A six-day immigration sweep in Florida this month resulted in the arrests of more than 1,100 people, the Trump administration said on Thursday as it increasingly relies on local law enforcement to help speed deportations.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers worked alongside the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the state’s Department of Corrections as they swept through communities.
ICE said the operation was one of the biggest in a single state in the agency’s history.
“This is a model that’s going to be implemented throughout the country, allowing us to have a force multiplier that can come to the table,” said Madison D. Sheahan, the deputy director of ICE.
ICE officials said the operation targeted people with deportation orders and those with criminal histories. More than 60 percent of those picked up had either an arrest or a conviction, the agency said.
Since January, the Trump administration has expanded the number of agreements it has with the local authorities to help with immigration enforcement. The Florida agencies involved in the operation this week had signed such agreements as well. ICE has signed more than 400 agreements with local law enforcement since January, the agency said.
Those agreements are part of the 287(g) program, which allows local law enforcement to collaborate with federal officials on immigration enforcement.
Typically, in recent years, that meant local law enforcement helped ICE with migrants already detained in their local lockup. But lately the agency has given power to local law enforcement to make immigration arrests.
Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University who analyzes immigration data, said that ICE has signed over 200 agreements allowing local officers to make arrests since the beginning of the administration. ICE has long had the ability to pair up with the local authorities on operations, but the ability of local law enforcement to make arrests on their own would help the agency the most, he said.
Scott Shuchart, a former senior ICE official in the Biden administration, said the expansion of local law enforcement assisting ICE could help free up officers to handle other key parts of the deportation process, like working with representatives of other countries to obtain travel documents for removal and preparing flights. If it happens elsewhere, he said, it could expand ICE’s ability to ramp up deportations.
Mr. Shuchart warned that the effort would be limited to areas willing to help ICE.
“It’s going to be very regional, though,” he said. “I expect most big cities outside Texas and Florida are going to want to keep their local tax revenue for things only local police can do and leave the immigration work to the feds.”
The program has faced pushback in the past. The American Civil Liberties Union wrote letters this year to various local law enforcement officials advising them not to participate.
“They have a history of harming public safety, imposing serious financial burdens on localities and leading to civil rights violations,” one letter read.
In 2010, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security said that ICE and local law enforcement “were not operating in compliance with the terms of the agreements.”
By 2012, the Obama administration stopped signing agreements with local police that allowed them to help with immigration arrests and focused mostly on getting officers to help transfer migrants who were already in local lockups.
