Florida Is the “Tip of the Spear”

Historically, ICE’s 287(g) agreements have relied on two frameworks to advance an “attrition through enforcement” strategy that expands the deportation machine.^[13] The “Jail Enforcement Model” deputizes law enforcement to act as immigration agents who assess immigration status and cooperate with ICE to send people from the jail to ICE detention. The “Warrant Service Officer” program, added in May 2019, allows state and local officers to serve administrative warrants, thereby arresting people for ICE and turning them over. Both approaches streamlined the process of deporting people who land in county jails, most of which are run by county sheriffs. The logic relied on an assumption that people in county jails were likely guilty of criminal activity. As then-president Barack Obama said in 2014, “If you’re a criminal, you’ll be deported.”^[14]

But this year has been a departure from the past two decades—even from the draconian immigration policies of Trump’s first term. DHS has reinstated the so-called 287(g) “task force” agreements, a third, more expansive model that empowers any police officer to detain and arrest people on the street for being potentially deportable immigrants.^[15]  Even further, despite a lack of legal clarity, “Alligator Alcatraz” itself imprisons immigrants supposedly “under the authority delegated pursuant to section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g).”^[16] Thus, Florida has interpreted—and the federal government has allowed—287(g) as providing unlimited permission for states to implement “mass deportation” as viciously and violently as they please.

The Feeling of a Police State

While 287(g) programs have exploded in number since Donald Trump became president in January 2025, around 30 percent of those agreements are with Florida law enforcement at the state and local level.^[17] To date, every Florida sheriff’s office has joined the program as well as at least 100 local police departments, the state troopers, Florida Fish and Wildlife, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and even the Florida Lottery.^[18] At least 11 of Florida’s public universities have also joined the program,^[19] including Florida International University, where 63 percent of the students are Hispanic or Latino^[20], raising questions about the impact of rising authoritarianism in universities across the country.^[21]

What does it look like when local law enforcement officers—who normally patrol the highways, respond to calls for assistance, and investigate serious crimes—decide to concentrate their efforts to locating and arresting immigrants?

Despite nominal legal prohibitions against racial profiling, it’s plain that that is exactly what police are doing.^[22] Take, for example, the words of Jeffrey Dinise, chief patrol agent in South Florida for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, at a DeSantis press conference about Operation Tidal Wave’s crackdown. Dinise explained that Florida highway patrol officers were watching drivers and how they react to a border patrol vehicle to decide whether to pull them over: “This is how they operate…They’re looking for reactions, reactions from the drivers. First of all, the driver looks over and then looks away and won’t look at them again. Then they vary their speed and move away from that marked unit.” The tactic is one of several used by Florida cops looking for people to deport.^[23]

Despite the dubious investigatory techniques, DeSantis has claimed repeatedly that the people arrested were all “criminals.” “These are people that should have never been in our country,” he declared,^[24] echoing propaganda from the Trump administration, which is demonizing immigrants while creating more people eligible for deportation by terminating the programs that brought them to the U.S.^[25]

DeSantis’s claims are clearly false. Even the Right-leaning libertarian Cato Institute found that 65 percent of people arrested by ICE operations since October 2024—most now being held in overcrowded detention centers, summarily deported, or, worst of all, potentially disappeared—had no criminal record.^[26] People with pending asylum cases and even citizens have been arrested.^[27] In mid-April, Florida’s highway patrol arrested 20-year-old Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a man born in the U.S., and tried to have him deported. Despite evidence of his citizenship—a birth certificate Lopez-Gomez’s mother brought to court to show the presiding judge—the judge said she could not release him. ^[28] (ICE eventually released Lopez-Gomez to his mother in semi-secret, away from the eyes of the media and supporters.^[29])

Just stating this fact, however, belies the true intention behind “mass deportation”—it does not matter if someone has a criminal record, a green card, or a pending asylum claim. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy who has touted various theories associated with White supremacy, has been clear that he sees all immigrants, even those in the country under protected legal status, deported.^[30] Many people who have been arrested this year had entered legally through state-sanctioned programs. Some have been here for decades. This current mass deportation crisis reveals just how permeable the label of “criminal” is.

Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition described the situation in Florida as an attempt to “normalize” mass deportations as “a part of everyday life.” “If they cannot make a police state,” he said, “then they are creating the feeling of a police state.”^[31]

A “Force Multiplier”

Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda is reshaping law enforcement across the country. Federal agents who typically inspect the mail, ferret out tax fraud, or even investigate federal crimes like child pornography and terrorism, are now ordered to focus on deportation arrests.^[32] Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which he signed in early July, allocates $170 billion in border-enforcement funding to DHS, bolstering ICE’s already hefty budget. It also includes money for more officers, more “temporary housing” like the one in the Everglades, and even support for local law enforcement.^[33]

Part of this is a strategy of shock and awe, enough to persuade people to leave the county voluntarily. Miller has demanded that ICE arrest around 3,000 immigrants a day.^[34] (Earlier in the year, Trump set this daily quota at 1,200 to 1,500.) To meet this goal, he ordered ICE agents to stake out Home Depot parking lots and 7-11’s as good places to sweep away immigrants.^[35] DHS has spent $200 million on a “self-deportation” campaign, with advertisements promising $1,000 to people who voluntarily leave.^[36]

Even with this manpower, money, and executive will, ICE can only hire so many people. Right now, the agency has around 20,000 agents, and Trump’s budget bill promises to add another 10,000 over the next four years (if they can find enough people to fill the spots).^[37] By way of comparison, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, the biggest sheriff’s office, has around 18,000 sworn officers; Florida alone has 47,000 law enforcement officers across all departments.^[38] Tapping into all of the law enforcement officers in the country—over a million armed and in uniform—means that every interaction, every traffic stop, every call for help could result in detention and deportation, a fate bound to lead to more deaths, the separation of families, and horrific stories of children missing medical treatment.  A police state makes it even more likely that noncitizens will “self-deport,” while everyone will feel the constraint on their liberty.

Although the involvement of local law enforcement in federal immigration enforcement is relatively new, it comes from the same nativist ideas that inspired most of America’s immigration laws: framing some immigrants as “good workers” and others as “dangerous criminals,” with a great deal of fluidity between the two by design.

In 1996, then-president Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which was heavily influenced by the contemporary anti-immigrant movement.^[39] The bill was primarily drafted by a lawyer for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), one of a constellation of anti-immigrant groups in a network created by John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist and self-taught eugenicist who was inspired by the “zero population growth” movement and White nationalist ideas.^[40] Tanton started FAIR and these other groups in the late 1970s and 1980s to seed politics, law, and culture with nativist ideas, in order to “make the restriction of immigration a legitimate position for thinking people,” as Stanton put it in a founding proposal.^[41]

Those efforts culminated in IIRIRA, which made many more people deportable overnight, especially people who were charged or convicted of crimes in the United States, and created the 287(g) program.^[42] Clinton claimed that it would strengthen “the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border” without harm to other immigrants who, in contrast, were not breaking laws.^[43] Alongside other tough-on-crime measures signed into law by Clinton, the criminalization of immigrants increased in the context of a larger war on drugs.^[44]

At first, the 287(g) program was not popular because of general anti-federal sentiment. Sheriffs only began to sign 287(g) agreements after 9/11 when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft published a memo suggesting that local law enforcement could, in fact, help enforce immigration law, a reversal of general policy that reserved immigration enforcement for the federal government.^[45] Florida and Alabama were the first states to participate, and the program remained rather small.^[46] At the time, DHS emphasized that the 287(g) program targeted people committing an ever-expanding list of “violent crimes,” like human smuggling, drug smuggling, and money laundering. This emphasis on immigrants who had committed crimes in the U.S. allowed local law enforcement to justify their entanglement with DHS and ICE without considering the overall impact on immigrant communities. Sheriffs could use 287(g) agreements as evidence that they were cracking down on serious crimes.

