What The Hell America!

AS THE WHITE HOUSE CONTINUES TO PRESSURE Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to ramp up its rate of deportations, the agency has cast about for allies willing to help them meet President Trump’s expectations. While many have answered that call, one group in particular has stood out for its willingness to be deputized, as it were, to help make mass deportations a reality: sheriffs.

The office of the sheriff has become a political battlefield in recent years, with everyone from red state governors to thinkers at the right-wing Claremont Institute advocating radical reinterpretations of the sheriff’s role to better suit their own priorities. Few embody this tendency better than Bob Songer, the controversial and powerful thrice-elected sheriff of Klickitat County, Washington. Last week, Songer appeared on a conservative talk show to explain his enthusiasm for cooperating with ICE—even if doing so goes against his state’s laws.

“If I had an opportunity to talk to Tom [Homan, the “border czar”], I’d tell him, ‘Put me on speed dial. You call me. We’ll be there to assist ICE in a New York second,’” he boasted. While Washington has a “sanctuary” law that prohibits local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE, Songer was dismissive of its power to restrain him. He told his host he considers it “unconstitutional,” the product of “woke nonsense . . . socialism, Marxism.”

Songer’s belligerent comments point to a major area of contestation over the law and law enforcement these days—one that can be traced back to a single Supreme Court Case, interpreted in contradictory ways. The conservative majority that decided Printz v. United States in 1997 argued that the federal government cannot force state governments to act on its behalf—a principle that prevents President Donald Trump and his lackeys from ordering around sheriffs. But a movement of “constitutional sheriffs”—officers who, like Songer, believe that they have the power to decide which laws are constitutional—use the same ruling as a basis for claiming that sheriffs do not need to enforce a host of federal and state laws, especially those concerning gun regulation.

This heightens the relative independence sheriffs have to an extreme, unprecedented level. Because the vast majority of them are elected officials, sheriffs generally enjoy a great deal of discretion when it comes to their enforcement policies. This includes whether and how to cooperate with ICE, which relies on local law enforcement to assist in the arrest and detention of potentially deportable individuals. Sheriff’s offices are a “force multiplier,” in the parlance of the agency. And if Songer commits his office’s resources to the use of the agency, as he claimed he intends to do, he would certainly be a force multiplier: In addition to his normal staff of deputies and reserve deputies, he has recruited a 170-member-and-growing volunteer posse that is “independent of any state or federal agency.” Their secondment to immigration-related enforcement would have an outsize effect in Songer’s county, which is home to only around 25,000 people.

Other sheriffs have used their relative independence to move in the other direction. During the first Trump administration, some liberal-minded sheriffs in Democrat-run urban areas opted to minimize immigration enforcement. Their position was responsive, in part, to certain facts: Immigrants do not lead to a statistical increase in crime; their presence actually tends to decrease it because they are significantly less likely to be convicted of a major crime than their native-born neighbors. Why waste resources on a non-problem? But those resources are being hoovered up amid Trump’s mania for deportation, which has even shifted law-enforcement agents away from investigating federal crimes like human trafficking and drug smuggling to rounding up people who are potentially deportable—most of whom are not remotely threats to public safety. And today, some of those liberal-minded sheriffs are being compelled to serve Trump’s goals—not by the federal administration, but by state governments.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S BULLISHNESS on “mass deportation,” alongside the Democrats’ rightward shift on the issue, has pushed the public to believe that Trump has a “mandate” to expel immigrants, including non-criminal migrants, thousands of whom have already been deported.

Joe Biden, in the waning months of his presidency, had already implemented policies that dramatically slowed the admission of immigrants at the southwest border; he also planned to detain and deport more. But Trump has taken this already-existing infrastructure and weaponized it for maximum cruelty, as attested in photos of chained Venezuelans landing in Gitmo—people we now know were mostly civilians waiting their turn to prove their asylum claims in the tortuous and drawn-out immigration process—and the morally outrageous “ASMR” video of detainees being prepared for a deportation flight, which was posted to the official White House X account. (That account has since continued to post content making light of what is happening to deportees.)

Existing government capacity for this work, it turns out, is not enough for Trump. Red states have started to intervene to appease the president by passing laws encouraging, incentivizing, or even requiring some sheriffs to cooperate with ICE. This strategy appears designed, in part, to short-circuit sheriffs who seek to minimize ICE disruptions through the use of state law.

Florida stands out for the aggressiveness of its moves in this area. Governor Ron DeSantis has not only required ICE cooperation from the state’s 67 sheriffs; he has mandated that every law enforcement agency sign what is called a 287(g) “task force” enforcement agreement—essentially, a pledge to assist ICE with immigration operations on the streets, not just inside jails. In a press conference surrounded by sheriffs, he touted this plan as “lead[ing] to street-level enforcement operations. . . . this is the maximum participation that a local entity can have under current federal arrangements.”

These agreements are authorized under (and take their name from) section 287(g) of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The idea was simple: local law enforcement could effectively assist ICE by acting as immigration agents in their own counties. While such agreements were originally intended for jailers to use to hand over those convicted of crimes to ICE, federal officials, many of them ex-local law enforcement, encouraged the use of 287(g) to go after more than just people convicted of violent or serious crimes. In 2008, ex-sheriff Jim Pendergraph (sometimes called “the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina”), who had by then become an official at ICE, told a roomful of local law enforcement: “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally, but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” In other words, sheriffs were encouraged to use 287(g) to notify ICE if they came across anyone who was potentially deportable, whether or not they had been even charged with a crime. This led to such programs being used by some sheriffs to deport people for all sorts of minor violations.

