A Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff’s deputy escorts a worker during an immigration raid in 2009 on a county landscaping contractor in Phoenix. President Donald Trump has revived the local task force agreements that were used by Maricopa County and others until they ended during the Obama administration amid concerns about racial profiling and other abuses. (Joshua Lott/Getty Images)
As the Trump administration seeks more partners to help round up immigrants living in the United States illegally, some states and cities are eager to step up, despite risks of racial profiling.
Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and even Arizona’s Democratic governor are pursuing statewide plans to help find immigrants for possible deportation.
And the number of state and local agencies planning “task force” agreements with the feds to do street-level immigration enforcement has reached 121 departments in 12 states: Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas.
The sudden ramping up of the local task force agreements — which led to racial profiling lawsuits 20 years ago when they were common in Republican and Democratic states — is a sign that the Trump administration wants more deportations, said Tom Wong, an associate professor and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego.
“These agreements are intended to be the force multiplier they need in order to enact mass deportations. The Trump administration is using all the tools at its disposal to try to ramp up the identification and detention of undocumented immigrants,” Wong said.
President Donald Trump wants to move quickly: He recently reassigned Caleb Vitello, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to a different post because immigration arrests and deportations weren’t as robust as Trump wanted. The United States would need to deport more than 2,700 people a day to meet his goal of 1 million a year.
Doris Meissner, who held top positions in the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, said the task force agreements had “basically disappeared in recent years” because of their reputation for leading to “racial profiling and over-policing in immigrant communities.” The agreements were discontinued in 2012 during the Obama administration.
“That has changed dramatically and quickly with the new Trump administration,” Meissner said in an interview. “[The agreements] are now on a list of ramping-up actions we’re seeing in pursuit of mass deportations.”
The administration is increasingly pressuring state and local authorities to help with immigration arrests traditionally reserved for federal agents, according to a February report by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank where Meissner is now director of the U.S. immigration policy program.
Focus on crime
Along with state and local law enforcement agencies, the Trump administration has enlisted federal agencies that have never before played a role in immigration enforcement: the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Migration Policy Institute report found.
One result of local involvement, according to a report Wong authored in 2019, is that once residents know that local police could question and arrest them on immigration charges, they are less likely to report crimes when they are victims or witnesses.
The new task force agreements allow local law enforcement, after training, to investigate immigration violations during day-to-day patrol duties. Sheriff Larry Kendrick in Owyhee County, Idaho, said he opted for it because voters in the county want it.
“My constituents support President Trump,” Kendrick said. “And of course me. I support the president’s mission 100%. I will do anything in my power to assist him.”
Kendrick said he doesn’t expect non-criminal immigrants, such as those staffing local dairy farms, to get any trouble from his deputies.
“We haven’t had any crime, really, out of that,” Kendrick said. “The main thing that bothers me is fentanyl.”
Wong said it’s typical for counties such as Owyhee County, which voted almost 83% for Trump last year, to be eager to join forces on immigration. But non-criminal immigrants are still likely to pay a price, he said.
“It is naïve for local officials to think they will only focus on things like fentanyl, when most of the immigration enforcement functions are going to identify undocumented immigrants, likely with no criminal history,” Wong said.
Most officials do stress the importance of removing criminals when calling for more task force agreements.
In announcing the revived task force program, border czar Tom Homan said he planned to “prioritize” criminals but also expected to deport people living here illegally even if they had no criminal record.
“We promised a mass deportation and that’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Homan told sheriffs at a February conference.
New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, said in a statement she supports state and local law enforcement agencies applying for the new task force cooperation agreements. “Criminals who are in our country illegally and pose a danger should be apprehended and removed,” she wrote.
No renewed interest
Some areas that made use of the agreements decades ago are not interested in trying it again. In 2010 there were 40 such agreements in 19 states, including nine in Virginia and seven in Arizona.
To date there are no agreements in Virginia or Arizona, though Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, signed an executive order Feb. 25 calling for an unspecified partnership with federal authorities in the state’s four border counties. The goal is stopping more fentanyl and human trafficking and not to “indiscriminately round people up,” according to Hobbs’ statement.
Arizona sheriffs have not heard anything specific about the governor’s plan, said David Rhodes, the Republican sheriff of Yavapai County and president of the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association. Yavapai County voted heavily for Trump. And much of the nation’s fentanyl supply is smuggled over Arizona’s highways, Rhodes said, so he’s happy to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration.
But he’s not sure he wants the task force model if it means he and his deputies will have to single people out based on appearance to ask about immigration status.
“I don’t know how you could even tell from looking at somebody that they’re here illegally or not. So we don’t do that. That’s very risky, very close to racial profiling there,” Rhodes said.
ICE guidelines issued in February say “racial profiling is simply not something that will be tolerated” under the new task force agreements.
In Virginia, which had the most task force agreements of any state in 2010, no sheriff has yet shown interest, said John Jones, executive director of the Virginia Sheriffs’ Association. However Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order Feb. 27 requiring state police to sign a task force agreement and local jails to cooperate with the state task force.
In North Carolina, a bill progressing in the state Senate would mandate state agencies cooperate with federal immigration authorities, but does not include specifics.
In Hudson County, New Jersey, one of the few urban, immigrant-friendly Democratic areas that had a task force agreement in 2010, leaders have no interest in trying it again, said county spokesperson Mark Cygan. Since 2018, the state has had an “immigrant trust directive” directing local authorities not to cooperate with federal immigration authorities or ask about immigration status during routine police work.
“With the sort of abuses there have been, and listening to our constituents and advocates that work on immigrant right here in Hudson County, we realized this policy just wasn’t going to work out for our county anymore. So we dropped out of the agreement,” Cygan said.
This story first appeared in Stateline, a sibling site of the Minnesota Reformer and part of the States Newsroom nonprofit news network.