More than a quarter of a million immigrants were deported by the Trump administration last year, Mother Jones reports—and many were deported with the eager assistance of local sheriffs who shouldn’t be involved in federal law enforcement in the first place. “70 percent of ICE arrests originate in the criminal justice system, mostly in jails,” the report said. “And as President Trump’s war on immigrants has expanded, sheriffs have become some of its most enthusiastic foot soldiers.”
Many sheriffs have helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carry out its mass deportation agenda unofficially; others have done so through ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents. It’s a flawed and racist program that the Justice Department itself said has resulted in racial profiling. Others have been ripped from their families and deported following a driving violation.
But one Georgia sheriff noted by Mother Jones, Butch Conway, has really taken 287(g) to awful extremes. “In the last decade, Conway’s agency has identified more than 21,000 people to hand over to ICE. Since 2017, Gwinnett, Georgia’s second-most populous county, has helped to detain more immigrants than any other county except five counties in states along the US-Mexico border.” Among them was Carolina Ciru, a mom of five turned over to ICE after being pulled over for driving without a license. (Georgia doesn’t permit undocumented residents to apply for licenses.) She was deported in June.
But as sheriffs have helped deport moms and have physically stood behind Donald Trump to cheer his gross attacks, Mother Jones also reports that angered communities, led by the years-long efforts of local immigrant rights advocates, have created successful pushbacks against 287(g) and pro-ICE sheriffs. “Amid public pressure, more than 20 law enforcement agencies, mostly in urban counties, have ended their 287(g) programs in the past three years,” the report said. “In 2018, voters in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, which includes Charlotte, kicked out a sheriff who’d participated in the program.”
The victories have only continued into 2020. For the first time since 2007, 287(g) is no longer in effect in Virginia’s Prince William County after the Prince William-Manassas Jail Board allowed the agreement to end. Following not one single member of the 11-person board seconding the sheriff’s move to continue the policy, “activists erupted in cheers and then chants of ‘We did it!’ and ‘This is home! This is home,’” Prince William Times reported.
Chief among 287(g)’s critics on the board was Democratic state Delegate Elizabeth Guzmán. “Guzman and others say the agreement struck terror in immigrant communities after some people were arrested for minor traffic infractions and later deported,” The Washington Post reported. “As a result, they said, undocumented immigrants were less willing to cooperate with local police, fearing that they, too, would be turned in.”
But 287(g) could also be coming to an end in Gwinnett. Mother Jones reports that Conway announced this year that he would be retiring after more than two decades as sheriff. Both of the Democratic candidates who are running to ultimately challenge his handpicked successor, Chief Deputy Lou Solis, have pledged to end the department’s participation in the program. “There’s no evidence that the 287(g) program has done anything good, anything to affect crime, anything to keep anyone safe,” Keybo Taylor, one of the two Democratic candidates, told Mother Jones. “It has created an atmosphere of severe distrust and made immigrants less safe.”