Last week, Mother Jones reported that the Trump administration “is quickly amassing the means” to make good on Trump’s promise to deport millions of people from the United States.
One of those tools is a federal program that enlists state and local police and jail officials to identify people they believe may be undocumented immigrants.
The program is known as 287(g) for the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 that created it. It established “task force” agreements that allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deputize local and state law enforcement officers as immigration agents. The program would give police authority to stop, interrogate and arrest anyone they believe to be unauthorized immigrants. It also gives deputized jail administrators access to immigration databases so they may refer undocumented immigrants to ICE for possible deportation.
The Obama administration scaled down the program, in part due to criticism that it encouraged racial and ethnic profiling, created financial incentives to detain immigrants, and undermined relations between the police and immigrant communities. Now Trump is preparing to bring it back, according to Mother Jones and other news reports.
On Feb. 21, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, calling the program a “force multiplier,” issued memos to senior officials in his department outlining instructions for enforcing the president’s Jan. 25 executive order, which called for an aggressive effort to deport undocumented immigrants regardless of whether they had committed serious crimes.