Trump officials increasingly recruit local police for immigration enforcement despite ‘red flags’

Composite: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design; Source photos via Getty Images

Those episodes follow years of scandal.

In 2023, Rogers’ predecessor in the top job was forced to resign – twice – after recordings emerged of him describing African American deputies on his force as “Black bastards”. The department was also under a recent federal investigation over allegations of sprawling embezzlement.

Despite this track record, the Columbus county sheriff’s office scored a recent win under the new administration of Donald Trump.

On 5 March, the Trump administration accepted the sheriff’s department as an official partner in the all-out push by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to execute the president’s election promise of “mass deportations”. Trump’s department of homeland security (DHS) signed a memorandum with Rogers known as a 287(g) agreement, which will empower the beleaguered department of Columbus county to help carry out the complex and controversial task of implementing federal immigration law and identifying residents potentially eligible for deportation.

The agreement in this rural, conservative jurisdiction, wedged on North Carolina’s southern border, is just one in an unprecedented surge of such partnerships with local law enforcement agencies across the country. Since Trump’s inauguration on 20 January, his administration has signed over 370 memorandums with over 300 agencies, at an average of four per day, according to an analysis of DHS data. This explosion has more than tripled the number of agreements since Trump was sworn into office and has brought the number of 287(g) agreements to over 500 across the country.

An examination by the Guardian reveals that previous oversight requirements have been overridden as the administration has resurrected an aggressive partnership model that was shelved more than a decade ago amid alarms about civil rights abuses. With the new surge of 287(g) agreements, civil rights advocates and former Homeland Security officials are expressing concerns about a potential cascade of administrative and civil rights violations involving law enforcement agencies across the US.

The Columbus county sheriff’s office is one of five departments identified by the Guardian that have previously applied to take part in 287(g) but were denied by DHS – only to have a new application approved within weeks of Trump returning to the White House.

The specific reason for its first denial, which according to records occurred in 2007, was not immediately clear. Rogers did not respond to interview requests and a series of detailed questions from the Guardian were not answered. But a spokesperson indicated the department intended to train only one officer at the county jail to take part in its program.

Kristi Graunte, legal director of the ACLU of North Carolina, said the department’s previously failed attempt to join the program and its history of alleged rights violations and racial discrimination were “clear red flags” as it moved forward with its Ice partnership.

“With an agency like Columbus county, where there have been recent, very serious complaints of misconduct, abuse of power and legal violations, I worry whether there is sufficient oversight and screening happening,” Graunte said. “Immigration law is incredibly complex and unless there is proper oversight and intensive training, there is incredible capacity for mistakes and harm.”

The department of homeland security did not respond to detailed questions.

The 287(g) program, created in 1996, began a relative boom in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. Agreements concentrated in sunbelt states in the American south, including Florida, North Carolina and Arizona during the second term of George W Bush.

As programs expanded, concerns over racial profiling and civil rights violations proliferated as well. Two landmark US justice department investigations, published under Barack Obama, confirmed many of these fears.

In Alamance county, North Carolina, the US justice department uncovered a raft of abuses by the sheriff’s department, which had signed its 287(g) agreement with Ice in 2007. County deputies were between four to ten times more likely to stop Latino drivers than other groups, the investigation found. The department had deliberately set up check points in majority Latino neighborhoods and specifically targeted Latinos for arrest. The county sheriff, Terry Johnson, was accused of encouraging a culture of discrimination, allegedly referring to Latinos as “taco eaters” and suggesting anyone of Mexican origin was “inherently suspicious”.

Johnson, who remains the sheriff in Alamance county, called the investigation “grossly tainted with politics” after a subsequent justice department lawsuit was dropped in 2016. His department rejoined the 287(g) program during Trump’s first term in office.

In Maricopa county, Arizona, where the sheriff’s department also signed its agreement in 2007, federal investigators uncovered a “chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations”. Similar to Alamance county, federal authorities found that the sheriff’s department had systematically targeted Latino drivers and that senior deputies had circulated racist emails. The 2011 justice department report said the sheriff, Joe Arpaio, had “clearly communicated to his officers that biased policing would not only be tolerated, but encouraged”.

The investigation also found multiple instances of deputies using excessive force against Latino residents and observed that “a wall of distrust” had emerged between the sheriff’s office and Latino communities as a result of the department’s enforcement practices.

Arpaio repeatedly denied the conclusions of the investigation but was eventually found guilty of criminal contempt for refusing to comply with a court order compelling reforms of his department. He was pardoned by Trump in 2017. The Maricopa county sheriff’s office is currently not part of the 287(g) program.

Joe Arpaio and Donald Trump. Photograph: Rick Scuteri/AP

The conclusions from both these reports led to a curb in the creation of new 287(g) programs and the complete abandonment of the “task force” model employed in Maricopa county, which had permitted sheriff’s deputies to question and detain people they suspected of immigration violations as part of their work in the field, rather than only those already held in jail.

