More States Back Feds On Immigration Despite Profiling Fear

As the Trump administration seeks more partners to help round up immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, some states and cities are eager to Join in, despite risks of racial profiling.

Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Arizona’s Democratic governor are pursuing statewide plans to help find immigrants for possible deportation.

The number of state and local agencies planning “task force” agreements with the feds to do street-level immigration enforcement has reached 110 departments in 11 states: Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas, Stateline reports..

The sudden ramping up of the local task force agreements — which led to racial profiling lawsuits 20 years ago when they were common — is a sign that the Trump administration wants more deportations, said Tom Wong of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego.

“These agreements are intended to be the force multiplier they need in order to enact mass deportations. The Trump administration is using all the tools at its disposal to try to ramp up the identification and detention of undocumented immigrants,” Wong said.

The U.S would need to deport more than 2,700 people a day to meet Trump's goal of 1 million a year.

Doris Meissner, who held top positions in the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, said the task force agreements had “basically disappeared in recent years” because of their reputation for leading to “racial profiling and over-policing in immigrant communities.” The agreements were discontinued in 2012 during the Obama administration.

The administration is increasingly pressuring state and local authorities to help with immigration arrests traditionally reserved for federal agents, says the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank where Meissner directs the U.S. immigration policy program..

In his address to Congress on Tuesday, President Trump renewed his ask for more funding to carry out his immigration agenda.

Trump's mass deportation plans are near-impossible to achieve without more money, which Democrats are likely to oppose. Trump Cabinet members, headed by border czar Tom Homan, have made a similar ask for weeks.

In the speech, Trump said he hoped to surpass the deportation record of "current record holder Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders" — a reference to Operation Wetback, Axios reports.

That mass deportation, in the 1950s, used military-style tactics to round up 1.3 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans for the-then largest deportation operation in U.S. history. "Wetback" is a racial slur for Mexicans.

The president celebrated new data on border crossings in February that showed they'd declined to their lowest level in decades.