Federal immigration officials are quickly and quietly rolling out a new street-level strategy for how state and local police collaborate with the Trump administration’s agenda of mass deportations, a model spreading across Florida and the nation.
The Florida Highway Patrol was the first agency in the nation to reach one of these agreements. Four other statewide police agencies in Florida have followed suit.
“We have set the stage for other states to follow, and I think you are going to see more states doing that in the ensuing weeks and months,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a recent press conference.
DeSantis has suggested the new powers will be used to “interrogate” and “detain” people for suspected immigration violations after being pulled over for traffic stops. A copy of the agreement with the highway patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement obtained by WLRN confirms the powers under the agreement.
The statewide agencies that have reached these agreements include the highway patrol, Florida State Guard, Department of Agriculture, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
But without the same fanfare or any public notice, ICE has been striking the same deals across the nation with other local and state law enforcement agencies.
In many cases, no press conference was held or press release issued about the expanded and novel partnerships.
The St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office in Florida has also entered into an agreement that will allow officers to interrogate and detain people on behalf of ICE, WLRN has learned.
The new kind of agreements with ICE have been reached with Owyhee County, population about 11,000, in Idaho; the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Nevada; the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which has statewide jurisdiction; three statewide police agencies of Oklahoma; the sheriff’s offices of Goliad County and Smith County in Texas; and the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
The agreements are listed ion the ICE website as a new “task force” model of local, state and federal partnerships when it comes to immigration enforcement . The model did not appear on the website prior to Feb. 19, when new agreements began getting posted.
As WLRN reported, for years 287(g) agreements — called that after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act section from which it gets the authority — have only taken place inside of county jails and state prisons.
Local officials trained by ICE in jails and prisons would assist ICE in identifying people in custody and holding them for up to 48 hours after they were set to be released so that immigration officials could pick them up and deport them. Law enforcement critics complained ICE would often fail to take them into federal custody.
Adding to the pressure for more local and state cooperation: Lawmakers in more than 20 states this year have filed legislation targeting so-called sanctuary policies that seek to limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, according to an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural.
With the new kind of “task force” agreements, the local-state-federal collaboration is quickly moving from the jailhouse into the streets, alarming civil liberties and immigrant groups.
“We’re turning into a police state where any moment people can be stopped and can be asked to prove their citizenship,” Kara Gross, the legislative director of the ACLU of Florida, told WLRN.
ICE has not issued any press releases or made any public statements about the expanded partnership model. Requests for comment or clarification to ICE about the new enforcement model program were not returned. The partnerships are listed on frequently updated spreadsheet that the government agency links to on a web page outlining the 287(g) program.
Florida was the first state in the nation to announce one of these agreements this month. Last Monday, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, announced his state would become the second.
“The KBI is pleased to have another tool at our disposal to get known criminal offenders out of our communities,” Kansas Bureau of Investigation director Tony Mattivi said in a statement. “This agreement will not shift KBI investigative priorities but will allow us to more swiftly achieve justice in cases in which the KBI currently focuses — major violent crimes, crimes committed against children and targeting drug trafficking organizations.”
In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. J. Kevin Stitt announced the agreement as well, saying: “There will be no haven for illegal immigrants who break our laws.” In a press release, the governor’s office noted that officers “will join ICE task forces to investigate and apprehend individuals.”
Yet not all agreements have been publicized. The new agreement with the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office was not announced. The office did not respond to a request for comment.
New ICE agreements with sheriff’s offices in Texas, Idaho and Nevada have not previously been disclosed.
ICE has told Sheriff Larry Kendrick in Owyhee County that it could take up to five months to begin training his deputies for the program, he told WLRN. After the training, deputies will be able to complete street-level interrogations and investigations into someone's immigration status that could "take a few hours," the sheriff said.
Following the investigation, they could potentially take that person into custody on behalf of ICE.
"We want to do our part — ICE is going after the bad actors, the criminals, the Chinese, the cartels and other who are up to no good," said Kendrick. "We don’t necessarily have a visible problem with those in our county, but make no mistake, every county has an issue with these populations, and we want to do our part."
