By W. Carsten Andresen
During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump has been establishing a framework for deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. It’s something he has previously vowed will be “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
Part of that operation includes what’s known as the federal 287(g) program. Established in 1996, it allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose work is normally carried out by federal officials, to train state and local authorities to function as federal immigration officers.
Under 287(g), for example, local police officers can interview people to determine their immigration status. They can also issue immigration detainers to jail people until agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement take custody.
“Illegal immigration has wide-ranging consequences, including a troubling surge of dangerous drugs into our state,” T.K. Waters, sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida, said in a February 2025 statement to explain his office’s participation in 287(g). “We remain committed to partnering with President Trump’s administration and our federal counterparts to secure our borders, protect Floridians, and establish a framework for the rest of the nation to follow.”
Local police authorities across the country – from Jackson County, Texas, to Frederick County, Maryland – are participating in 287(g) for similar reasons.
Since Trump began his second term in January, ICE has increased 287(g) agreements from 135 in 25 states in December 2024 to 628 in 40 states as of May 28, 2025.
As a criminal justice scholar, I believe the surge of 287(g) agreements sets a dangerous precedent for local policing, where forging relationships and building the trust of immigrants is a proven and effective tactic in combating crime. In my view, the expansion of 287(g) will erode that trust and makes entire communities – not just immigrants – less safe.
Past federal-local cooperation
There is a long history of federal authorities collaborating with local police to enforce immigration laws.
During the Great Depression, federal officials blamed Latinos for taking American jobs, and local agencies helped them deport up to 1.8 million people to Mexico. It’s estimated that 60% of those deported were U.S. citizens.
In the early 1930s, local police participated in immigration raids in California and other states. As author Adam Goodman details in his book “The Deportation Machine,” state and local government agencies, including social workers, welfare agencies and police, acted as “de facto immigration agents.”
Trump’s mass deportation plan mirrors President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 federal immigration initiative, which resulted in 1.3 million deportations.
As author Natalia Molina notes in her book “How Race is Made in America,” local police often served as “immigration cops” in Eisenhower’s program because the federal government “did not have enough agents to cover such a large territory” as the U.S.
During his two terms, President Barack Obama deported over 5 million people and used the 287(g) program to help him do that, primarily to target jailed or recently arrived undocumented people. Obama’s use of 287(g) peaked at 76 agreements during his first term but dropped to 35 during his second term.
A Justice Department investigation launched in 2008 found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona engaged in unconstitutional law enforcement actions against Latinos. The Justice Department found that the sheriff’s office engaged in a pattern of “unlawful seizures, including unjustified stops, detentions, and arrests, of Latinos in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
Joshua Lott/Getty Images
Power of local policing
Forty states have adopted 287(g) agreements as of May 2025.
This could have effects outside of the immigration laws.
In the past 45 years, many law enforcement professionals in urban areas have highlighted the importance of forging relationships and building trust with immigrant communities. That’s because the police depend on the participation of all citizens to prevent crime and solve criminal investigations.
But police departments across the U.S. have found that 287(g) partnerships erode that trust.
In 1979, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates created Special Order 40 that prohibited local officers from enforcing immigration laws in response to community complaints alleging discrimination against Latinos. Gates issued the order “to encourage immigrants to cooperate with police and build community trust.”
Other large police departments followed. In places such as Chicago and San Francisco, they shifted focus from helping federal immigration officials to prioritizing community relationships.
William Bratton, who led six police departments, including in Boston, Los Angeles and New York, criticized 287(g) in a 2009 op-ed. He said that deputizing local officers to enforce immigration laws immediately “undermines their core public safety mission.”
Conservative police scholar George Kelling, co-author of the broken windows theory, which presumes that visible signs of disorder can lead to crime, also expressed support for local police agencies prioritizing their community relationships.
In a 1999 study, Kelling highlighted a San Diego police memo announcing its refusal to enforce federal immigration laws. The San Diego Police Department, he wrote, “thought through its values, mission, and functions and elaborated a policy that put public safety and harmony above aggressive attempts to ferret out undocumented aliens.”
During Trump’s first administration, some police chiefs echoed Bratton and Kelling. They warned that employing local officers to enforce immigration measures could spark fear and damage public safety.
Former Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole stated in 2016 that Seattle police officers were prohibited from “inquiring about a person’s immigration status.”
And former Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn announced in 2016 that his department does not enforce immigration law.
He added, “It is our opinion, our strongly held belief that our responsibility is to protect the residents of our city. To protect them, they must trust us, they must be willing to report crimes, they must be willing to be witnesses.”
Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images
Consequences of 287(g)
President Trump has frequently linked immigrants with higher crime rates, calling them murderers and rapists.
But multiple studies have found that undocumented people commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens.
Although the Trump administration is expanding the use of local police in immigration enforcement, research casts doubt on using mass deportation as a crime reduction strategy.
A 2018 study on 287(g) from the libertarian Cato Institute found no evidence that ICE-led partnerships with local police decreased crime rates.
And a 2014 study on the Secure Communities Program, which calls for local police agencies to share arrestee information with federal immigration officials, found that this program has “no discernible impact” on crime in medium and large municipalities.
The Trump administration’s expansion of 287(g) ignores the shift that some big city police departments have made away from immigration enforcement in favor of community policing. And I believe it threatens to undermine the relationship between local police and the increasingly diverse communities they serve.
