Police Departments Across the Country Cave to Aligning with ICE

Over the last nearly 100 days of the Trump administration, local police departments in at least five states, including Florida, Indiana, Maine, South Carolina and Texas, are partnering with ICE.

You read that right. Through a government program known as 287(g), those local officers are helping this administration carry out an unprecedented crackdown on migrants. Because of this partnership, they will now be able to perform tasks like interviewing individuals, checking databases to find the detained person’s information, and issuing immigration detainers on people in their communities.

Although the 287(g) law was enacted in 1996, under this administration, partnerships with ICE have more than tripled from administrations’ past. As you read this story there are more than 450 active partnerships between ICE and local police.

So, how exactly will local police enforce ICE policies? There are three main ways:

1) The Task Force Model allows local officers to question, detain, and arrest individuals they suspect of violating civil immigration laws.

2) The Jail Enforcement Model allows local officers to interrogate incarcerated suspected noncitizens and can request to keep the person up to 48 hours after they would otherwise be released, allowing ICE officers to pick the individual up.

3) The Warrant Service Officer Model allows local officers to execute ICE administrative warrants within the agency’s jails or correctional facilities but not interrogate alleged noncitizens about their immigration status.

While some police departments work with their communities to assure them they’re a separate entity from ICE, others are silently voting to cooperate with ICE despite presiding over largely Latino communities. What we do know is that giving ICE-like-powers to local police will not only detain undocumented immigrants, but, it leaves everyone, US citizens, tourists, residents, and folks in varied legal processes vulnerable to racial profiling, unwarranted arrests, and for their civil and human rights to be violated.