Donald Trump’s plan to immediately carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history upon taking office is banking on a key ally: conservative sheriffs.
There are some 6,000 federal immigration agents in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), but the incoming administration is counting on sympathetic local law enforcement to be its eyes and ears in communities and jails across the country.
While police chiefs are appointed, sheriffs are often elected and excercise broad powers, including running county jail systems. Many right-leaning sheriffs, whose own partisan politics align with new administration’s, are eager to join forces.
“I’m willing to support the president 100%,” Chuck Jenkins, the Republican sheriff of Maryland’s Frederick County, recently toldThe Wall Street Journal. “I want to do more, within the law.”
“We’re going to be in the business again,” another sheriff, Richard Jones of Butler County, Ohio, told the paper.
Trump is also likely to get support from the insurgent “constitutional sheriff” movement, a growing trend of local, often right-wing, sheriffs who believe they are the final word on what’s legal and constitutional in their jurisdictions — even if state or federal laws or Supreme Court decisions say otherwise. Such sheriffs have been key proponents of Trump’s election denial claims and flouted Covid restrictions during the height of the pandemic.
The president-elect himself has acknowledged his alliance with sheriffs, touting their support in a recent post on Truth Social.
Through Trump’s political rise, he’s sought to tie himself to hardline local sheriffs who crack down on immigration, including Joe Arpaio, the notorious, now-former, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona.
In 2017, Trump pardoned Arpaio, who was accused in a civil rights lawsuit of racially profiling Latino constituents, stopping and detaining them on immigration suspicions them even if they hadn’t broken any state laws. Arpaio was held in contempt of court for refusing a 2011 court order to cease such stops.
Pro-Trump state governors have also taken up the mantle of immigration enforcement, even though it’s traditionally an area of federal power.
Texas has declared it is literally under “invasion” by immigrants to justify sweeping new plans, and has spent billions on its Operation Lone Star, which has surged state troopers to the border and erected walls and barriers across the international boundary with Mexico.
This election season, Arizona passed Proposition 314, a ballot initiative making illegal immigration a state crime in addition to a federal one, and empowering state police and courts to carry out deportations.
Throughout both Republican and Democratic administrations, local sheriffs have cooperated with federal immigration officials through initiatives like the 287(g) program. Under 287(g) agreements, sheriffs screen inmates for their immigration status, share data with federal officials, serve warrants for ICE, and in some cases begin the deportation process themselves.
Critics like the ACLU claim that such collaborations are a “license to abuse” and encourage law enforcement to profile people they suspect to be unlawful immigrants because of their skin color or language.
A report from the group analyzed the more than 140 local law enforcement agencies in the program as of 2022 and found that at least 59 percent of the sheriff’s in the program have a record of “anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric” and 65 percent have shown a “pattern of racial profiling and other civil rights violations, including excessive use of force.”
In 2021, a Latina woman in Frederick County, one such jurisdiction, won a lawsuit accusing deputies of stopping her on false claims of a broken tail light and interrogating her over her immigration status.
Others argue local police collaboration with immigration authorities erodes public safety by making minority communities and immigrants, legal and otherwise, wary of interacting with law enforcement or other government offices for fears of being swept into the deportation system.
“The last thing we want is people who are part of our economy, part of our school system, part of our community and the fabric of our city to feel than all of a sudden they have to retreat into the shadows,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said earlier this month in an interview with WCVB.
Since 2014, the city has had a law on the books limiting local police resources from going towards enforcing civil immigration violations, while leaving room for cooperation on immigration matters involving criminal accusations like human or drug trafficking.
Boston is one of a number of “sanctuary” jurisdictions across the country limiting local resources and cooperation with federal immigration agents.
The Trump administration has warned it will crack down on sanctuary cities and states, including reports it could pull federal grants for such jurisdictions.
After the mayor of Denver said local police might be used to stop federal forces from deporting migrants, Trump border czar Tom Homan said he would put the mayor in jail. The mayor later walked back the comments on police, but called on local citizens to help resist the mass deportation plan.
Despite the political narrative that Democrats have ignored immigration in comparison to Donald Trump, the Obama administration actually deported more immigrants than Trump in nearly every year of its two terms, and in 2023, the Biden administration removed more people than any year during the first Trump term, according to a Reuters analysis.
