Feds and Deputized Cops Stockpiling War Machines for Deportation

Federal agents and local cops are inking thousands of deals to collaborate on immigration law enforcement, while stockpiling historic amounts of military-grade weapons. That’s the takeaway from contractual agreements, federal procurement records, Department of Defense property data, and information obtained through records requests, the Prospect found. A year after President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act poured a record amount of money into his mass deportation project, which after a second law passed this year now comes to nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, the United States is in the grip of a heavily militarized joint force whose goal is to throw one million people out of the country annually. It stands to harm immigrants, protesters, and community members in general, because the federal government rapidly hired 12,000 officers and agents to staff it without requiring they meet rigorous standards or background checks, immigration advocates, attorneys, and researchers told the Prospect. More from Whitney Curry Wimbish An Associated Press investigation found, for example, that the new recruits include those who failed to graduate from a police academy, were caught lying in a police report “to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman,” used excessive force, and faced lawsuits alleging misconduct in prior law enforcement positions. “The number one thing I worry about and think about all the time with the basically doubling or tripling the size of ICE is they attempted to do that at a time when there’s a nationwide shortage of law enforcement officers,” said Kenneth Lowande, associate professor of political science at Rice University, who researches military equipment in law enforcement and was a creator of an interactive map on the topic. Police departments can’t find qualified applicants to fill jobs, he said, but immigration agents don’t have to meet the same standards to get hired, nor must they undertake the same length of training. “So basically you put military-style weapons in the hands of undertrained, likely unqualified applicants, or applicants that wouldn’t have otherwise found a law enforcement job,” Lowande said. “It is now the largest federal police force there is, and by any measure it’s a low-quality police force when you compare it to, say, the LAPD … To me that’s why there was such a conflagration in Minnesota.” TRUMP’S POLICIES ARE CONTRIBUTING to the violence in multiple ways. One is by encouraging local police departments to sign so-called 287(g) deals to work with ICE, which more have done in his second term than at any point since Congress authorized the deals in 1996 under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. For years, the number of 287(g) deals between cops and ICE remained in the double digits after the Florida Department of Law Enforcement signed the first one in 2002. There were just 35 at the end of the Obama administration. But they rose to 150 under the first Trump administration, then skyrocketed to 2,116 as of last Thursday, federal data shows. There are three types of agreements. In the task force model, ICE trains local officers to enforce immigration law during traffic stops and other routine police work, after which cops may issue ICE detainers—requests for local jails to imprison suspected foreign nationals for up to 40 hours more than they would have been otherwise—as well as arrest warrants and search warrants. President Barack Obama discontinued this option because law enforcement was using it to racially profile Black and brown people and violate their civil rights, but Trump reinstated it when he returned to the White House. It is now the most popular of the three arrangements. The jail enforcement model allows local law enforcement to interrogate people arrested on state or local charges about their immigration status and issue immigration detainers. The warrant service officer model deputizes local law enforcement officers to perform arrest functions of immigration officers within jails and to execute administrative warrants. But it doesn’t allow them to interrogate alleged noncitizens about their immigration status. Local law enforcement agencies originally signed 287(g) because they “ideologically aligned” with mass deportation, said Asya Magazinnik, professor of social data science at the Hertie School in Berlin. Magazinnik, who researches 287(g) programs, studied why the federal government extends its power downward in immigration enforcement in particular and found that the deals benefited both sides. The federal government gets a subsidy of effort from local cops, and local cops get to participate in immigration enforcement, where they previously wanted to but did not have permission. Initially, this meant that only the most anti-immigrant law enforcement departments were signing deals, such as the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office under Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom the Department of Justice stripped in 2011 of the power to enforce federal immigration laws over civil rights abuses he allegedly inflicted through a 287(g) agreement. The new factor drawing in police departments that were on