As noted above, the version of 287(g) enforcement agreements that DeSantis has mandated is the “task force” model. While two other models permit sheriffs to train deputies to enforce immigration law inside their jails—usually by asking about immigration status when booking inmates—or for officers to receive special training to serve warrants on behalf of ICE, the task force model allows sheriffs to designate some of their deputies as immigration enforcers out on the street. If this sort of thing sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve seen it play out before: The 287(g) “task force” model was used by Joe Arpaio, former longtime sheriff of Maricopa County, to provide his deputies the statutory authority to illegally stop, detain, and arrest Latinos. He was found guilty of intentional racial discrimination by a federal court and was about to be sentenced to prison time for flouting a judicial order to stop harassing Latinos when Trump pardoned him in 2017.

Trump’s first administration recruited sheriffs to join the 287(g) program and press themselves into immigration enforcement service, but they did so without reintroducing the task force model, which became inactive after Arpaio’s abuses became a matter of public record. Then, during Joe Biden’s administration, 287(g) agreements were put on hold; no new agencies joined the initiative. But since Trump’s return to the White House in January, ICE has in short order processed dozens of new agreements, including ones that use the controversial task force model.

As of this writing—the numbers are changing daily—there were over 300 287(g) agreements in place (many within agencies that have multiple agreements) and dozens pending; 140 of the current agreements are based on the task force model. The 287(g) agreements are unfunded mandates, meaning the participating agencies do not receive federal dollars for joining. They also generally require a weeks-long training, although Homan has said he seeks to shorten this process. Across the board, obstacles are being removed to allow sheriffs to use their law enforcement resources in the service of ICE’s activities, although some states, like Songer’s, still do not allow sheriffs to join the program.

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AS STATES HAVE JOINED THE PUSH to legally encourage or require sheriffs to assist ICE in conducting immigration enforcement activities, the right-wing Claremont Institute has been conducting a campaign to radicalize sheriffs to embrace reactionary and nativist interpretations of their roles and responsibilities. (Another similar movement in some evangelical circles advocates the “doctrine of the lesser magistrate,” promoted by Wisconsin pastor Matthew Trewhalla, which conceives of sheriffs as “lesser magistrates” who have a religious duty to resist ungodly authority. Trewhalla spoke at a prayer breakfast as part of the 2023 National Sheriffs Association conference.)

Songer is once again a representative figure: He and several dozen sheriffs from across the country have participated in Claremont’s “sheriff fellows” program in recent years. Starting in 2021, the right-wing think tank has hosted around eight sheriffs each year (see the list below) at its headquarters in Huntington Beach to engage in roundtable discussions with Claremont scholars, whose ranks include prominent right-wing, anti-liberal thinkers.

While the 287(g) doesn’t factor into the fellowship itinerary, the week-long program provides instruction and invites discussion on broad principles aligned with Claremont Institute values, which include a disdain for the administrative state, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion, and a strong nativist sentiment that touts the “great replacement” theory—the idea that liberals are intentionally bringing hordes of immigrants into the country to dilute the votes and the political status of the declining native-born population.

During the fellowship, participants read missives on immigration by Jeremy Carl and Kyle Schideler, the latter of whom has written passionately about his fondness for sheriffs. Carl, a senior fellow at Claremont who hails from Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, advocates curtailing immigration as a necessary step to ensure America’s survival as a nation. He has suggested many immigration reforms that Trump has adopted, like removing temporary protected status protections, challenging birthright citizenship, and “delegitimizing bureaucratic and judicial interference.”

While the Claremont sheriff fellowship is not large—there have been fewer than forty participants since its inception—its reverberations echo across the country, and not just in red states. One fellow, Sheriff Mike Murphy of Livingston County, Michigan, lobbied for a county resolution that will “monitor and document contacts between illegal immigrants” and his deputies. He told the Livingston Daily, “If . . . you’ve been here more than three months [without paperwork], you’re an illegal.” He continued:

You have no business being here. Within three months of entering this country, if you’ve not been able to find a way to immigration, to seek asylum, to do it the right way, to get paperwork, then you’re up to no good. Either you want to fly under the radar and take American jobs and work for cash under the table or you’re up to something more nefarious. There’s no other explanation.

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THESE TRENDS IN THE WAY SHERIFFS IMAGINE their roles and conduct themselves in their duties—whether as sovereign officers of a law whose extent they themselves determine, as eager deputies of federal agents intent on deporting undocumented people, as reactionary enforcers with conspiracist views of immigration, or as some combination—converge in President Trump’s call for mass deportations.

Many county sheriffs have heard Trump’s comments as a summons. Steeped in right-wing radicalism, they are working to realize his dark vision on the local level, and their efforts are going to increasingly affect everyday policing. Local law enforcement resources might be diverted as sheriffs like Songer refocus their offices to assist ICE. And if local officers respond to an undocumented person’s emergency call by showing up and asking questions about the person’s immigration status, they will have succeeded in achieving one of Trump’s apparent goals for his immigration policy: creating an atmosphere of ambient menace and anxiety for those in the country illegally. They already have no assurance of due process or fairness from federal immigration agents. And if the Trump administration is willing to unaccountably deport hundreds of people under the cover of darkness, what will radicalized county sheriffs believe they are empowered to do? We are all going to find out.