IIRIRA turned immigrants into “criminals” overnight. Calling the merging of the two the “crimmigration” system, the legal scholar César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández argues that the 1996 law and the “tough-on-crime,” perpetual drug war mentality resulted in the detention of hundreds of thousands of people not for criminal reasons, but for civil ones.^[47] Due process protections eroded, new crimes emerged to justify the detention of immigrants, and immigrant families were forced to live in the shadows, with fewer paths to legal citizenship.

With this criminalization of immigrants, immigration detention expanded and became indistinguishable from jail.^[48] People were deprived of their liberty and their ability to see their families or consult with attorneys; they suffered medical neglect, including alleged unwanted sterilizations.^[49] Crammed into overcrowded facilities, they faced violence from their guards, many of whom were employees of for-profit companies who bragged of bolstered profits. Of course, this was also the point—getting immigrants to self-deport because they could no longer tolerate the inhumane conditions of confinement made it easier to remove people from the country without the U.S. government being forced to prove why they could not stay.

The 287(g) program should not be understood as a neutral cooperation agreement, a mere “force multiplier.” Anti-immigrant groups in the United States frequently cite 287(g) programs as successes.^[50] The program has long served as a tool in the toolbelt of the most nativist sheriffs, those most prone to blatantly using racial profiling. The first sheriffs to use 287(g) were all openly nativist and anti-immigrant; ^[51] they joined the program not because they were concerned about public safety but because they wanted to help deport people.

Recruiting Sheriffs to the Cause

FAIR recruited some of the most infamous sheriffs to police immigrants using 287(g), including Maricopa County’s then-sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who became the ur-example of how local law enforcement could become deportation agents in their own right.^[52] While it is easy to look at the self-described “toughest sheriff”^[53] as an exceptional bad actor, Arpaio was immensely assisted by a series of state laws and nativist propaganda that anti-immigrant groups had been seeding for years. In 2006, Arizona passed the first of a series of anti-immigrant state laws.^[54] That same year, FAIR told its members, “Creating coalitions with police and sheriff’s [sic] departments all across the country to confront the issues posed by mass immigration has been a key FAIR goal for many years.”^[55] They were influential in the passage of SB 1070 in 2010, the “The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” better known as the “show me your papers” act. Arpaio eagerly lobbied in favor of the state bill and signed up for the federal 287(g) program. He then used the law as a pretext to send his deputies—paid and volunteer—to seek out immigrants, especially in places where they worked. In one notable incident in 2008, Arpaio invaded the town of Mesa, sending his troops to the public library and City Hall to arrest maintenance and cleaning crews on the night shift. The then-police chief of Mesa, George Gascón, faced off against Arpaio and accused him of showboating for the media.^[56]

Arpaio was eventually sued by the Department of Justice as well as immigrant advocates and removed from office by voters, but groups like FAIR were not deterred.^[57] They realized that sheriffs were easier to recruit than other local police.^[58] In 2011, FAIR produced a promotional video for the annual conference for the National Sheriffs’ Association, a group that represents the country’s elected sheriffs. According to FAIR’s annual report that year: “In 2011, we identified sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.”^[59] FAIR staff “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, [and] established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences.”^[60]

During Trump’s first administration, FAIR representatives emailed sheriffs they thought might be sympathetic to their cause and asked them to join the 287(g) program. Many of them did join.^[61] Even when Biden became president, FAIR helped GOP politicians rev anti-immigrant fervor to an ever-present hum. They held massive press conferences with so-called “Angel Families”—relatives of people allegedly killed by immigrants—to argue that immigrants were responsible for everything from traffic accidents, to horrific homicides, to fentanyl overdoses. The drumbeat of propaganda casting all immigrants as criminals or potential criminals overwhelmed social media and right-wing news. Tom Homan himself helped to run a propaganda operation called Border911 which produced misleading videos of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and suggested that they were potentially dangerous.^[62]