The sheriff estimates applications from other law enforcement agencies will soon come "flooding in" to ICE.
"Trump was voted in, and this was the primary reason he was voted in," he said. "I support President Trump 100%."
The sheriff's offices of Collier County and Lee County in Florida have pending applications to join the new model, ICE records show. The New Hampshire State Police is also waiting on ICE approval to participate in immigration enforcement.
Florida lawmakers have hinted that they knew the new model was coming. Republican state Rep. Lawrence McClure, the sponsor of a new immigration enforcement law in the state, told lawmakers this month that lawmakers “anticipate” that the agreements would soon extend beyond jails and prisons, citing conversations with officials in the Trump administration. The new law established incentives for entering into agreements and having local officials be trained by ICE on assisting immigration enforcement efforts.
The new law provides a $1,000 bonus for all Florida officers who get trained in “at-large task force operations” with the Department of Homeland Security. They would only be paid the bonus if they prove they participated in at least “one or more operations” with an immigration task force.
Since Jan. 29, statewide law enforcement agencies have worked alongside ICE to detain at least 83 people suspected of being in the country unlawfully, Dave Kerner, director of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, told the newly created State Board of Immigration Enforcement at a meeting last week.
“What is most interesting and most concerning is that 19 of these 83 — no one is able to determine [what country] they came from,” said Kerner.
Most incidents took place in the Panhandle, he said.
The state has allocated nearly $300 million through the new law to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement. Out of that, $250 million will be used for a grant program to reimburse local and state agencies for money they spend helping with efforts to support Trump’s immigration agenda.
Gross, with the ACLU of Florida, said that the state money is misspent.
“These are our state dollars. We already pay federal taxes, our federal taxpayer dollars are already going toward these efforts. Why should our state taxpayer dollars be going to fund this?” asked Gross.
Granting local and state officials the power to interrogate and detain people they suspect are in the U.S. unlawfully will “inevitably” lead to racial profiling, she said. “It’s a show-me-your-papers state. This is not a ‘free state of Florida’ at all,” she added.
Florida replicates immigration enforcement past
In becoming the first state to enter into the new form of agreement, Florida is replicating its past when it comes to having local departments participate in immigration enforcement.
In the years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the administration of Republican President George W. Bush allowed local law enforcement to enter into “task force” agreements with ICE that let local police interrogate and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants. Florida was the first state to follow that model, under former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother.
The early emphasis of the task force model of joint enforcement was to catch suspected terrorists under a wartime threat assessment as the war on terror was launched. Florida jumped on board early, after it was discovered that several Saudi pilots who committed the 9/11 attacks trained in the state.
“We have arrested single individuals involved in what appears to be surveillance activities of sensitive locations. We have also conducted extensive investigations that have resulted in illegal aliens being apprehended working in restricted or secured areas of airports, seaports and nuclear plants,” Mark Dubina, an FDLE special agent, testified at a 2005 congressional hearing.
Bay County, in the Panhandle, became somewhat of a hotspot for this kind of collaboration. Former Bay County Sheriff Frank McKeithen participated widely in the task force in the mid-2000s. He bragged about deputies raiding construction sites after receiving ICE training and assisting the federal government in deportation efforts.
"It's what the community wants," McKeithen told a local newspaper in 2009.
After taking office that year, Democratic President Barack Obama ended the “task force” model of collaboration between local law enforcement and the federal government, and it has sat dormant until now.
Last week, the Bay County Sheriff’s Office boasted that it helped ICE detain 45 people suspected of being in the U.S. unlawfully, but the sheriff there would like to go further. Under the current agreement ICE has with the sheriff’s office, most assistance can only take place inside the county jail. Sheriff Tommy Ford told local media he would like to go back to how things were under McKeithen, his predecessor, when deputies could interrogate and detain suspected undocumented immigrants on the street level.
Soon, he might be able to.
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