This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
Arizona law enforcement agencies are largely rejecting a fast-growing ICE program that lets local officers act as deportation agents — citing the experience of the state’s largest sheriff’s office, which was booted from the program in 2009 after a federal judge found deputies racially profiled and violated the constitutional rights of Latinos.
Even in Republican-led communities known for backing immigration measures, law enforcement leaders are steering clear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) task force program, which the Trump administration is using to enlist local officers in its mass deportation efforts.
Of at least 106 municipal police departments, sheriff’s offices and county attorneys in the state, nine currently have agreements to cooperate with ICE in making arrests, as of Oct. 15. And only four Arizona departments have signed on since January, amid a national recruitment campaign that has prompted more than 900 agencies to join.
The program’s explosive nationwide growth follows President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that, among other things, called for local law enforcement to “perform the functions of immigration officers.”
Local police have three ways of participating in the 287(g) program. The first two are through the Jail Enforcement and Warrant Service Officer models, which restrict local collaboration with ICE to people who’ve already been booked into their jails. The third way is through the Task Force Model, in which local officers “serve as a force multiplier” in federal immigration enforcement “during routine police duties,” according to ICE.
ICE did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions.
Half of the agreements in Arizona are for jail enforcement, including the state’s prison system, the only statewide agency. It signed on in 2020. The Republican sheriffs of two Arizona counties that border Mexico, Yuma and Cochise, signed 287(g) warrant service agreements for their jails this year, along with Navajo County, in the far northeast part of the state.
The only local agency in Arizona to sign a task force agreement since ICE revived them in January is the County Attorney’s Office of Pinal County, a Republican stronghold sandwiched between the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas.
ICE, under the Obama administration, suspended all task force agreements in 2012. The move followed a Department of Justice investigation that found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which had a task force agreement under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, used “discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos.” In 2013, a federal judge ruled that under Arpaio the sheriff’s office had discriminated against Latinos during immigration enforcement operations, violating their Fourth and 14th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and to equal protection under the law, respectively.
“I’ve never been guilty of anything,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica, despite the judge’s rulings. “They went after me. But that’s OK. And you can tell your audience I’ll do it again.”
Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller, a Republican, said he intends to certify four deputies under the task force agreement he signed in August. Miller said these investigators will process immigration violations involving people they encounter during child abuse and drug investigations, instead of waiting on ICE officers. He said he does not foresee them participating in ICE raids.
Miller prosecuted sex crimes in Maricopa County when Arpaio’s 287(g) task force agreement was in effect. He said he remembers the “chaos that ensued from that” and doesn’t want it repeated in Pinal County. “We have zero intention and we will not be participating in any immigration raids or task forces. I just want to make that clear.”
Miller said he spoke with federal officials his agency works with before signing the task force agreement.
“‘Would we be required to join specifically an immigration task force?’ That was my first question, and the answer came back as no,” he said. “If that were one of the prerequisites, I was not going to do the program.”
Starting in October, ICE began reimbursing local agencies with task force agreements for the salaries of certified officers and paying “performance awards” of up to $1,000 per officer.
Miller said money didn’t influence his decision. None of his four deputies will be assigned full time to the 287(g) agreement, he said, only as needed in the course of their other task force investigations.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, a Democrat, believes the financial incentives are a federal ploy to pull local officers away from their everyday duties and direct them to immigration enforcement.
“I consider the program to be illegal,” said Hathaway, whose county shares a border with Mexico. He bases this view on court rulings on Arizona’s landmark 2010 anti-illegal immigration law. The “show me your papers” law was the toughest state immigration law in the nation at the time. But the Supreme Court struck down most of its provisions, leaving in place only one that allows local police to check immigration status as long as it doesn’t prolong the public’s interaction with officers.
“The Supreme Court said this is not in the realm of local law enforcement,” Hathaway said. “This is entirely a federal issue.”
States including Texas and Florida have since enacted laws to more aggressively curb illegal immigration. Florida was also among the first to require all county law enforcement agencies to sign on to the 287(g) program. Other states, largely in the Southeast, have followed suit.
Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature this year passed a similar requirement for its local law enforcement agencies called the Arizona ICE Act. But the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed it.
Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, a Democrat who runs southern Arizona’s largest sheriff’s department, has vowed not to involve his deputies in deportation arrests. The county shares a 130-mile border with Mexico. Nanos has said his department is instead focused on preventing crime, and to do that it’s imperative his deputies build trust with communities they protect, including migrant ones.
“The stance we take is: ‘Look, you have a job to do and I have a job to do,’” Nanos says in a video released by his office this year. “But clearly immigration laws, enforcement of those laws, that is the federal government’s job.”
In Maricopa County, home to a majority of Arizona’s population, Sheriff Jerry Sheridan says he’s hesitant to have his deputies certified to patrol with ICE, mainly because his office remains under strict court oversight related to its past experiment with the 287(g) program. But Sheridan has endorsed the ICE program’s work inside local jails and said that’s where Maricopa County got it right on cooperating with federal immigration enforcement.
“They’re focusing on the criminal illegal aliens,” he said of local jail partnerships with ICE. “And that’s really what a law enforcement agency should be concerned with, is people that commit crimes here in Maricopa County. And that’s what I’m concerned with.”
Sheridan is working to rebuild trust with Latinos that was broken by Arpaio’s raids and sweeps, beginning when the sheriff’s office entered a 287(g) agreement.
For Hathaway, the Santa Cruz county sheriff, lost trust is his biggest concern with deputies enforcing immigration laws in a border county that’s 83% Latino.
“I don’t want to have any animosity between the local population and our sheriff’s office,” he said. “I want them to trust us and not think just because they’re Hispanic, we’re chasing them.”
