The Trump administration said Thursday that a six-day immigration sweep in Florida in April led to more than 1,100 arrests as it increasingly relies on local law enforcement to help speed up deportation.
U.S. immigration and customs law enforcement officers work with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the state Correctional Commission, where they sweep the community.
The operation is one of the largest in the agency's history, ICE said.
“This is a model that will be implemented nationwide, allowing us to have a force multiplier that we can list,” said Madison D. Sheahan, deputy director of ICE.
ICE officials said the operation targeted people with deportation orders and those with criminal history. More than 60% of people arrested were arrests or convictions, the agency said.
Since January, the Trump administration has expanded the number of agreements with local authorities to help immigrants enforce the law. The Florida agency for six days also signed such agreements. The agency said that since January, ICE has signed more than 400 agreements with local law enforcement agencies.
The agreements are part of the 287(g) plan, which allows local law enforcement to work with federal officials on immigration enforcement.
Often, in recent years, this means that local law enforcement has helped ICE help ICE with immigrants who have been detained in local lockdowns. But recently, the agency has granted local law enforcement agencies an immigration arrest.
Austin Kocher, a research professor at Syracuse University, analyzed immigration data, said the ICE has signed more than 200 agreements to allow local officials to be arrested since the government began. He said ICE has long been able to pair with local authorities, but the ability of local law enforcement to arrest itself will be of the greatest help to the agency.
Scott Shuchart, a former ICE official in the Biden administration, said expanding local law enforcement assistance to the ICE could help release officials to handle other key parts of the deportation process, such as working with representatives from other countries to obtain travel documents for removal and preparing flights. He said that if it happens elsewhere, it could expand ICE's ability to improve deportation.
Mr Shuchart warned that the work will be limited to areas willing to help the ice.
“It will be very regional, though,” he said. “I expect most big cities outside Texas and Florida to retain their local tax revenues, things only local police can do, and leave immigration work to the Fed.”
The plan has faced pushback in the past. The ACLU wrote letters to various local law enforcement officials this year, advising them not to participate in such programs.
“They have a history of damaging public safety, pose a serious financial burden on the local area and lead to civil rights violations,” a letter reads.
In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security inspector general said that Ice and local law enforcement “don't comply with the terms of the agreement.”
By 2012, the Obama administration stopped signing agreements with local police, allowing them to help immigrants arrest and focused on having police help migrants who have been locked in the area.