While Ice funds the initial training of local law enforcement, the frequently high expenses of running a program are borne by the local department.

In 2009 DHS set up an advisory board to evaluate the applications of law enforcement agencies applying for 287(g) status and to assess their suitability for the program. The seven-member board voted on each application, and included a representative from DHS’s office for civil rights to advise “on civil liberties and civil rights issues associated with potential or existing” 287(g) partners, according to records.

But ten days after taking office in 2025, the Trump administration unilaterally disbanded the board and routed all 287(g) approval requests directly to the Ice director’s office, according to a previously unreported DHS memo that followed an executive order issued by the new president. And earlier this week, the White House released more executive orders, targeting so-called sanctuary cities and local officials that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

The abolition of the board appears to have opened the floodgates to new 287(g) agreements. The first approved application, submitted by Texas’s attorney general office, was dated the day the advisory board was disbanded. It was signed by Ice within 24 hours, according to records.

The statewide Texas office did not respond to detailed questions on its new 287(g) deal.

On 26 February 2025, the Trump administration approved 89 new agreements in a single day, according to a Guardian analysis. Most of the new agreements in 2025 are the “task force” models previously employed in Maricopa county, which have been unused since 2012. In the Trump administration’s first 100 days, Ice and local law enforcement agencies signed 231 task force model agreements.

The Guardian’s findings drew alarm from former DHS inspector general John Roth, who served under Obama and during Trump’s first term in office.

“Any time you loosen the appropriate controls over a program you’re going to increase the risk that program is misused or ineffective,” Roth said in an interview.

Roth pointed to the conclusions of a report he commissioned during Trump’s first term that examined the consequences of a much smaller spike in 287(g) agreements using the “jail enforcement” model, which only allows local law enforcement to carry out immigration checks on those already detained in jail.

In the first 14 months of Trump’s initial term the number of these agreements rose by 40, from 36 to 76. This increase was modest in size compared to the current surge, but it nevertheless caused havoc within Ice, the report found. The agency struggled to hire enough program managers – required by statute – to oversee the new agreements and failed to deliver the necessary IT systems to local police required to make programs operational.

Roth described the surge in new task force models and the disbanding of the oversight board as indicative of a “complete disregard for the kind of controls you need in a program that is as high risk as this one would be”.

“You only have to look at what happened in Maricopa county to show what can happen if there isn’t proper oversight over law enforcement in the execution of immigration laws,” he added.

The nationwide explosion of new 287(g) agreements has involved police agencies in 38 states. The largest concentration by far is in Florida, which has logged 191 new deals since Trump’s inauguration.

Four of the five agencies identified by the Guardian that had been previously rejected and then approved in Trump’s second term are situated in Florida. As in Columbus county, North Carolina, the specific reasons for their prior rejection were unclear, but a 2010 DHS report noted that half of 287(g) agreements denied since 1996 had been turned down due to a lack of supervisory resources at Ice.

The Florida state legislature and its conservative governor, Ron DeSantis, has pushed through a slew of laws and orders that seek to compel local law enforcement to take part in the program and enhance co-operation with Ice. The effects of this cooperation are starting to be seen already. In late April, nearly 800 people were arrested over four days in Florida as a part of one of the first 287(g) operations in the state, according to Todd Lyons, acting Ice director.

A similar legislative effort is ongoing in North Carolina, and another similar bill in Arizona, which was recently blocked by the state’s Democratic governor, has led local Republicans to vow further action – an indication the surge in agreements is likely to continue rising.

Prior analysts of the program caution that assessing where the most acute issues will arise is hard to predict.

“Previous research has shown that 287(g) agreements can be implemented in wildly divergent ways from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” said Austin Kocher, an immigration researcher at Syracuse University, pointing to the degree of discretion available to local law enforcement leaders across the US. “We aren’t going to really know until we start hearing reports about what’s going on in these particular new jurisdictions.”

The Guardian analysis of county sheriff offices that have signed new deals raises questions about many departments’ capacity to meaningfully execute a partnership with Ice. Of the agencies that have signed up for the program, 117 represent counties with fewer than 50,000 residents. The Guardian also identified a handful of municipal police departments that have signed onto the program that serve areas with just a few hundred residents.

The Pittsburg, New Hampshire, police department, which signed a task force agreement with DHS on 3 March 2025, serves a township of 800 people and has just two serving officers. Only one of the two is employed full time.

In a phone interview, Captain John LeBlanc acknowledged he would be the only member of Pittsburg police’s immigration detail, but said he had signed his agency up due to its proximity to the Canadian border. LeBlanc also acknowledged that in his ten years at the department he had never encountered a migrant crossing irregularly from Canada.

“Essentially there’s not going to be any difference on our day-to-day activities,” LeBlanc acknowledged.

Pittsburg police, like many other departments across the country, was still waiting to hear from the new Trump administration on how to train and prepare for its fresh agreement with Ice.

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