The Trump administration is quietly using a program called 287(g) to turn local police and sheriff's departments into arms of its deportation machine.

This week, the Trump administration hit a milestone of 1,000 participating state and local agencies. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is aggressively recruiting for this deportation-collaboration program. It is now offering cash to local police in exchange for "locating" our immigrant neighbors, as it attempts to reach a level of deportations never before seen in our nation's history.

President Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to remove 20 million people from the country. That's 5.8% of our population. This ambitious project — most visible in the masked deportation squads that are smashing car windows and forcing people into black vans — is likely to grow even more nefarious as ICE leeches on to local police to help it.

How Local Police Become Deportation Assistants

The 287(g) Program is a set of partnerships between ICE and state and local agencies that effectively turns local officials into ICE agents, authorizing selected officers to identify, arrest and process certain people for immigration enforcement and ultimately deportation.

Local law enforcement participating in the 287(g) program are redeployed from local public safety matters to be an ICE force multiplier. This could include interrogating anyone they believe to be a noncitizen about their right to be in the country and asking for their citizenship papers. It could mean that local jails continue to hold people — grandparents, caretakers and other long-time residents who lack legal status — beyond when they would otherwise be released after a minor infraction or posting bail until ICE comes to take them away. Local police officers become secretaries for ICE — doing paperwork and helping process people for deportations.

Many law enforcement leaders oppose 287(g) because it is a drain on local resources. It not only wastes police officers' time, but it also has led to costly lawsuits for constitutional rights violations, including wrongly holding U.S. citizens. Numerous studies show that this program hurts public safety. People are less likely to come forward to seek police protection when they know calling 911 could result in their family member or friend being deported.

Record Number of Police Now Working With ICE

At the end of President Barack Obama's administration, there were just 32 participating state and local law enforcement agencies. That leapt to 152 in Trump's first term, and the administration removed guardrails such as expiration dates for participation agreements.

President Joe Biden's administration left the program largely intact, refusing to kick out participating law enforcement agencies with records of racial profiling and anti-immigrant abuse, despite calls from the ACLU and our partners.

Now, in just eight months of the second Trump administration, the number of local agencies opting to act as deportation force multipliers has grown by 600%. The program has encroached into states that until now had few or no participating agencies, such as Iowa, Maine, New Mexico, Utah and West Virginia.

287(g) Program Expands in Dangerous New Ways

Congress first authorized 287(g) in 1996, permitting the federal government to delegate certain federal immigration enforcement responsibilities to designated state and local officers, subject to training and close supervision by federal officials. Now, just as the Trump administration has moved to exploit other long-standing legal authorities, it has gone far beyond what Congress intended and morphed this program into a larger, cannibalizing force, the full implications of which we have yet to see.

In the coming months, we expect ICE to tap local police to join its multiagency masked deportation squads across the country. Already, in April, ICE boasted a "first-of-its-kind statewide operation" involving ICE and more than a dozen sheriff's offices, the state of Florida, the FBI and other federal agencies. Blurring law enforcement agencies into a single, unaccountable deportation force is a recipe for civil rights abuses and government waste.

ICE has also illegally relied on 287(g) to detain people at the notorious "Alligator Alcatraz" detention center, a hastily constructed facility in the middle of the Florida Everglades, which is surrounded by alligators, snakes, mosquitos and swampland. The ACLU and our partners recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of people detained there.

ICE has also penned agreements with state National Guards in Texas, Florida and West Virginia. It has tapped campus police departments and even agencies that are not law enforcement-oriented, such as the Florida Department of Lottery Services.

Our Communities Are Fighting Back

We are seeing vocal opposition to agreements under consideration in communities nationwide. At a July meeting of the Utah County Commission in Utah, "the vast majority" of public input on a 287(g) agreement was opposed — citing racial profiling, the risk of unidentified ICE agents and "religious values of loving their neighbors." In Miami, lines of people gathered before the meeting and delivered hours of passionate public comments against the city joining the program. In Camden, Delaware, the city quietly approved an agreement and then backtracked and withdrew after robust public opposition. This led to the state passing legislation to ban these agreements statewide.

If local governments choose to participate in the 287(g) program, despite community opposition, they can put limits and oversight on how local law enforcement is supporting federal deportation agents and how this impacts community members.

We expect demands for transparency and accountability to grow in the coming weeks and months — the longer we all witness the violence of the masked deportation squads, the more opposition to them will grow.

Naureen Shah is the director of government affairs in the equality division at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she leads the ACLU's immigration policy and advocacy work. For more than 100 years, the ACLU has worked in courts, legislatures and communities to protect the constitutional rights of all people. With a nationwide network of offices and millions of members and supporters, the ACLU takes on the toughest civil liberties fights in pursuit of liberty and justice for all. To find out more about the ACLU and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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