Mass Deportations and Local Authorities

WSJ (“The Local Sheriffs Gearing Up to Help Trump Carry Out Mass Deportations“):

If President-elect Donald Trump ramps up deportations as promised, he will have a strong ally in Chuck Jenkins, the longtime Republican sheriff of Maryland’s Frederick County.

“I’m willing to support the president 100%,” said Jenkins, 68, gravel-voiced with a gray buzzcut. “I want to do more, within the law.”

That prospect is spreading fear in immigrant circles, advocates say, and drawing mixed views from residents in this growing county, which backed Democrats in the last two presidential elections. But Jenkins, once dubbed among the nation’s 10 toughest immigration sheriffs by Fox News, sees Trump’s imminent return to the White House as a mandate for a more assertive approach.

For local sheriffs who have long talked tough on immigration, their time has come.

While the incoming Trump administration has spoken about increasing the ranks of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and using the military to turbocharge deportations, one thing is clear: The federal government needs help from local law enforcement in cities and states far from the border to detain and remove people en masse.

Trump’s transition team is already pursuing new spaces they can repurpose into short-term detention centers near large, Democratic-run cities where most immigrants in the country illegally live. It is also weighing a broad mix of changes to give sheriffs more power, with rewards for jurisdictions that cooperate, and financial retribution against those in blue states and cities that hold out, according to people involved in the planning.

To leverage legions of deputies, the Trump’s team is aiming for a “historic” expansion of a federal program that gives sheriffs and other agencies certain ICE powers, said one person involved in transition planning. Under that program, known as 287(g) after the section of law that created it, the team aims to revive a dormant and controversial “task force model,” which until 2012 allowed officers from participating local agencies, during their routine duties, to question and arrest suspected noncitizens in the community on immigration violations.

Tom Homan, the administration’s incoming border czar and a longtime ICE official, favors the model because it leads to more frequent and visible arrests, which he believes could act as a deterrent to would-be migrants thinking of coming to the U.S., according to people close to him.

Under one plan being considered, billions of federal dollars that currently reimburse nonprofits and cities for helping newly arrived migrants at the border would be redirected to local law-enforcement agencies that turn immigrants over to ICE, people involved in the planning said.

[…]

Across America, sheriffs, most elected in partisan races—unlike police chiefs—have long been viewed as more political than police and as uniquely powerful because they operate jails and often have a vast geographic reach into unincorporated areas outside municipal lines. As president, Trump granted a pardon to Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff who built a national reputation as an immigration hard-liner before he was convicted of disobeying a court order to halt the raids that brought him fame.

Since the Nov. 5 election, some sheriffs have emphasized they aren’t in sync with Trump and say linking arms with ICE erodes trust with immigrants and drains resources. In Los Angeles, which just passed a “sanctuary city” ordinance, the county sheriff last week emphasized that his officers don’t and won’t ask citizens about their immigration status. In Massachusetts, Bristol County’s sheriff publicly said he would reply “not interested” if ICE asked him to hold undocumented immigrants with a criminal history at a former federal detention facility in his county.

Adding to the complexity, a patchwork of state laws means sheriffs in some blue states legally can’t cooperate with ICE, while those in some red states must, said Jonathan Thompson, the executive director of the nonpartisan National Sheriffs’ Association, whose members include about 70% of the country’s 3,081 sheriffs. In North Carolina, for instance, Republican lawmakers last week overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto of a bill that would require sheriffs to work with ICE on certain detentions. In Oregon, by contrast, local and state agencies can’t comply with federal immigration requests absent a judicial subpoena.

WaPo (“Texas is gearing up in a big way for Trump’s mass deportation campaign“):

While Donald Trump’s opponents denounce the president-elect’s planned “mass deportations” and border crackdown, this state’s Republican leaders are vying to make Texas the launching pad.

Gov. Greg Abbott and other top officials have spent the past four years positioning themselves as the Biden administration’s greatest antagonists — and heirs to the border enforcement campaign begun by the last Trump administration. Despite having no constitutional authority on immigration enforcement, they have used tools of the state to dramatically escalate anti-immigrant policy and legislation locally while steering a similar narrative nationally.

[…]

“The leadership of Texas is trying to create a model for the federal government that is exceptionally tough and exceptionally cruel to immigrants,” said Daniel Hatoum, senior supervising attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “Texas is more than willing to let the Trump administration co-opt its institutions for immigration enforcement.”

That was the core of Abbott’s message during a joint appearance Tuesday with Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, an event held at a state military base on the border in Eagle Pass. The small city about 145 miles southwest of San Antonio became the front line last year in the governor’s battle with the federal government over the “invasion,” as he called it, by record numbers of migrants.

“There is a change afoot as we speak right now,” the governor told scores of Texas National Guard troops and law enforcement officers assembled for a Thanksgiving meal. State officials are already conferring with Trump’s transition deputies about border security, he noted — on “actions, planning, preparation, schematics.”

Since the Nov. 5 election, state leaders have suggested they could reduce funding for border security, especially if the federal government takes over. On Tuesday, however, Abbott and Homan talked about working together to ramp up, not scale back.

Once Trump takes office, Abbott said, “we’re going to be doing more and faster than anything that’s ever been done to regain control of our border, restore order in our communities, and also identify, locate and deport criminals in the United States of America who have come across the border.”

Homan, Trump’s former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, praised Operation Lone Star and its “unprecedented success in Texas.” The state’s approach, he said, is one that could be replicated as the next administration pursues mass deportations. “This is a model we can take across the country.”

Trump campaigned on a “mass deportation” policy but I’ve been skeptical that we’ll see anything like what he’s promised. Actually implementing the program would be incredibly costly, logistically challenging, and draw massive opposition from all manner of groups. To say nothing of the abject cruelty that would be necessary.

One hopes political backlash mitigates the effort. While poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans support the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, it’s actually much more complicated than that. Once broken down into discrete policy questions, we see that support evaporates.

But there’s enthusiastic support within pockets of the Federal government, especially the Border Patrol itself, for the effort. If Trump can augment their budget by moving it from programs designed to help migrants and also deputize eager state and local officials to the cause, the logistics suddenly become much easier.