President Donald Trump's administration has galvanized immigration enforcement operations across the country, and those impacts go beyond major operations in cities such as Minneapolis and Chicago. Local communities — including those in the St. Louis region — are seeing heightened enforcement.
St. Louis advocates who support immigrants attempting to build a life in the United States warn that the impacts of immigration enforcement are increasingly local and tied to generally mundane interactions with police.
In O'Fallon, Missouri, a traffic stop landed a St. Louis County man — and former DACA recipient — in a rural jail after being handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In St. Ann, police say they detained another St. Louis-area Mexican man for another traffic-related issue and turned him over to St. Charles County police when an officer saw there was a warrant for his arrest over traffic-related issues.
Missouri's "Jake's Law" requires law enforcement, sheriffs and jails to check if detainees have outstanding warrants before releasing or transferring them. The legislation appears to have set the requirement for local municipalities to interface with federal agencies like ICE, even when they don't possess 287(g) agreements, the contracts that deputize some federal immigration enforcement tasks to local law enforcement.
The number of such agreements has ballooned during Trump's second term, according to ICE records and the American Civil Liberties Union. The St. Charles County Council, which turned over the Mexican man after traffic-related issues last week, is set to consider signing onto such an agreement this week. More than 60 individual 287(g) agreements have been signed in Missouri as of Monday.
Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University researcher who focuses on the federal immigration system and writes about it on Substack, spoke to St. Louis Public Radio's Brian Munoz on the changing landscape of immigration enforcement — locally and nationally — ahead of the Ashrei Foundation's "Foundations of Justice" series last week.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Brian Munoz: A growing number of municipalities in Missouri are signing these 287(g) agreements with ICE. Can you explain what those practically do?
Austin Kocher: Under our current U.S. laws, local law enforcement agencies cannot just choose to take up and enforce federal laws just because they want to. That includes a whole bunch of different parts of our legal system — and it includes immigration.
Traditionally, the dominant form of 287(g) is what we call a jail enforcement model agreement, which basically means that if that agency has signed on when anyone is booked into the county jail, they can be asked about their immigration status and have their information checked against national immigration databases. A warrant service officer agreement basically means that local officers can execute immigration warrants.
The most concerning and aggressive one, however, and the one that is now dominant across the country — as well as here in Missouri — is the task force model. This is a type of 287(g) that means that those local police officers, deputies, state highway patrol officers, can go out into the field and ask about immigration status and ask immigration questions while they are out doing routine enforcement traffic stops, responding to 911 calls, and so forth.
The task force model is so concerning to many of us, given the fact that oversight and accountability mechanisms have been all but abolished within the agency. There's no guarantee that a highway patrol officer, sheriff, or cop can do any better of a job than the ICE officer is, and typically, those officers will receive much less training than the ICE officers. The concern is — and the evidence is over the many years — that this can exacerbate community concerns around racial profiling, can lead to unlawful arrests, and for these agencies, can generate backlash of lawsuits that can and have cost taxpayers in these jurisdictions a lot of money.
Munoz: Why is it enticing for these local municipalities to sign on to these agreements?
Kocher: I spent several years interviewing senior law enforcement officers across the South who have signed on to 287(g) agreements to understand what their motivation is, what they understand their delegated authorities to be, and how these programs work in practice, and what they've told me is a variety of answers.
In the post-911 law enforcement landscape, interagency cooperation has been a big focus of federal law enforcement and local law enforcement. This may just be one of a dozen or two dozen that someone signs on to, and they may not fully understand or really care that much about the full scope of powers others, especially for sheriffs.
Sheriffs are elected by popular vote, [so they] may be motivated, especially during an election year, to run on a pro-immigration enforcement policy if they feel like that is something that will give them an edge over their competition.
There are also some financial incentives if it is in combination with a jail agreement, because there is compensation for local jurisdictions that hold immigrants for the federal government.
The issue with 287(g) was that, until recently, it was a net loss of taxpayer money, because there was no compensation for anything. The financial disincentives were top of mind for a lot of law enforcement agencies that have a hard time meeting their budget.
That has changed under this administration with the massive blank check that Congress has given the Department of Homeland Security [which] has said: "We will pay you for your time working under a 287(g) agreement. We will pay you for your training time, and we will even provide financial incentives for your immigration enforcement activity."
Munoz: Do you think jails are ready for this moment? Or do you think you know people really didn't expect the level of detention that we're seeing now?
Kocher: One of the things we've seen from the start of the Trump administration is that the national detained population has gone from less than 40,000 people, which is already really large, to over 70,000 people in just 12 months. We've never seen immigrant detention grow this quickly. We've never seen this many new detention facilities come online across the country; we've never seen this many county jails roped into holding people for the federal government. So I think across the entire country, the immigrant detention infrastructure has ballooned in a way that was very hard to imagine as recently as a year ago, and we've definitely seen the infrastructure struggle to maintain an adequate level of care for people in detention.
Munoz: Is there something you're working on that you're particularly excited about?
Kocher: I'm really excited about this work I'm starting with Claire Trickler McNulty, who is a former career DHS official. One of the things that we are both really passionate about, me as a researcher looking at the data and her with a real, in-depth understanding of the policy and practice, is how we can build a system that doesn't rely on mass detention.
What we're really trying to do is to say: "Look, do we really need to be detaining 70,000 people? 100,000 people?" No, we don't think so. We think there probably is some minimum amount of detention that is appropriate for a law enforcement agency to have. It's certainly not this big, and it's certainly not a budget this big. We're currently looking at detaining at the Trump administration's wildest dreams, 100,000 people — which is a percent, a single percent — of the total population they could attain.
We can't detain our way out of this problem, that's for sure. The question then is: How do we make better decisions, and how do we actually understand what the appropriate support services are that people need as they're going through the immigration process?
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