BEL AIR, Md. — As President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration solidifies its plan for mass deportations, local law enforcement agencies are preparing to ramp up a controversial program that allows them to partner with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The 287(g) program empowers state and local law enforcement officers to help enforce federal immigration law and will likely be one of the ways the new administration bolsters its manpower as it seeks to launch what it calls the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. But it also may also be a flashpoint for a legal showdown that’s brewing as Inauguration Day draws closer.
Tom Homan, who will serve as Trump’s “border czar,” visited Texas Tuesday to tout the forthcoming administration’s plans for mass deportations.
“We’re not waiting until January,” Homan said. “We’re going to put a plan in place and secure this nation.”
Homan, the former acting ICE director during Trump’s first term, has promised to “take the handcuffs off ICE.”
The 287(g) program was added to the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1996 under then-President Bill Clinton. It authorizes ICE to delegate to state and local law enforcement officers the ability to perform certain functions of an immigration officer. Once a suspect is arrested for a crime, a trained corrections officer can access an ICE database to see more information about their immigration status and may then detain the person for up to 48 hours if ICE chooses to pick them up for deportation.
Supporters of the program argue that it does not allow local officers to round up undocumented immigrants on the streets, and that any enforcement is done within an agency’s jail or detention center once a suspect has been arrested for other charges. According to ICE, as of May 2024, law enforcement agencies in 21 states participated in the program.
Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler is a proponent of the program, saying he believes that local law enforcement should partner with ICE to help enforce immigration laws. He also pushed back against criticism that it would lead to undocumented immigrants being unfairly targeted.
“This isn’t stopping people on the street — saying ‘show me your papers,’” Gahler said, “If they’re brought in — they’re arrested for something that they have committed, an act they’ve committed against the citizens of our community. And at that point, they’re held accountable for the action of being in the country illegally.”
Gahler is no stranger to being at the center of the country’s immigration debate. He has made several trips to the southern border — and worked on a high-profile murder case in his county allegedly involving an undocumented immigrant.
Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five, was reported missing on Aug. 5, 2023, and her body was found the following day off a popular running trail. Victor Martinez Hernandez, an El Salvador native, was arrested after a 10-month nationwide manhunt. He was extradited to Maryland, where he’s been charged with first-degree murder and rape.
The victim’s mother, Patty Morin, remembers when she first learned the suspect was undocumented.
“I was actually very angry,” she said in an interview with NBC News. “I thought we had laws in place for this type of thing. … But as information became more and more available, I realized that somehow something went wrong somewhere.”
Another supporter of the 287(g) program is Samuel Page, the sheriff of Rockingham County, North Carolina. It’s a much more rural area than Mecklenburg County, where controversy over the program erupted in 2018 when a new sheriff cut ties with it. Page said his county signed up for the program in 2020 and put about a dozen corrections officers through the training. He said there have been fewer requests for ICE detainers during President Joe Biden’s administration.
“When President Biden came in, he ended a lot of those programs that were good to protect the American people,” Page said. “We got to draw the line and say the rule of law is going to matter in America.”
The 287(g) program has long been controversial. Democrats have moved to cancel agreements in various parts of the country. The American Civil Liberties Union strongly opposes the program and argues it amounts to racial profiling while instilling fear in immigrant communities. The Maryland chapter of the ACLU has said that local police officers are “wholly unprepared” to act as immigration agents.
“This hurts those families,” said Todd Shulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigrant advocacy group. “This leads to worse public safety outcomes. It erodes a sense of trust in communities and hurts the economy.”
Even within ICE, there is debate about “whether the juice is worth the squeeze,” according to Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff. It may be effective for large cities, he said, where having trained corrections officers help with immigration enforcement inside jails might free up other ICE agents to search for immigrants with more serious criminal records on the streets. But in sparsely populated areas, the time and effort to train officers could be seen as inefficient.
Other critics have also said the 287(g) program merely serves as a political messaging tool for conservative sheriffs.
Trump’s campaign platform promised to require local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But a growing number of Democrats are vowing to defy that. Earlier this month, the Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance that prohibits the use of city resources in immigration enforcement.
Elected officials in Massachusetts are already clashing with the Trump team over immigration. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said he’d be willing to go to jail to stop efforts by the president-elect that he believed were illegal or wrong.
It’s all setting the stage for a clash after inauguration.
“Local and state officials on the frontlines of the Harris-Biden border invasion have been suffering for four years and are eager for President Trump to return to the Oval Office,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team. “On day one, President Trump will marshal every lever of power to secure the border, protect their communities, and launch the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrant criminals in history.”
As for the 287(g) program, corrections officers in Harford County, Maryland, are preparing for changes next year with the incoming Trump administration.
“I believe we’re going to be very busy,” said Sgt. Christopher Crespo. The program “has been very effective. … The last thing you need to do is have someone in the street commit a murder and find out that they were here illegally.”
