Donald Trump has said his mass deportation plans will need buy-in from state and local law enforcement.
Officers at the border aren’t so sure they want to play a central role.
Out of the six current and former law enforcement officers stationed in different capacities at the border who NOTUS spoke to, all voted for Trump except one — Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez of Val Verde County, Texas. Almost all were wary of their offices being heavily involved in Trump’s push to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants.
“Personally, I’m not in favor. That is, at the end of the day, that is a federal responsibility,” Martinez said. “I may have three to four deputies working on a particular shift, and that’s to serve my citizens.”
“That’s a big debate,” Ronny Dodson, sheriff for Brewster County, Texas, said of involving local law enforcement. “I don’t know that we want that authority to start putting them in jails, because it’ll break us.”
Trump and his allies have made clear that they’ll be demanding participation from state and local parties on their immigration agenda. “It’s going to be the local police, are going to turn them over, and we’re going to have to move them back to their country,” Trump told Sean Hannity on the campaign trail last February.
Since winning the election, he’s appointed Tom Homan his “border czar,” Stephen Miller his deputy chief of staff and senior adviser and nominated South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. All three are immigration hard-liners.
Homan has already been threatening cities that vow not to comply with Trump’s agenda, recommending cities be stripped of federal funding. He previously said he would “flood agents to the sanctuary cities” — which are typically localities that prohibit local resources from going toward assisting with deportations.
Trump tried to pressure such cities to cooperate with federal law enforcement in his last term, but it didn’t work. This time around, it’s unclear what else he could do to get the results he’s seeking. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can operate in a city without the consent of local officials and carry out deportations, but it can’t force local law enforcement to cooperate, especially if it’s against local law.
Local officers told NOTUS that they don’t necessarily take orders from Trump.
“I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job,” Dodson said.
“It’s gonna be on a case-by-case basis. If they come in and say, ‘We need you to do this, this and this,’ well, that’s going to depend on what else I have going on,” Brad Coe, sheriff of Kinney County, Texas, said. “They can’t make it mandatory.”
Even on the border, not everyone in law enforcement sees immigration as their job.
“First and foremost, I will take care of my community and my citizens. At the end of the day, that is ICE’s and Border Patrol’s responsibility,” Martinez said. “We will support whatever efforts we can to whatever extent we can, depending on whatever funding there is available.”
Local police along the border have collaborated with Border Patrol, ICE and other agencies like Homeland Security for decades. That’s partly been through federal programs like Operation Stonegarden, a 2006 grant program that has helped law enforcement along the border hire more officers, and partly because they run into undocumented migrants often.
Officers said they already report those who break local laws and are undocumented to ICE, and flag others when they can, even if they can’t detain them.
There are 287(g) agreements, which allow participating police departments to hold migrants for ICE in their jails and execute immigration-related warrants, which local officers normally can’t do. The Biden administration didn’t issue any new agreements, though Trump could bring back the practice.
But asking them to do more would require investment with a serious price tag. Local jails have very limited space, and holding migrants is expensive. Bigger jails need more staff. Many of these local law enforcement offices on the Texas border said they are already under-resourced and need more police officers and Border Patrol.
“They would have to come in and build me a 1,000-bed jail and have that, and then they’re gonna have to fund this county to hire jailers and more deputies,” Dodson said.
Hiring more staff means being able to attract new hires — which typically means having a bigger budget.
“We are outnumbered big time. Our guys are overwhelmed with work, and a lot of times it seems like we’re working as Border Patrol agents because these are the majority of the calls that we’re getting,” Jose Duran, sergeant at the Eagle Pass Police Department and president of the Eagle Pass Police Association, said. “It’s kind of gotten us away from policing, from proactive policing, because we are so focused on the immigration issue.”
Of hiring more people: “We just don’t have the budget to attract them, hire them and retain them,” he said.
