In addition to deploying tens of thousands of federal agents from across the federal government to carry out his deportation agenda, President Donald Trump is rapidly expanding the network of state and local police going after immigrants through partnerships with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The aggressive, nationwide law enforcement regime, all taking place under orders from the White House, amounts to what scholars, attorneys, and now a federal judge say are steps toward the creation of a national police force. And the ranks of ICE partners won’t be filled with just local cops: In at least three states, the administration is joining forces with agencies typically tasked with environmental and marine protection, lottery control, and gaming to target immigrants.

“This is quite a common tactic,” said Charis Kubrin, a professor at the University of California, Irvine who studies immigration and crime. ”There’s this idea that we’re going to get local, not just police officers, but nurses and teachers and other public officials involved in enforcing immigration laws.”

It started largely with immigration, using federal agents and a little-remarked-upon program known as 287(g) to funnel funding to local law enforcement for partnerships. The widespread ICE incursions and local police partnerships, however, have also been justified by the myth of an immigrant crime wave.

“There is this moral panic now about migrant crime. This is rhetoric that is at odds generally with what we know about immigration and crime,” Kubrin said. “The research is pretty unequivocal that these policies have no impact on public safety whatsoever.”

“We didn’t really need this increased cooperation,” she said. “The foundational assumption of this widespread immigrant criminality upon which all of these policies and practices are based, is patently not true.”

Recruiting and paying local police to do immigration work, however, is just one part of the bigger project of creating such a national police force, said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Naureen Shah. And critics are worried that with Trump’s willingness to leverage state power for his own ends, such a security force could become a tool for carrying out the president’s political agenda.

Shah, who leads the ACLU’s policy and advocacy work on immigration, said, “Their larger project is to blur the lines between different law enforcement agencies in the military and create one national police force that is essentially under the command of the president.”

Local Partners

By funneling money to local police to do immigration work that falls under the federal government’s purview, Trump is effectively bolstering a police force........

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