the fence, Magazinnik said, is money. Under the task force model, the local department may receive $7,500 for equipment, salary, and benefit reimbursements for every officer trained; $100,000 for new vehicles; and “overtime funds up to 25% of salary”—details spelled out in a brochure selling the program. Magazinnik’s research shows that after signing a 287(g) task force agreement, local police spend more time in areas where immigrants are known to work. They make traffic stops over broken headlights, check identification and immigration status, and detain mostly people with no previous crimes or only low-level misdemeanors, individuals they would not have detained before. TRUMP IS ALSO ENCOURAGING VIOLENCE through programs and funding that puts weapons of war in the hands of police officers and immigration agents, some of which are working together under 287(g) agreements. Local law enforcement can get war machines a variety of ways, including through the 1033 program, which transfers extra military weapons from the Department of Defense to local police and sheriff’s departments, and the 1122 program, under which states and governments can buy equipment for homeland security, anti-drug, and emergency response purposes. Both Obama and Joe Biden tried to curtail weapons transfers, but federal data shows that police departments throughout the country continue to possess grenade launchers, armored tanks, military-grade rifles, drones, and bayonets. In Ohio, for example, where the 50,000-strong Haitian community in Springfield and elsewhere is bracing for mass deportations after the Supreme Court ended Temporary Protected Status earlier this month, police departments have added about $3 million worth of weapons to their stockpile over the last two years, including a $424,403 so-called “nonlethal” weapons set, multiple aerial drones, remote-control and ground vehicles, and various scopes for small arms. That’s on top of the materiel they already had, including more than 2,000 military rifles, 46 tanks, and the $850,000 Special Operations Media System and Mobile Radio Broadcasting Subsystem that the Mount Orab Police Department obtained in 2015. That system, sometimes referred to as SOMS-B, is media broadcast equipment that the U.S. military uses for psychological operations in war zones to propagandize the local population and erode their resolve. The police department did not respond to a request for information about how the psyop system has been used and whether it’s still in use. Twenty-two law enforcement agencies in Ohio have 287(g) agreements with ICE. Not all of them have weapons through the 1033 program; those that do include the police departments of Fayetteville, North Hampton, Sardinia, and Spencer, and the sheriff’s offices of Butler, Geauga, and Portage Counties, which together have amassed $1.5 million worth of military weapons. The department in Portage County and Sardinia have the most, mainly dozens of military rifles and pistols. As of last July, there were slightly more than 163,400 people living in Portage County. There are about 1,100 people in Sardinia. At the same time that local police departments are arming up, ICE is spending a record amount of money on its own small-arms shopping spree. According to federal procurement data, the agency spent $80 million on small-arms weapons last year, the most in any year since 2008 by a wide margin. The year before, it spent just $18.8 million, and in 2023, $16.4 million. Already in this year, ICE has spent nearly $26 million on small arms. Some of its biggest recent purchases include nearly $20 million for a pair of contracts to Quantico Tactical and Geissele Automatics for various firearms and precision long guns, $4.7 million to Sig Sauer for red dot sights, a gadget for semiautomatic pistols and shotguns, and $4.3 million to Atlantic Diving Supply for gun silencers. Researchers and advocates said that even if a police department doesn’t have an agreement with ICE, its officers may still be at immigration raids and anti-ICE protests. That’s because ICE doesn’t handle its own crowd control; it calls local police to do that, they said. And even if a local police department has no 287(g) agreement and is ideologically opposed to ICE, it may share the jurisdiction with a sheriff who has inked such a deal and wants to terrorize immigrants or one who believes the law does not apply to them, as the Claremont Institute–backed, extreme-right “constitutional sheriffs” do, said researcher and author Jessica Pishko, who wrote a book on the subject. How much military materiel is flowing into communities specifically to hunt immigrants is impossible to know, researchers told the Prospect. The information the federal government publishes is incomplete, as are the datasets published by local authorities, scholars, advocacy organizations, and media outlets. It’s likewise impossible to know what machinery armed forces are actually using as part of Trump’s mass deportations. “This is the very pernicious thing about the way the immigrant enforcement system and the criminal justice system have become completely intertwined,” Magazinnik told the Prospect. “Immigration is a civil matter in principle … but when you marry immigration enforcement with street-level policing, that line gets blurred.”