The budget is an open question, especially for Republicans who normally say they want to shrink the national debt. ICE and Border Patrol couldn’t substantially expand operations without more money, and congressional Republicans are still unsure how much it would take, most still waiting for cues from Trump or his appointees.
Without additional federal funding, a “mass deportation” is unlikely to happen — or would just look very similar to what is already happening, sheriffs say.
“I don’t see it being anything out of the ordinary. I think I see it as things that we’ve done in the past,” Thaddeus Cleveland, sheriff for Terrell County, said. “It would be impossible to go out and get every illegal alien in this country out of the country because there are so many.”
“My jail, we can only hold seven people at a time, so it really becomes taxing on our resources,” Cleveland, who supports 287(g) agreements, continued. “We turn them over to Border Patrol, and I would foresee us doing that unless there was some additional funds that allowed us to take care of some of that stuff.”
Duran said something similar: Trump’s promise to begin a mass deportation on day one isn’t realistic.
“I’m not worried about them creating something to where we’re going to be forced to enforce these laws, because it’s too much,” Duran said. “In order for them to force us, they have to give us facilities. They have to build facilities. They have to bring people to man those facilities. It’s not just starting tomorrow.”
Republicans’ small majority in the House and Senate means that funding any expansion to deportation infrastructure would necessitate some consensus with Democrats, most of whom don’t support expanding the role of local law enforcement.
“You don’t want local law enforcement to be perceived as being the people that are coming after you. They’re supposed to be your protectors,” Rep. Tom Suozzi, who campaigned partly on supporting tougher border security measures, said. “If they’re a victim of a crime, or if they see something happening, they’re afraid to talk to the police, and then the police lose their ability to have community policing, and then when people want protection, but they can’t get protection from the police, where do they go? They go to gangs.”
Republicans will have to address much more fundamental issues around mass deportation first . For one, they don’t all agree on what it should look like.
There’s been an effort from Trump’s corner to the halls of Congress to limit deportations to undocumented migrants who have committed crimes.
“It’s me, it’s Tom Homan, it’s Mike Johnson. All of us are saying we need to make criminals a priority, and America is saying that too,” Rep. Tony Gonzales, who represents part of the southern border, told NOTUS. “I don’t know where any disagreements are with anyone else.”
“It’s not gonna be a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan has said. “They’ll be targeted arrests.”
Some Republicans have contradicted this edict. In a post on X, fellow Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy said, “It’s time for a freeze in legal immigration while we FULLY secure the border and mass deport the millions of illegal aliens Biden/Mayorkas/Harris ILLEGALLY dumped into our country.”
Second, it’s not just local law enforcement that would need additional resources. Homan has said that “worksite operations have to happen,” referring to raids of certain workplaces, though such raids are resource-intensive and rarely yield significant numbers of deportations. He has said ICE agents will be reassigned from desk duty to assist with deportations, though ICE personnel have said there are insufficient funds for such measures, and it’s unclear what jobs would be neglected in favor of more arrests. During Trump’s first term, ICE conducted intensive surveillance missions in sanctuary cities, and the agents pulled to help were moved off long-term investigations for serious crimes like trafficking to do so.
This leaves the incoming Trump administration with an existential question: Is the mass deportation agenda just a continuation of the Biden administration’s policies?
Biden “was deporting about a million people a year, and ICE was focused on individuals who had a criminal record, so all of that is already happening today,” Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, said.
“If it is to be expanded, the question then becomes, what resources will Donald Trump either tap into or request from Congress?” she said. “We have to kind of wait and see to get a better idea of what they’re planning on doing that is an expansion of what’s been happening normally.”
“They’re already deporting convicted serious offenders. They’re also deporting people posing national security risk and people who have recently crossed the border,” Nanette Barragán, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said. “The incoming administration is going to do whatever they can to cause fear and concern in the communities, and it’s not really about safety. If it was, it would be focused on the most serious offenders.”
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Casey Murray is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.