How Sheriffs Will Assist With Mass Deportation

November 1, 2024

“Mass Deportation Now!” sign

Livingston County, Michigan, is a fairly conservative county and a distant suburb of Detroit. The county Board of Supervisors voted in 2020 to make Livingston a Second Amendment Sanctuary and, in 2023, they made the county a “constitutional county.” In September, the board also voted to allow the sheriff of Livingston County to “track” immigrants, “no matter the nature of the contact,” including witnesses and victims.

The resolution was passed unanimously despite vigorous objections from community members, who pointed to how it would make the community less safe, bloat the local law enforcement budget for a non-law enforcement task, and the region’s history of white supremacy. The text of the resolution specifically links immigration with “increased crime” and refers to Kamala Harris as a “Border Czar.”

Text of Livingston County Resolution

Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy was a 2023 Claremont Fellow and has links to other far-right groups. He has expressed skepticism about red-flag laws and said he would not enforce other gun laws. He also pushed the board’s resolution to track immigrants. In August, he hosted a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office, for which Murphy is now under investigation for violating campaign finance laws. The penalty is a fine of $1,000, though whether he or the office would pay it is unclear.

According to Murphy, the idea of “tracking” immigrants is to collect information. From the Livingston Daily:

“There is no mechanism in place right now, under our current system, to track any illegals,” Murphy told The Daily last week. “So, anything that we know is just kind of anecdotal, because we know, in other words, when my guys arrest somebody that's an illegal, undocumented, we contact ICE and they do their thing, whether they come pick them up or whether they don't, which 99.9% of the time they don’t”

“So my motivation, frankly, is to better understand the problem. It's just that simple. I have been asked probably in the last six months, at least every other day, ‘Hey, do we really have a huge problem here?’”

Murphy also explained that he considers any immigrant who has been in the United States for “three months” as in violation of the law. (This isn’t true, needless to say.) From the Livingston Daily again:

When asked by The Daily whom he considers to be an "illegal immigrant," Murphy said:

“My definition would simply be this — if ... you've been here more than three months (without paperwork), you're an illegal. 

You have no business being here. Within three months of entering this country, if you've not been able to find a way to immigration, to seek asylum, to do it the right way, to get paperwork, then you're up to no good. Either you want to fly under the radar and take American jobs and work for cash under the table or you're up to something more nefarious. There's no other explanation.”

Murphy is just one of many sheriffs who is prepared and enabled by local support to mass deport immigrants. Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones recently said that if Trump is elected, he will be able to get back into the “deportation business.”  In Montana, a sheriff boasted he could “round up” immigrants to deport. And across the country, every sheriff is already a participant in deportations one way or another. The infrastructure is here and being used.

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In 2008, Barack Obama introduced Secure Communities, touted as “a virtual ICE presence in every local jail.” Around 70% of people who enter deportation proceedings do so through county jails; these are people who are arrested and charged, but generally not yet convicted of a crime. (Immigrants convicted of crimes are also deportable, and it is common for someone to serve years or decades in prison only to be deported to a country they haven’t seen for their adult life.)

Deportation can happen at any time for people in the criminal legal system, even if they are arrested and released, even if they just talk to the police. It is insidious and frightening through its randomness.

Sheriffs in particular have been eager to participate in deportations. The federal government has a program called 287(g), which allows local law enforcement more leeway and power in putting people into deportation proceedings. States have also passed various laws making it easier for sheriffs to cooperate with ICE. In Texas, for example, ICE agents are often embedded inside the jails. Other states have started to pass laws similar to the dreaded 1070 in Arizona – the law that allowed ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio to run rampant. Texas allows law enforcement to arrest immigrants and charge them with a state crime. Arizona is considering a similar law that is on November’s ballot.

During the Trump administration, anti-immigrant groups, especially the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – a part of the Tanton network – recruited far-right sheriffs with known animus towards immigrants to participate in 287g and act as a “force multiplier” for ICE. Most sheriffs used 287g and other laws to racially profile, arrest, and then enter people into deportation proceedings, again, without having to prove any crime was committed.

