This article is a part of HuffPost’s biweekly politics e-newsletter. Click right here to subscribe.
Last August, officers for Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and Conservation, the company tasked with defending wildlife and the surroundings, approached a gaggle of Hispanic males fishing on a dock and requested to do a routine inspection of their fish.
According to physique digicam footage obtained by an area tv station, the officers known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One stated that they had been advised to do immigration checks on individuals who look a sure manner.
“We’ve been instructed to check with immigration on anyone that just gives us a passport and doesn’t appear to be a citizen,” he stated. It’s not clear who gave the directions.
The officers arrested 5 males and turned them over to ICE.
The wildlife officers have been doing federal immigrant enforcement duties as a result of Florida, months earlier, had expanded its 287(g) settlement with the federal authorities. It’s a program that enables native and state legislation enforcement businesses to carry out duties which might be normally reserved for the federal authorities, reminiscent of immigration enforcement. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a number of crimson states have pushed by way of laws to broaden legislation enforcement’s cooperation with the president’s deportation agenda.
“They’ve deputized police into the ‘show me your papers patrol,’” Thomas Kennedy, a coverage analyst with Florida Immigrant Coalition, an immigration advocacy group, advised HuffPost.
Across the nation, blue states have been scrambling to determine how you can push again towards the federal surge of immigration officers into their states. But in crimson states the place lawmakers are blissful to adjust to immigration actions, quietly harmful operations are additionally underway.
Traditionally, police departments wouldn’t have the authority to cease or detain somebody based mostly on alleged immigration violations, that means the 287(g) agreements provide a workaround. While this system has a number of completely different fashionsall of them basically permit native legislation enforcement businesses to have interaction in immigration enforcement: They can query suspected immigrants, arrest somebody on suspicion of being within the nation with out authorization, and refer individuals who have been arrested for different alleged crimes to immigration enforcement businesses.
Federal 287(g) agreements are usually not new, however underneath this administration, crimson states have been doubling down and increasing their scope. Typically, native police use their very own budgets for operations. But the Trump administration has supplied to pay police salaries with the intention to make it simpler for native businesses to enroll. Last 12 months, it gave $39 million to legislation enforcement in Florida alone, in keeping with a latest report from the Migration Policy Institute, a corporation devoted to immigration analysis. As of this January, in keeping with the institute, 1,313 legislation enforcement businesses throughout the nation have entered into these agreements, up from simply 135 in September 2024. About half of these fall into what is named the “task force” mannequin, that means officers can interact in immigration enforcement in the midst of in any other case common police work.
“You have seen an exponential growth in 287(g) agreements in the Trump administration,” Cori Alonso-Yoder, a legislation professor and director of the Immigration Clinic on the University of Maryland Francis Scott Key School of Law, advised HuffPost. “The current enforcement model is the on-the-street, mass roundup style.”
According to a DHS map, 39 states have at the least one 287(g) settlement in place. (Seven states, together with everything of the continental West Coast, have state rules prohibiting such agreements, whereas others have pending legal guidelines seeking to ban such agreements.)
Last 12 months, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis introduced that Florida was increasing its 287(g) agreements to incorporate not simply native police departments however different state businesses just like the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Florida State Guard.
“Florida is setting the example for states in combating illegal immigration and working with the Trump Administration to restore the rule of law,” DeSantis stated that February, barely one month after Trump took workplace following an election marketing campaign targeted on mass deportation.
Republicans tout this system as an efficient solution to scale back crime, however research have discovered that immigrants don’t commit crimes at increased ranges than native-born Americans. Further analysis from the American Immigration Council has proven that agreements with ICE don’t successfully scale back crime, however they’ll stretch the sources of cash-strapped police departments.
For one factor, new obligations require new coaching — one thing that even official immigration brokers aren’t essentially getting. The FWC officer in Florida joked about how little coaching they’d obtained earlier than being despatched out to detain immigrants. “Looking like a newborn giraffe with wobbly legs trying to make his way around,” he stated of himself and his colleagues after arresting the lads. He additionally stated that he had about one hour of on-line coaching.
Former immigration officers have stated inexperienced and untrained officers improve the danger of violence and are a risk to public security.
In August 2025, West Virginia entered right into a 287(g) settlement with ICE underneath the duty power mannequin, permitting the National Guard and state police to undertake immigration enforcement.
“This level of coordination between West Virginia’s law enforcement and ICE will significantly speed up the process by which we arrest, detain, and deport illegal aliens,” Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey stated on the time.
