Mass Deportations and Local Authorities
The dark side of federalism.
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.
Sheriffs have wide latitude to operate and as some of the quoted material notes, are partisan actors. There are a lot of hardcore right-wing sheriffs who will likely be more than happy to cooperate.
I’m rooting for Trump’s plan to be as large, far-reaching, expensive, and disastrous as possible. Maybe the next generation can become incentivized to have Congress address immigration. My generation talked, but never got around to agreeing on action.
Another thing on which boomers failed, spectacularly.
@just nutha:
Sadly, there are solutions that address the core issue and related economic issues,
the draconian, militant approach that Trump and his authoritarian allies favor.
A rational approach could never see the light of day in our hyper politicized environment of total confrontation.
@just nutha:
So that people might learn from experience?
They might not, don’t get your hopes up.
Is anyone else reminded of Stalin’s hunt for kulaks?
@charontwo: Just so you’ll know, that was my inner sociopath talking. I don’t expect the following generations to fuck up any less than mine did. Or differently, either.
[Post skipping Trigger Warning] My inner sociopath has made a guest appearance at the Aleppo post, too.
@Kathy: As long as there is life, there will be people to hate.
And people to hate them. Balance in everything.
Going large on immigration is a recipe for failure and that will discredit trump.
Best case scenario is that this all explodes in Trump’s face and it fails to go anywhere. Worst case is that it blows up in his face and the explosion becomes another catalyst to attack his opponents with. Bottom line is that it will explode. The American police are no shape (physical or mental) to start deporting unarmed people who are here to work and who look much like unarmed people who are also here to work, but in a legal way. The only real hope is that the explosion is directed at the cops rather than the unarmed.
@Steven L. Taylor: 100% about the huge powers sheriff’s weild (arguably greater than police oprosecutors).
They are largely only constrained by voters and the dynamics of geographic sorting mean that once a sheriff is elected by the dominant county party they are in there for life.
@Steven L. Taylor: IIRC, in your book, A Different Democracy, you note that only one or two other countries have elected judges, and only for a few positions. The problem being obvious, that elected judges can support the tyranny of the majority, or large plurality. Sheriffs are elected. In a red county they’re quite naturally going to be all in on deportation.
@Sleeping Dog:
Cynically, I think it only harms him if he gets his way and it has the predicted economic effects of driving the price of consumer goods up.
Failing to succeed, especially if blocked by the Democrats, will only strengthen his support as we saw during his first term.
Again, its important to understand what the real purpose is, behind the stated one.
The real purpose is to establish white people at the top of the social hierarchy. Deporting immigrants is the tool by which they do this, but the tool isn’t the goal.
The tool allows them to terrorize and inflict suffering on the nonwhite immigrants and perhaps crush them into a docile underclass.
No, this isn’t some Grand Plan, there isn’t some Wannsee Conference where this is plotted. Instead it is a series of choices and decisions, starting with the underlying anxiety over a society in which white people are forced to hear Spanish spoken by the restaurant staff.
The plan to deport masses will run into the fact that big business depends on these workers, so there will be tradeoffs and bribes and special corrupt carveouts, and the immigrants who are allowed to stay will be in limbo, officially subject to deportation but tacitly allowed so long as they don’t make trouble and do as told.
There are going to be a lot of Texas politicians and right wing big mouths who are going to be mowing their own yards and cleaning their own homes. And waiting for months to get their kitchens remodeled.
I want to say that should they carry it out, people will be able to see first-hand whether it makes their lives better or not.
But maybe not. Maybe a lot of what we are seeing is a kind of theater – go along in public, find resources, etc, but make sure you know which illegal aliens you can deport without disturbing large employers too much, and so on.
People sometimes have the hardest time seeing what’s in front of their noses, too.
Finally, although sheriffs and state governments are gearing up, how are they going to manage bulking up the deportation hearings? I mean, they are going to have them, right? They aren’t going to deport people without due process, right? I mean that could turn into a very bad situation, where people finger their (legally resident) neighbor because of jealousy or something. Or because Border Patrol agent who lacks the ethical compass that most of them have decides they don’t like someone’s face.