Now, the same program is being expanded and used by law enforcement to enforce plainly anti-immigrant and racist policies put into motion by key advisors to Donald Trump—Stephen Miller^[63] and Tom Homan^[64]—both of whom have explicit links to FAIR as well as other nativist organizations. Both have also advanced large quantities of nativist propaganda before and as part of their current jobs to justify advancing authoritarianism, in addition to using their links to law enforcement to legitimize their involvement.^[65]                      

Using 287(g) to Advance Authoritarianism

Even if Florida cannot recreate a police state, DeSantis and his allies are doing their best to replicate the feeling of one—a feeling that includes a diminishment of everyone’s civil rights and freedom to speak, travel, and live without fear of violence.

The harms of 287(g) are not hypothetical nor exaggerated. The use of local police in immigration enforcement not only grows the detention and deportation machine, it also makes it more difficult for immigrants to go to school and work, negatively impacts the daily lives of immigrants, results in rampant racial profiling, especially of Latino drivers, and creates significant mistrust between immigrants and law enforcement.^[66] With the program’s ramping up, already there have been new reports of people reluctant to call 911 for health emergencies or to report domestic violence, despite some attempts from local law enforcement to reassure communities that they are only arresting “criminals.”^[67]

The proliferation of the 287(g) program also undermines local democracy, as DeSantis’s bullying campaign targets resistance to his plan. In late June of this year, pro-immigrant advocates rallied in Fort Lauderdale, where the National Sheriffs’ Association held its annual summer conference. They brought a petition from faith group leaders arguing against 287(g) agreements and supporting the rights of immigrants generally. One advocate told the Miami Herald, “When you sign one of these agreements, they divide the community and the police…They see each other as enemies.”^[68] Sheriff Alyshia Dyer of Washtenaw County, Michigan, who was elected on a general platform of systemic change and transparency, described 287(g) as “bad policy and bad policing,” but admitted that Florida state leaders had made resistance difficult. In Broward County, for example, the sheriff, who did sign a 287(g) agreement, said that he would not target immigrants who were not accused of crimes. In response, the state attorney general promptly threatened to remove him from office even though he had been duly elected to represent the best interests of the community.^[69]

Beyond these specific harms, the failure of prior presidential administrations to eliminate the 287(g) program reflects just how reliant our deportation system is on criminalization and detention to justify its continued existence. Democrats like Barack Obama can implement 287(g) cooperation inside of jails by arguing that they are simply deporting the “worst of the worst.” But these programs are also infinitely flexible and can be transformed into a model for ethnic cleansing.^[70]

The anti-immigrant Right is responding to the political wins of immigrants demanding their rights with propaganda, threats, and legal maneuverings. What we see represents the union of a vast law enforcement structure across the country with a federal government single-mindedly focused on removing immigrants from the U.S. Miller has made it clear that he will create criminals, through cancelled temporary protected status or other work visas, making hundreds of thousands of people potentially deportable overnight.

For too long, the immigration system has persisted because most actors kept much of their work hidden from public view. Now, with ICE’s all-too-public raids, people are being openly disappeared.

Where are these people now? We do not know. There is no complete list of those arrested;^[71] nor is it clear what kind of due process they will receive. DeSantis has proposed, and Trump approved, making National Guardsmen immigration judges in order to expedite the docket.^[72] “[Deportations] are not punishments,” he added.^[73]

There is no way to control people entering the country without also controlling those of us who live inside, because limiting immigration always has the effect of limiting civil rights and freedoms for everyone. Not only has the deportation machine become larger and crueler, but more people are being threatened with deportation if not outright exile, including documented residents who represent political causes the federal government does not like.^[74] The GOP has embraced a rabid nativism, notable in its public presentation, but it’s worth remembering that the laws now being used with startling cruelty have historical roots.

Once again, people are being made to disappear into the gaping maw of an insatiable crimmigration machine that both political parties have empowered and Trump has weaponized against everyone. As our civil and political rights erode, we all become suspects.