To be clear, sheriffs have wide latitude to make arrests, even for things like traffic infractions or, say, no driver’s license (a common problem for immigrants). Once arrested, individuals enter a bureaucratic system that does not care about guilt or innocence. It doesn’t even care whether you are actually undocumented – the process is riddled with errors, so it is not uncommon for citizens or people who are in the U.S. legally to find themselves in deportation proceedings.

While many sheriffs ran for office in 2016 and 2018 promising not to cooperate with ICE, this has not really been an effective strategy to reduce the reach of the crimmigration system. Many sheriffs did pull out of 287g agreements, most notably in North Carolina. In response, however, states have passed laws to require sheriffs to cooperate with ICE – North Carolina has one pending in the legislature right now – and the federal government has refused to eliminate 287g, which it could do today through administrative processes.

Further, the Democrats appear to have simply given up on immigration reform. Kamala Harris is running as a “border cop” and has said that she would continue to build the border wall. There is no longer any talk of systemic reform, like more immigration judges, expediting the process, or paths to legalization that both parties have supported in the past. The Democratic National Convention featured two sheriffs, both of whom emphasized that they were on board with deportations so long as the people being deported were ones who had committed crimes. What they didn’t explain is that people enter deportation before they have been found guilty of any crime, and that the definition of “crime” is, of course, ever expanding to fit the moment. When Barack Obama talked about deporting “felons, not families,” he did not bother to explain how people can both be accused of felonies and be members of families. (Never mind that in many states, an adult traveling with a child can be accused of the felony of trafficking.)

All this is to say that the system is primed for mass deportations without activating the military or even spending a great deal of money. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick to lead ICE, has spent the last few years on the anti-immigrant circuit, speaking at FAIR rallies and whipping up xenophobic fears. Far-right sheriff groups like the CSPOA, FAIR, and Claremont have recruited sheriffs who are fully prepared to deport as many people as possible. And we need only look at Texas to see what it looks like. Operation Lone Star has pulled in all sorts of available law enforcement to assist in mass arrests and deportation. Despite much of this being illegal, the federal government has not been willing to physically step in and stop what is essentially a mass pogrom going on in plain sight.

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What can we do? The first solution, quite frankly, is to understand that the criminal legal system and the deportation machine are intertwined. Abolishing jails and the police – who do not keep us safe – would also prevent people from being deported, including those “felons” who apparently, in the eyes of Obama, lose their status as a loved one because they have been accused of a crime. (As an aside, MAGA has been eager to embrace people convicted of crimes; they no longer see being a felon as a barrier to personhood, so long as that person is white or otherwise politically useful. Democrats are distinctly moving in the opposite direction, running away from criminal system reform and co-opting “lock him/her up” as a slogan.)

Communities are the key to resisting deportation. I believe that the solution will require not just lawsuits but also direct action. Latino activists protested the jail, hid in water tanks, and physically surrounded buses Arpaio used to transport people to ICE detention. They prevented the bus from moving with their bodies. Artists painted murals depicting Arpaio as the tottering despot he was. Volunteers drove children to and from school to protect their parents from arrest. When Trump enacted the “Muslim ban” – without warning – people flooded the airports in protests.

The mass incarceration and deportation systems rely on compliance and the cover of darkness – this is why raids happen in the wee hours before dawn when children are tucked into their beds, asleep. It’s why Governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis sent buses full of people to distant cities while the media was still groggy-eyed. It’s why journalists cannot enter jails to watch the dehumanization that happens there; nor can they see with their own eyes how people are whisked away to ICE detention without a chance to see their loved ones.

In some ways, I think people want to see the military in the streets because it is a clear sign that something is amiss. The spectacle of violence forces confrontation. But what will happen when there is no spectacle? Will we tell ourselves it is not that bad, that these are “felons, not families”?

For more on sheriffs and mass deportation, check out my book, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, available everywhere books as sold (also on Audible!).