So, what happens to due process? Does Trump have some plan to make judges work 3 times as fast?
Changing law enforcement priorities as the result of elections is fine. Completely legitimate. But dropping due process is not fine. Not at all.
There are 1.4 million individuals in the US under already adjudicated deportation orders that the Biden administration has not enforced. There are many individuals determined to be in the US illegally under violent felony indictments and convictions who are eligible for deportation.
As far as state and local officials inquiring into immigrant status, when NY State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) raided the home of Peanut, the squirrel, and Fred, the raccoon, to seize and intentionally kill them, they harassed the wife in the house over her immigrant status as she was German. Clearly, only to intimidate and harass in a “sanctuary” state for those of clear illegal border crossing status.
And, yes, in most states, sheriffs are the most senior law enforcement official in their counties, even above most city police chiefs, unless a city was chartered under special circumstances. They are elected officials, but under the auspices of the state governor for gross dereliction of their constitutional duties.
What will happen is that if individuals have not shown up for their immigration hearing dates, they will be now located for ICE to take lawful actions to bring them before the court.
On the flip side we have governors and mayors threatening to prosecute and deny retirement to officers that cooperate with federal authorities. Some have even threatened to order the officers to act unlawfully and to use force to interfere with federal law enforcement. Should the latter happens, the governor or mayor or other state/local officials issuing such orders should be arrested by federal agents and transported to a federal court outside that state for prosecution and adjudication.
Yes, that is why Bull Conner, as Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama, and Democrat Southern sheriffs were able to enforce the Jim Crow laws of the Democratic Party controlled pre-1970s South.
Coincidentally, it took federal authorities to break this racist control
@JKB: Your reply citing Bull Connor comes off as some sort of gotcha. Do you suppose that the thing we don’t like is the name of someone’s party attached? Well, let me speak for myself. I fully endorse the takedown of Bull Conner and all like him, both then and now, and I care very little what party label he bears.
@Matt Bernius:
And a willingness by whoever sets their budget — to the best of my knowledge, no sheriffs’ offices have taxing authority and can set their own top line budget. Maricopa County in Arizona tolerated Joe Arpaio misspending something over $100M over the years, and grossly ignoring other responsibilities in violation of statute. The point is, a number of other public officials are going to have to go along in order for the sheriff to get away with it.
@JKB:
What a difference 60 years makes, eh? Now it’s the Democrats who field black presidential candidates and Republicans – the part of Lincoln – who attack them for it.
@Matt Bernius:
The idea that any bad side effects hurt Trump or Trumpism is wishful thinking. People don’t care or are in information silos, if necessary to explain bad effects they will find something else to blame.
No amount of evidence will ever convince people like @JKB of anything. Reality is irrelevant when you can endlessly move goalposts and always find a scapegoat. And of course cruelty is a feature not a bug for them. Cruelty is what these sorts of people conflate with masculinity.
However, there are non-culties, non-MAGAts who voted for Trump and they may begin to notice if inflation ramps back up. Of course they’ll tell themselves it would have been worse under Kamala, because they, too, will resist ever admitting they’ve made a mistake.
But Trump won by 1.6%, about a third of Biden’s edge in 2020. A slight improvement in turnout is all it would take to see these scum off in 2028 – unless of course @JKB and his ilk have managed to kill democracy entirely, which is their end goal.
@JKB:
This is technically correct. However, governors rarely exercise this oversight power, and typically, when they do, they are of the opposite party. The most recent example I could find was Ron DeSantis removing the Democrat who was the Broward County Sheriff post-Parkland shooting in 2019.
Googling the topics of “governor sheriff removal” finds far more examples of governors opting *not* to remove a sheriff. If you have other recent examples of sheriff’s being removed, please share them.
@JKB:
Serious question: what’s the point of this? Do you think we don’t know about Bull Connor’s actions during the civil rights movement? Or that he was a Democrat (as this was before the Southern Realignment)?
Is it to just to go down a typical “democrats are the real racists?”
I’m asking because I can bring up far more recent history where the Federal Government had to go after Republican Sheriff Joe Arpaio for rampant civil rights abuses. BTW, he was largely protected by the state’s Republican governor. And all that happened… check’s notes… within the last decade (to the point that Trump pardoned him).
