Donald Trump’s immigration policy would use local police to initiate mass deportations.

On By Littum

The largest mass deportation in American history begins on January 20th.

That’s what Donald Trump says. It’s a promise to rebuild American society in such a fundamental way that Trump has been so resistant to explaining in detail that it’s hard to know if he has the discipline to attempt it. News junkies from the first Trump administration know this creepy guessing game well: Since the guy lies constantly and says whatever pops into his head, how do you know when to take him seriously? He also promised mass deportations in his first administration, but his record was indistinguishable from Barack Obama’s, and it was mostly his cruel and illegal tactics that attracted attention.

But the next Trump administration appears to be better prepared, with less concern for the law and fewer opponents within his own party. Moreover, polls suggest his anti-immigrant sentiment is widely shared — how many suburbs would like to proclaim their sanctuary city status this time?

Expect retaliation for controversial Trump-era policies like separating children from their parents at the border; the Remain in Mexico policy, which forced asylum seekers to live in Mexico while awaiting a court date; the Muslim banwhich prevented new arrivals from a handful of countries in the Middle East and North Africa; a renewal of immigration and customs enforcement raids on workplaces such as dairies and chicken plants; a new commitment to the border wall; and an end to refugee resettlement and Temporary Protected Status programs, the program that brought Haitian families to Springfield, Ohio.

But the most ambitious part of Trump’s agenda is the promise to round up the country’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in detention camps for deportation. Doing so would separate millions of American citizen children from their foreign-born parents, permanently damage crucial economic sectors like agriculture and construction, and literally decimate the populations of cities like Houston and Los Angeles. JD Vance has said more than 500,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, who are Americans brought to the country illegally as children, could also be targeted — a betrayal of those who trusted the federal government with their information.

Some of Trump’s advisers have expressed thoughts on how the country can achieve one trillion dollar police action with few historical precedents. These include staffing the State Department with ideological allies who will pressure foreign governments to accept deportees; reallocating resources from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, which is focused on cross-border crimes such as drug trafficking and human trafficking; enlist the National Guard; and building hundreds of internment camps and hiring tens of thousands more enforcement agents. The last part would require money from Congress and could take years.

By far the biggest existing resource Trump can put to work on his behalf is the local police, whose cooperation with ICE (or lack thereof) was an ongoing battle during his first administration when “sanctuary city” became an anti-Trump rallying cry .

If you want to see what the future looks like, keep an eye on Arizona. The voters have adopted a voting motion that would allow local and state police to arrest and detain people based on their immigration status, and state courts to deport them. The law is similar to one in Texas, SB 7, that is being held up in court because it appears to supersede federal authority over immigration.

Also in Arizona, the winner of the sheriff’s race in Maricopa County (the nation’s fourth largest, home of Phoenix) is a career cop named Jerry Sheridan, who was the right-hand man of former Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and would considers himself a “constitutional sheriff”– an extremist view that sheriffs can defy orders from courts or state officials if they feel they are defending the Constitution.

Sheriff Joe is a name even casual observers might remember: Arpaio had a deal with the federal government that turned Phoenix-area officers into immigration enforcers who, according to a 2011 Justice Department investigation, conducted “sweeps” of Latino neighborhoods to round up undocumented immigrants through traffic stops. During this period of high-stakes racial profiling, Latino drivers were nine times more likely to be stopped than non-Latinos. The Obama administration suspended the county’s federal deal following that report, and Arpaio was later convicted of criminal contempt before being pardoned by Donald Trump. A related lawsuit cost Maricopa taxpayers more than 300 million dollarsand the sheriff’s office still operates under federal oversight.

Arpaio’s urban border patrol law was made possible by a contract between local police and DHS called a 287(g) agreement. These schemes were born out of the 1996 immigration law and proliferated after the September 11 attacks, and in 2013 local law enforcement was responsible for initiating more than half of deportations across borders.

After the scandal in Maricopa County, the tide turned against 287(g). Obama scaled back the program so police could only investigate immigration status after an arrest or after receiving a warrant from ICE. Some sheriffs rejected the schemes outright on the grounds that they sowed distrust and discouraged immigrants from calling 911. After Trump was elected in 2016, many big-city and blue-state Democrats declared they were running “sanctuary cities.” “Local law enforcement is not going to do the job of the federal immigration agency,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock told me in 2016. “That’s not our responsibility.” Within five days of taking office, Trump, along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, issued an executive order to withhold federal funding from these sites. It was ruled unconstitutional two years later.

In fact, these high-profile exhibits by the opposition Democrats masked a trend: The number of jurisdictions with 287(g) contracts grew from 37 in 2017 to 140 in 2021. After declining for years, a Washington Post investigation establishedlow-level arrests in 287(g) counties hit their highest level in a decade in 2019. The data appeared to confirm what civil liberties advocates have long argued: Even when immigration enforcement is conducted only in jail, police have a lot of discretion over who is arrested. A previous study by the Migration Policy Institute found that half of all ICE referrals through the program were to immigrants who had committed misdemeanors or traffic violations. A grandfather who had lived in the United States for two decades could be issued for a broken rear light.

In the raucous pro-immigrant atmosphere of January 2021, newly elected sheriffs such as Craig Owens in Cobb County, Georgia and Kristin Graziano in Charleston County, South Carolina boasted that they had ended their 287(g) programs, and the Biden administration stopped publicizing its results . But this year, public opinion had backfired: Owens, who won re-election, had to insist that he was actually cooperating with ICE. Graziano lost to a Republican who said he would.

Like Arpaio had Arizona’s SB 1070the boycott-inspiring “immigration control at a traffic stop” law, Republican Sheriff-elect Sheridan could have Proposition 314, pending the viability of the Texas statute.

Trump’s team, meanwhile, has once again threatened that he will withhold federal money from cities and states that don’t do his bidding on deportations. Immigrants in Aurora, Colorado, for example, where Trump has said the mass deportation campaign will begin, are protected by a 2023 law that prohibits local cooperation with ICE. Project 2025 proposes to go further and require “total information sharing” from these jurisdictions, including access to voter registration and DMV databases. This was illegal last time, but it’s anyone’s guess what a Trump Justice Department will do about these precedents.

Either way, Trump will start another round aggressive recruitment of sheriffsas he did in 2017. Mark Morgan, who served as Trump’s acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told State line that the success of Trump’s plan depends on local law enforcement finding a way to do immigration work. And that means finding a reason to stop people.

“Everything is illegal,” a Connecticut state trooper once explained to me. “No front plate. Number plate cover. Tinted windows. Following too closely. I’m not going to pull over 300 cars. That’s not what people want.”

Unless it is – they voted for it the.