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16 Jan 20253 min readsitemanager

To assist with immigration enforcement, Trump is recruiting local police enforcement.

In order to find and imprison immigrants who are in the country illegally and are being charged, the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office in suburban Indianapolis has long sought to collaborate with…

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In order to find and imprison immigrants who are in the country illegally and are being charged, the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office in suburban Indianapolis has long sought to collaborate with federal immigration officials. According to the sheriff's office, calls to President Joe Biden's administration were never answered. However, Hamilton County deputies may soon be the first in Indiana to be authorized to do federal immigration responsibilities as President Donald Trump pushes down on illegal immigration. Trump's administration aims to recruit many more deputies around the country.  Chief Deputy John Lowes told The Associated Press, "We are definitely joining." "We want to work with ICE to ensure the safety of our community." A decades-old program that prepares local police enforcement to question and detain immigrants in their custody is being revived and expanded by U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement under Trump. Named for a provision of the 1996 statute that established it, the 287(g) program presently only applies to those who are already incarcerated or detained on charges. However, Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, recently informed sheriffs that he wants to revive a program that former President Barrack Obama abandoned because to concerns about racial profiling by expanding it to include local task teams that have the authority to make arrests on the street. It's unclear if that would enable local law enforcement to stop individuals just to verify their immigration status. The Florida Highway Patrol and ICE have reached an agreement to question, arrest, and detain individuals suspected of being in the country illegally and turn them over to federal authorities, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis stated on Friday. According to DeSantis, the agreement will assist in "fulfilling the president's mission to effectuate the largest deportation program in American history." Meanwhile, new agreements that place local law enforcement on immigration enforcement are alarming immigrant advocates. According to Nayna Gupta, policy director at the nonprofit American Immigration Council, "All of these agreements, in practice, have the same track record of racial profiling, of sweeping in U.S. citizens or people who have lawful status, and of having a chilling effect in terms of communities reporting crime to local law enforcement agencies." Many of the original 287(g) program participants had agreements in place in the early 2000s that permitted them to enforce immigration laws outside of their jails, in their communities. However, issues surfaced in several locations, including Arizona. According to a 2011 U.S. Department of Justice civil rights investigation, deputies in Maricopa County, which encompasses Phoenix, have a history of racial profiling, illegal stops, and arrests of Latinos. The contract between the county and the Department of Homeland Security was terminated. According to Lena Graber, senior staff attorney at the charity Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the program became "the hallmark of far-right, anti-immigrant sheriffs" as a way "to feed people based on their ethnicity into the deportation machine." ICE has provided law enforcement organizations with two different kinds of 287(g) agreements in recent years. One approach, which involves four weeks of training, permits local authorities to detain suspected noncitizens for ICE and interview them while they are incarcerated on other offenses. Trump introduced a different approach during his first term that only permits local authorities to execute federal immigration warrants and only needs eight hours of training.

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