As part of the Trump administration’s push to carry out mass deportations, the agency responsible for immigration enforcement has aggressively revived and expanded a decades-old program that delegates immigration enforcement powers to state and local law enforcement agencies. Under the 287(g) program led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, police officers can interrogate immigrants in their custody and detain them for potential deportation. Since President Donald Trump took office in January, ICE has rapidly expanded the number of signed agreements it has with law enforcement agencies across the country. The reason is clear. Those agreements vastly beef up the number of immigration enforcement staff available to ICE, which has about 6,000 deportation officers, as they aim to meet Trump’s goal of deporting as many of the roughly 11 million people in the country illegally as they can. Here’s a look at what these agreements are and what critics say about them: What is a 287(g) agreement and what’s the benefit to ICE? These agreements are signed between a law enforcement agency and ICE and allow the law enforcement agency to perform certain types of immigration enforcement actions. There are three different types of agreements. —Under the “jail services model,” law enforcement officers can screen people detained in jails for immigration violations. —The “warrant service officer” model authorizes state and local law enforcement officers to comply with ICE warrants or requests on immigrants while they are at their agency’s jails. —The “task force model” gives local officers the ability to investigate someone’s immigration status during their routine police duties. These agreements were authorized by a 1996 law, but it wasn’t until 2002 that the federal government actually signed one of these agreements with a local agency. The first agreement was with Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement. “The benefit to ICE is that it expands the ability to enforce immigration law across multiple jurisdictions,” said John Torres, who served as acting director of ICE from 2008 to 2009. Earlier in his career, he said, he was assigned to the Los Angeles jail and would interview any foreign citizen who came through the jail to see if they were in the country illegally. But if a jail has a 287(g) agreement with ICE it frees up those agents at the jail to do something else. What’s going on with these agreements under the Trump administration? The number of signed agreements has ballooned under Trump in a matter of months. In December of last year, ICE had 135 agreements with law enforcement agencies across 21 states. By May 19, ICE had signed 588 agreements with local and state agencies across 40 states, with an additional 83 agencies pending approval. Roughly half of the pacts are in Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently announced the arrest of more than 1,100 immigrants in an orchestrated sweep between local and federal officials. Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has also allied himself with Trump on immigration, comes in second. Other states topping the list are Georgia and North Carolina. A majority of the agreements are with sheriff’s departments, a reflection of the fact that they are largely responsible for running jails in America. But other agencies have also signed the agreements including the Florida and Texas National Guard, the Florida Department of Lottery Services and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The expansion of agreements “has […]