Last week, ICE and the West Virginia governor’s workplace boasted in a press launch that greater than 650 undocumented immigrants had since been arrested within the state because of these partnerships. That’s up from the 88 undocumented immigrants that the state stated it had in custody on the time the settlement was signed.
But the partnerships with half-trained brokers don’t all the time lead to a robust case for legislation enforcement. In early January, West Virginia state police pulled over a automobile allegedly as a result of its license plates have been unclear. Officers turned two of the occupants, who have been immigrants from Venezuela and Honduras, over to federal immigration brokers.
A federal decide dominated on Thursday that that they had been wrongly jailed, had been cooperating with immigration coverage and posed no risk to nationwide safety. The courtroom ordered them launched. “There’s not a shred of evidence to support the government’s position,” the decide stated in the course of the listening to. “Not one iota. Not a jot or a tittle.”
Nor are these agreements the one manner states are speeding to conform. Florida has paired its 287(g) enlargement with legal guidelines aimed toward forcing compliance with ICE actions: In February, DeSantis signed into legislation a invoice requiring state businesses to make use of their “best efforts” to assist federal immigration enforcement.
The model of legislation is being echoed by different Republican-led states desirous to make their states inhospitable to immigrants: Tennessee, for instance, enacted eight immigration-related legal guidelines in simply 10 months, together with a legislation to carry charities liable in the event that they housed undocumented immigrants who dedicated crimes and a legislation declaring that kinds of out-of-state driver’s licenses obtainable to undocumented immigrants are usually not legitimate within the state.
“Tennessee has long been a testing ground for an anti-immigrant agenda,” stated Lisa Sherman Luna, government director of the Tennessee Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition, advised HuffPost. “But this year is a little different. They’re working with Stephen Miller to make Tennessee a model for Miller’s vision for America.”
The Republican-led state legislature additionally introduced a collection of payments final month that they touted as the results of a monthslong collaboration with the White House. “We’re not only going to cooperate with the White House and our federal immigration enforcement officials, but we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they are successful,” state Senate Republican Majority Leader Jack Johnson advised the Nashville Banner.
The proposed package deal of eight payments successfully forces individuals to work together with immigration enforcement with the intention to entry the fundamentals of public life: It features a legislation that may power native legislation enforcement and governments to cooperate with ICE or threat penalties, require immigrants to point out proof of authorized standing earlier than having the ability to entry any public profit and make youngsters confirm their immigration standing earlier than being allowed to enroll in colleges.
“They’re mandating cooperation with ICE and really trying to commandeer state and local resources to support the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda,” Sherman Luna stated.
Regardless of the state, the end result of such insurance policies are comparable. Immigrants afraid to go away the home, afraid that masked males might come snatch them or their households at any second. Ironically, the chilling impact is much like the states during which Trump has deployed federal brokers with a unfastened interpretation of “excessive force.”
“We don’t have the militarized operations because those are punishments for states that don’t cooperate, but it’s all over the place,” Kennedy stated about immigration enforcement in Florida.
It’s already having the impact of scaring the state’s immigrant inhabitants. After the Nashville space was struck by a debilitating ice storm in January that killed over two dozen individuals and left residents with out energy or water for greater than every week, some immigrants have been afraid to entry shelters. “Our communities are terrified,” stated Sherman Luna. “You have a portion of the population that doesn’t feel safe enough to access those shelters.”
Even because the worry of brutal enforcement techniques and legally doubtful arrests by the hands of federal brokers looms behind immigrants’ minds, a unique method that doesn’t use huge shows of power might yield the identical outcomes.
The American individuals are rising more and more weary of Trump’s immigration insurance policies. A February Quinnipiac University ballot discovered that 60% of voters believed the federal authorities was being too harsh in its therapy of undocumented immigrants, whereas greater than half stated that the administration’s immigration coverage was making the nation much less protected.
But the enlargement of 287(g) applications can, paradoxically, assist soften public criticisms, specialists counsel. Instead of scary visuals of individuals being tackled on the road by officers in physique armor, immigration enforcement turns into merely simply one other routine, bureaucratic interplay.
“Enforcement on the street is not the direction the Trump administration sees the political appetite going,” stated Alonso-Yoder, referencing the cruel federal crackdown in Minneapolis that’s gone viral for its photographs of violence and drawn widespread disapproval amongst Americans.
“When people have seen what immigration enforcement looks like in their neighborhoods and communities, we have seen outcry and protest,” Alonso-Yoder stated. “What 287(g) does is take the enforcement back behind closed doors.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/red-states-helping-trump-immigration_n_69865e9de4b0ddd030348cf2