If racism was bad in the pre-70’s, is it also bad in the 2000’s and 2010’s? Does the party in power matter?
Or, are you going to say that the Federal civil rights investigation of Arpaio was somehow corrupt? If that’s the case, you seem to be suggesting that the Federal civil rights investigation into Bull Connor was just? Perhaps you can explain what makes them different?
@charontwo:
I am increasingly convinced that any sustained rise in core consumer goods prices will end up being blamed on the party in control of the Whitehouse regardless of information silos.
I think Trump’s supporters will give him a lot of leeway on many issues. I don’t think inflation or the rising cost of goods sold is one of those issues.
@Michael Cain:
Completely true. And it’s also true that, as we have seen, few people get reelected–especially in Republican-leaning counties–by running on defunding the police and jails.
That’s before we get into the amount of political power sheriff’s offices and associations exert on local races.
There is only one thing that will deter migrants from coming here; lack of jobs. But hey, with the way the tariff thing is going, maybe the Trump administration will. The only times that migrants from other countries come here in great numbers is when there are times of strife and home and job here. Period end of story. They could do the same thing with E-verify. My question is, how are they going to do the tariffs and the deportations, and still keep their donors happy?
Exactly, only nationwide and complicated by much higher costs for goods and services.
@Matt Bernius:
Probably, I wasn’t clear enough, but the cascading effects of trump going large will be what will cause his failure. Frankly, the best course of action in opposition is let trump be trump. Stopping or even restraining him, lets him off the hook.
Regarding those sheriff’s, I’m sure trump will be happy that they are filling their jails with immigrants, but the likelihood of getting reimbursed for the costs is about the same if they held a trump campaign event.
I predict this will play out much like the tariffs.
After ten years, we can see that Trump is amazingly predictable. His overriding motive in all things is displaying dominance and impressing his fans with being the pro-wrestling heel.
His decision to impulsively talk about tariffs didn’t spring from any desire to actually do anything about trade or drugs, but was intended to sow fear and confusion and display dominance like a guy waving a hand grenade.
And we can see now that after the Mexican and Canadian leaders reached out to him, his base is crowing about his manly dominance and iron will.
It doesn’t matter that nothing happened- It wasn’t intended to change the facts on the ground, it was a theatrical stunt.
Now of course, he may very well pull the pin on the grenade- but its a mistake to parse his policy pronouncements with conventional logic since he is not operating on that level.
So I predict there will be some spectacular theater of roundups and saber rattling threats against sanctuary cities, which will get bogged down in a morass of litigation and resistance, then he will pronounce the problem solved and hi base will cheer, as they move on to the next two minute hate.
@JKB: The Bull Connor example is exactly what I am afraid of, but this time empowered by the federal government.
BTW, the morality of an action is to be found by assessing the action, not which party label can be applied.
@Rick DeMent:
During the last Trump administration, deportations were down because the “pursue everyone” policy meant pursuing a lot more people who have plausible asylum claims, etc. These are people who use up a lot of court time.
Court time ends up being a finite resource, limiting deportations.
So, if the donors want a cheap, exploitable workforce, and the base every illegal that ever interacts with anyone deported, this could work out fine.
Going after people legally here who made a mistake or lied on a form? Looks good, but that’s going to use so much court time.
I doubt Trump is planning this far ahead though, and Stephen Miller really wants to deport people. They may have even learned from their previous mistakes.
One of the advantages of growing up in Seattle as relates to this issue is that the King County Sheriff was an elected official, but King County was already urbanized enough even in the late 50s to be pretty stripped of funding given that incorporated cities contributed almost nothing to running the Sheriff’s Office. By the time I was living in unincorporated King County in the late 70s, the Sheriff didn’t even have money for patrol. Cars were sent out from stations to specific crimes in progress. One of my neighbors was burglarized and the station sent a pre-signed investigation report for him to fill in and mail to the various agencies that would need copies.
It was a good thing the area was relentlessly white. The Sheriff would never have been able to handle civil rights trouble.