How Trump could use county sheriffs for mass deportations: report

President Trump could allow state and local law enforcement agencies, such as B. give sheriff departments the authority to carry out specific immigration enforcement tasks. The authority comes from Section 287(g), which was added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996.

The program allows officers to remove incarcerated criminal noncitizens before releasing them back into the community. Everything happens under the direction and supervision of ICE.

The 287(g) program has two models:

• The jail enforcement model targets individuals with criminal or pending criminal charges who have already been arrested by state or local law enforcement.
• The Warrant Service Officer Program allows ICE to train, certify, and authorize local law enforcement officers to execute administrative warrants against noncitizens in their agency’s jail.

As of May 2024, ICE had model prison enforcement agreements with 60 law enforcement agencies in 16 states and warrant officer agreements with 75 agencies in 11 states.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the president-elect is also considering a plan to redirect billions of dollars from NGOs and cities that assist newly arrived migrants to law enforcement agencies that hand migrants over to ICE.

The Journal report said the Trump transition team is aware that it will need to significantly increase its resources if it wants to carry out a mass deportation.

The new border czar, Thomas Homan, said he would guarantee that federal funding would be cut off from states and cities that do not cooperate with deportations. The Trump administration plans to reward those who cooperate.

Homan said they will prioritize the deportation of people who pose a threat to public and national security, including refugees, people on the terrorist watch list and people convicted of a crime