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The Long, Bitter Fight to Get ICE Out of Dallas

The mayor wants to deepen his city’s collaboration with ICE. The people have other ideas.

A screenshot from a news story about the ties between the Dallas police and ICE.

Last November, Azael Alvarez was driving around a neighborhood in southeastern Dallas when he noticed what appeared to be a group of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers surrounding a car at a gas station. Alvarez, an organizer with the group El Movimiento DFW (Dallas–Fort Worth), had been heavily involved in the fight against ICE in the city since the start of the second Trump administration.

As soon as he saw the masked agents, Alvarez pulled into the station and began recording the interaction. He noticed that a group of Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers was also present. When Alvarez asked the officers if they could verify that the masked men were from ICE, they said, “We don’t know [who they are] either.” As the suspected ICE agents detained at least one person, Alvarez asked the agents if they had a warrant, while DPD officers stood by watching. As police were driving off, an officer shouted, “Get a job!” in his direction.

The incident came in the midst of an ongoing debate about the relationship between local Dallas law enforcement and ICE. For the better part of a year, organizers, residents, and elected officials have called on the city’s leadership for accountability, transparency, and action in the face of the Trump administration’s pervasive mass-deportation drive.

The debate reached a fever pitch less than three weeks before the gas station incident, when Eric Johnson, the Republican mayor of Dallas, ordered a special meeting of two city hall committees to discuss whether the DPD should enter into an official agreement with ICE, under a federal program known as 287(g). (Johnson, whose lax approach to his job led the The Dallas Morning News to dub him “the mayor of Somewhere Else,” didn’t show up to the meeting.)

The 287(g) program can act as what ICE calls a “force multiplier” by delegating federal immigration enforcement responsibilities to local agencies. In other words, your local cop can effectively become your local ICE agent. There are various forms this delegation can take; the model favored by Johnson is known as the “task force model,” which gives local officers the “power and authority” to interrogate and detain immigrants or people they “believed” to be undocumented. Sarah Cruz, policy strategist with the ACLU of Texas, told The Nation that the task force model has a documented history of producing civil rights violations and runs the “risk of racial profiling, costly potential litigation, and the diversion of local resources to federal immigration enforcement.”

In 2012, ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ended 287(g) in part due to a string of lawsuits and investigations into agencies implementing the task force model. The most infamous abuses occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, where a DOJ investigation found that the Sheriff’s Department, deputized as ICE agents under 287(g), had been racially profiling and unlawfully stopping, detaining, and arresting people they perceived to be Latino. On top of the harrowing violence the sheriff and his officers inflicted upon the community, resulting litigation and settlements are expected to cost Maricopa taxpayers nearly $314 million.

But the second Trump administration has enthusiastically brought the 287(g) program and the task force model back from the dead—and municipalities across the country are taking part. Over 1,700 agencies across almost 40 states have signed 287(g) agreements, mostly under the task force model. Including diverted federal agents and existing forces, local cops deputized by 287(g) give ICE an effective army of 50,000 to carry out mass deportations and terrorize communities. In Texas, a law that went into effect in January will force all of the state’s county sheriffs to enter into a task force agreement by the end of the year. The law, Senate Bill 8, will add sheriffs’ offices to the long list of agencies in Texas, such as the Department of Public Safety and Highway Patrol, that now have the power to separate parents from their children.

The proliferation of Trump’s deportation drive into local jurisdictions is being bolstered by the nearly $191 billion available to DHS from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. DHS has promised to fully reimburse agencies for the salary and benefits of each officer trained for immigration enforcement under 287(g). The department is also promising performance-based bonuses based on the number of deportations a partner agency conducts.

Across the country, local governments are increasingly leveraging their autonomy to curb ICE’s reach. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a directive ordering........

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