In order to find and imprison immigrants who are in the country illegally and are being charged, the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office in suburban Indianapolis has long sought to collaborate with federal immigration authorities.
According to the sheriff’s office, calls to President Joe Biden’s administration were never answered. However, Hamilton County deputies may soon be the first in Indiana to be authorised to perform federal immigration duties as President Donald Trump cracks down on illegal immigration. Trump’s administration hopes to recruit many more deputies around the country.
Chief Constable John Lowes told The Associated Press, “We are definitely joining.” “We want to work with ICE to ensure the safety of our community.”
A decades-old program that prepares local police enforcement to question and detain immigrants in their custody is being revived and expanded by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement under Trump. Named for a provision of the 1996 statute that established it, the 287(g) program presently only applies to people who are already incarcerated or jailed on charges.
However, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, recently informed sheriffs that he wants to revive a program that former President Barrack Obama abandoned due to concerns about racial profiling by expanding it to include local task forces that have the authority to make arrests on the street. It’s unclear if that would enable local law enforcement to stop individuals just to verify their immigration status.
The Florida Highway Patrol and ICE have reached an agreement to question, arrest, and detain individuals suspected of being in the country illegally and turn them over to federal authorities, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stated on Friday.
According to DeSantis, the agreement will assist in “fulfilling the president’s mission to effectuate the largest deportation program in American history.”
Meanwhile, new agreements that place local law enforcement on immigration enforcement are alarming immigrant advocates.
According to Nayna Gupta, policy director at the nonprofit American Immigration Council, “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, and of having a chilling effect in terms of communities reporting crime to local law enforcement agencies.”
A sluggish program is energised
Many of the original 287(g) program participants had agreements in place in the early 2000s that permitted them to enforce immigration laws outside of their jails, in their communities. However, issues surfaced in a number of locations, including Arizona.
According to a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice civil rights investigation, deputies in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, have a history of racial profiling, illegal stops, and arrests of Latinos. The contract between the county and the Department of Homeland Security was terminated.
According to Lena Graber, senior staff attorney at the NGO Immigrant Legal Resource Centre, the initiative became “the hallmark of far-right, anti-immigrant sheriffs” as a way “to feed people on the basis of their ethnicity into the deportation machine.”
ICE has provided law enforcement organisations with two different kinds of 287(g) agreements in recent years. One approach, which involves four weeks of training, permits local authorities to detain suspected noncitizens for ICE and question them while they are incarcerated on other offences. Trump introduced a different approach during his first term that only permits local authorities to serve federal immigration warrants and only requires eight hours of training.
In 21 states, ICE had 135 agreements with sheriff’s offices, police departments, and prison systems as of December; 35 more jurisdictions were still requesting agreements. Only three states—Florida, Texas, and North Carolina—had two-thirds of the agreements. However, according to ICE records, no agreements had been inked during Biden’s four years in office.
Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to make the most of 287(g) agreements allowing local law enforcement to investigate, detain, and arrest immigrants on his first day back in office. Homan stated at a recent National Sheriffs’ Association conference that the government wants to promote more cooperation with federal immigration officers by reducing the length of the training and loosening the rules governing detention facilities.
Kieran Donahue, president of the association, praised the news.
“There is no doubt that local sheriff’s offices across the nation will sign on to this program,” Donahue told the AP.
However, Donahue has no plans to start his own agency in Idaho’s Canyon County.
He added, “I have no bed space in my facility, so I don’t have that kind of manpower.” Nothing.
States advocate for mandatory ICE training The first state to sign a 287(g) agreement with the federal government was the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which established an immigration enforcement task force in 2002. Twenty years later, Florida was the first state to mandate that all local government entities that had county jails either join the program or provide the state with an explanation for their inability to do so.
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Last year, Georgia approved a legislation mandating local law enforcement agencies to apply for the program after Laken Riley, a student at the University of Georgia, was killed by a Venezuelan man who was in the country illegally.
Republican lawmakers are attempting to mandate or provide incentives for cooperative agreements with ICE in around a dozen states this year. Texas state representative David Spiller, a Republican who also wrote a bill enabling any law enforcement official to detain migrants suspected of entering the nation illegally, is the sponsor of one measure. Due to a legal challenge, that law is on pause.
Mandatory involvement in ICE programs is crucial, according to Spiller.
During the next year and a half, Spiller stated, “President Trump and border czar Homan cannot remove and deport all the people that are a public safety threat to our state and our nation without the help of our local law enforcement.”
Legislators in Florida have already approved legislation this year that will provide millions of dollars for local immigration enforcement initiatives. Tennessee legislation would instruct the state to submit an application for the 287(g) program and authorise funding for participating local agencies.
This week, the Indiana Senate also passed legislation establishing a state grant program for 287(g) participants; the House is now considering it. The plan was described as “very, very dangerous” and “very, very disturbing” by Democratic state senator Rodney Pol.
“We are placing too much pressure on individuals, especially law enforcement officials, who will be forced to dismantle their communities,” Pol stated.
However, Hamilton County deputies will only target those who are already incarcerated, according to Lowes. He claimed that more than 500 people who were thought to be noncitizens were booked by the jail last year on allegations that included drug use, driving under the influence, theft, burglary, sexual battery, and other offences. He claimed that ICE got engaged in 64 of those instances, though it’s unclear how many were in the country illegally.
“We think that this program will help us see a decrease in some of those crimes and will help us get some of the people who are committing crimes that endanger our safety out of our community,” Lowes stated.
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