W. Carsten Andresen is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at St. Edward’s University.
Jack says
I agree 100%. Trump is making it harder to find the criminal, because of his policies most legal immigrants are afraid to work with the police to weed out the criminal.
Biden has deported more illegals than Trump and he did it legally. Trump’s policies make it more difficult to deport the criminals, so he’s going after people that are here legally to make up with his deportation deficit.
I worked with the Sheriff’s office for a few years. The main rule was to work with the immigrant community to build up a trust so they will work with Law enforcement to solve crimes and weed out the criminals. Without cooperation from those communities crimes are difficult to solve.
Trump has violated that trust and now it’s making it harder to solve crimes. Less illegals have been deported during Trump’s Presidency than under Biden. The deportation numbers this year have now dropped sharply. Political Rederick makes bad policy and it’s impacting the smooth and efficient functioning government. The damage being done is self-inflicted and will drag out by losing trust and will make it harder to find the bad guys.
Laurel says
And I agree 100% with Jack.
Our local police and sheriff deputies should be focused locally, and not trying to fulfill the toddler’s fantasy. That’s just political bullshit. Trump lies. Don’t follow.
I don’t want to live under a “golden dome” that’s what abusers and cultists do: separate people from the outside. Give them only information that serves a very narrow purpose. Our local police should not be participating.
Skibum says
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I could have written this article because from what I have seen and experienced during my long law enforcement career, I agree wholeheartedly with the author’s view and have been voicing the same concerns for a very long time. It is NOT the responsibility of state and local law enforcement to round up those suspected of being in the U.S. illegally!!! In particular, every local police and sheriff’s department’s law enforcement personnel absolutely has to have the cooperation and help from the public in their communities to be effective. We have all seen what happens in places where the citizens turn against the police because of a lack of trust, and the obvious result is less 911 calls reporting crimes, people looking the other way, not wanting to step up and provide critical witness information even in serious crimes, less arrests and convictions, and MORE CRIME. Who wants to live in a place like that?
If the feds want to increase their efforts to enforce federal immigration laws and round up suspected illegals, why is the federal government demanding that ICE officers increase all of their individual workloads but not giving them the resources they need, instead threatening local and state law enforcement agencies to drop their own duties and have police perform federal law enforcement responsibilities simply because of coercion and threats of taking away federal dollars from local authorities?
I know for a fact that most immigrants who come into this country are exceedingly thankful to be here, and are hard-working people just trying to survive and make an honest living like the rest of us, but doing the work that NO Americans are willing to do like toiling in the hot sun out in the agriculture fields picking crops. They are much more likely to be VICTIMS of crime than criminals committing crimes, yet they have all been targeted with the swipe of a very broad brush, putting that thought in people’s minds by the one person at the top of our nation’s government who REALLY is a criminal. The orange-faced buffoon who is spearheading this anti-migrant bullshit came down that golden elevator in drumph tower years ago spouting about Mexican migrants being rapists, murderers, and “very bad people”. Well, I’m here to tell the maga mush brains that it is drumph, NOT migrants, who is the sexual abuser, having been found liable in court of sexually attacking an innocent shopper in a store’s dressing room! It was him who was convicted of all 34 felony crimes in a court of law. Drumph is a “very bad person”!!! If we had the option, HE is the one who should be deported to one of his favorite third world country high security “prisons” to protect the law abiding citizens here in America from his atrocities!
It seems like everything that drumph lashes out about is a mirror image of what HE is about… not others. I cannot wait for the day when this country is rid of the most disgusting, immoral thug to ever soil the cushions of the WH furniture. HE is the lawless one, not migrants, who should be carted away, not to be seen or heard from again.
Mike P says
So on Tuesday, an MS-13 member, child sex offender nabbed amid federal immigration enforcement on Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard. On March 17th, 10 Sex Offenders were arrested in Florida by U.S. Border Patrol Agents in the Miami area as well. These are just a few of many stories of public safety being increased. My grandparents migrated from Poland, LEGALLY, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939. They got their citizenship, my grandfather worked on the railroads, then US Steel in Massachusetts, my grandmother in a Worcester factory. They didn’t get federal handouts, live in sanctuary cities, commit crimes. They contributed to this country, paying their taxes, building a family of 8 children. Legalizing immigration offers significant economic, social, and individual benefits that can contribute to a stronger and more prosperous society. Our local law enforcement officers, enforcing immigration laws, removing illegal’s have come here after committing serious crimes, or committing them while here, makes us all much safer.
Alice says
The system is broken and the Trump Administration is the biggest offender. Judges are ruling how the illegal procedures they continue to do.
How about fixing the system correctly and legally?
Many agree they don’t want anyone in our country that isn’t legally permitted. But why is Trump sending those that are here legally to a dangerous prison in other countries?
It doesn’t matter what party you are with, everything should be done correctly and legally no matter what political position you hold in our government and the includes the President of the USA.
Pogo says
@Professor Andresen, and Jack
… are, IMO, correct, and too, on the side of wisdom and angels.
A police state is what it is — not something else; all complaints may be referred to the staff of room 101:
Sign in before entering
https://www.google.com/search?q=room+101
Marek says
I agree with Jack. The job of thee police and the Sheriff is to prevent and combat crime .
Alienating local population is not the way.
William Moya says
Let’s cut through the BS, this is the US stumbling froward to full fascism, and intimidation, if you think this is hyperbole go back to our history books. The fissures to our foundation are beginning to show.