their finances, law enforcement agencies are also responding directly to political pressure from the White House.
“I think it has to do with political pressure for these jurisdictions to get involved,” Kubrin said. “There’s lots of political pressure.”
Much of the narrative around recruiting police to take on Trump’s deportation agenda has taken for granted that police should be helping ICE carry out their work, said the ACLU’s Shah. It’s not so much that ICE doesn’t have adequate resources, it’s that they need local police on their side to carry out Trump’s political agenda.
“They’re grabbing for local police because local police are all over the place,” Shah said. “It’s very linked to the larger threats of authoritarianism in the country, and I don’t see that in any of the coverage.”
More Than Just Cops
The massive, nationalized police force taking shape as Trump expands his reach into state and local agencies around the country is not limited to just police.
In Florida, for instance, the Trump administration has active 287(g) agreements with other state agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the Department of Environmental Protection law enforcement division, the Gaming Control Commission, and the Department of Lottery Services. Wildlife commissions in Louisiana and Virginia are also partnering with the administration to target immigrants for deportation, as well as Virginia’s Marine Resources Commission. (A spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources said the agency has not been requested to participate in any activities related to its 287(g) agreement since it entered into the partnership this summer.)
Since April, the administration has also partnered with university police or trustees for at least nine Florida state universities.
Partnering with agencies that aren’t traditionally focused on law enforcement is part of a strategy to enlist local officials outside of police in enforcing immigration laws, said Kubrin. The same strategy shaped laws like Arizona’s infamous S.B. 1070 migrant racial profiling law and others modeled after it in states like Georgia and Indiana.
Kubrin said she harbored a serious worry about eventually having to identify undocumented students in her own UC Irvine classes.
“It’s 10 times worse,” she said, “when you’re asking medical officials and teachers to be also policing immigration.”
The Invasion
The creep of federal control into state and local police departments comes as Trump has sent more than 35,000 troops to cities around the country. In a rambling address to military leaders earlier this month, Trump called to use American cities as training grounds for the military to fight a “a war from within.”
In a ruling last month against Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, a federal judge wrote that Trump had used the troops as his own police force and styled himself as chief.
“Almost three months after Defendants first deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, 300 National Guard members remain stationed there,” the judge wrote. “Moreover, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country—including Oakland and San Francisco, here in the Northern District of California—thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”
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Though Trump’s efforts to deploy the National Guard to Portland and Chicago have met legal roadblocks, the president is signaling that more cities could see National Guard deployments in the coming months. Several states have also agreed to use the National Guard to assist ICE.
None of it is likely to do much, Kubrin said.
“These policies and programs are not cashing in on the promise that they will lower crime rates,” Kubrin said. “But they are doing potential harm in communities.”
“Mass shootings, gun violence, gender based violence, corporate crime,” she said. “Immigrant crime is a very small slice of the crime problem.”
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