For years, the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in suburban Indianapolis has wanted to partner with federal immigration authorities to identify and detain immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally and facing charges.
President Biden’s administration never returned its calls. As President Trump cracks down on illegal immigration, Hamilton County deputies soon could become the first in Indiana empowered to carry out federal immigration duties and one of many nationally that Trump’s administration hopes to enlist.
“We definitely are joining,” said Chief Deputy John Lowes. “We want to collaborate with ICE to make sure we keep our community safe.”
Under Trump, Customs and Immigration Enforcement is reviving and expanding a decades-old program that trains local law officers to interrogate immigrants in their custody and detain them for potential deportation.
The 287(g) program — named for a section of the 1996 law that created it — currently applies only to those already jailed or imprisoned on charges, reports the Associated Press.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has told sheriffs that he wants to expand it to include local task forces that can make arrests on the streets, reviving a model that former President Obama discontinued amid concerns about racial profiling. It’s unclear whether that could allow local officers to stop people solely to check their immigration status.
On Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that the Florida Highway Patrol had struck an agreement with ICE to interrogate, arrest and detain immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally and deliver them to federal authorities.
Advocates for immigrants are raising alarm about new pacts that put local law officers on immigration enforcement.
Advertisement
“All of these agreements, in practice, have the same track record of racial profiling, of sweeping in U.S. citizens or people who have lawful status, of having a chilling effect in terms of communities reporting crime to local law enforcement agencies,” said Nayna Gupta of the nonprofit American Immigration Council.
The Trump administration's scramble to find more detention space for unauthorized immigrants has led the federal Bureau of Prisons to begin holding some of those who've been arrested
Congress has given ICE enough money to hold roughly 40,000 immigrants in detention, and the average number detained last month was already near capacity, Axios reports.
Trump's plans to deport "millions and millions" of unauthorized immigrants is leading to as many as 1,000 arrests a day — below the administration's goals but far more than the system can hold in detention.
Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy and an architect of the president's immigration policy, is demanding that top ICE officials find money to open up more detention space.
Besides the federal prison system, officials are turning to local law enforcement agencies to help hold immigrants who've been arrested but not yet deported.
Homan has asked sheriffs across the country to rent out space in their local jails to detain immigrants. He made the pitch this month at a National Sheriffs' Association convention in Washington, D.C.
Comments