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All Florida residents now live in a county where local police will be trained to work on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to federal data analyzed by The Markup.

The training is part of a rapidly expanding federal program to deputize state and local authorities as immigration enforcers, with the number of participating agencies doubling since January, according to the data. There are now over 10 million Americans living in a county with an immigration delegation agreement, The Markup’s review shows.

The delegation is enabled by a law enacted in 1996 and known as 287(g), named after a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The provision allows the Department of Homeland Security to enter into agreements with local and state agencies to “perform the function of an immigration officer.” President Donald Trump moved to expand use of the law in an executive order early in his first term, and his transition team reportedly considered expanding its use again in November as part of Trump’s promised crackdown on people living in the United States without authorization. 

Experts say developing the program is essential if Trump is to fulfill his campaign promise to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. With hundreds of vacancies, ICE is down to around 5,500 immigration officers working on civil enforcement nationwide. “We absolutely will see an expansion of this authority,” said Austin Kocher, a professor at Syracuse University studying immigration enforcement. 

We absolutely will see an expansion of this authority.

Austin Kocher, Syracuse University, professor studying immigration enforcement

Critics say the program is costly, ripe for civil rights abuses, and lacks oversight and transparency. ICE declined an interview request about the program’s expansion during Trump’s second term. 

Some of the state and local agencies who joined the program in Trump’s current term are doing so using the “Task Force Model,” the most involved and controversial of three available levels of participation. Under this model, officers are trained to act as de facto ICE agents in their community — detaining, questioning, and flagging undocumented immigrants for deportation.

The federal data analyzed by The Markup shows that officers in every county sheriff’s office, 55 city police departments, and six state agencies in Florida have entered the program under the Task Force Model. No other state has enrolled nearly as many agencies in the model. 

Use of the Task Force Model was discontinued under President Barack Obama after the Department of Justice found  county sheriff offices in the program such as former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpiao were engaged in racial profiling. 

Just before Trump was elected, 133 law enforcement agencies in 21 states were signed up to participate in 287(g), according to agency data. Now, over 300 agencies in 38 states have signed up. In comparison, the number of participating agencies stayed flat during Joe Biden’s term and grew more slowly during Trump’s first term, when it took about 10 months to double the number of participating agencies.

Today, The Markup published a tracker showing which state and local agencies participate in 287(g), what participation level they enrolled in, when they joined and, when available, the agreement between the agency and ICE. It is updated regularly with the latest data from ICE’s 287(g) website. Users can search for participating agencies by city, state, county, or participation level, which is known as the “enforcement model.” 

As of March 15, The Markup’s analysis found Florida dominates participation in the controversial program, with 145 agencies enrolled – far ahead of the next closest state, Texas, with 58 agencies enrolled. 

Participating agencies in Florida include some statewide offices not focused on law enforcement, including the Florida Department of Financial Services, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and a pending application from the Florida Department of Agriculture. They also include the state’s National and State Guard, defense forces. In Texas, the Texas National Guard is participating in the program’s Task Force Model.

A handful of states, like California and Illinois, ban participation and do not appear in the database.

Although ICE provides some data about the program online, lack of transparency around 287(g) agreements has made it difficult for the public to track when and exactly how it is being used. ICE does not disclose how many officers from each individual jurisdiction have been trained or are actively enforcing immigration laws but, across various program fact sheets, did indicate earlier this year that over 1,300 officers were trained nationwide under the program. 

Here’s how the program is typically implemented: Local law enforcement agencies nominate officers for ICE training, choosing between different levels of involvement. Once approved, these officers undergo training and receive certification to question individuals about their immigration status, make arrests, search federal databases, issue detainers, which hold detainees beyond when they would normally be released, and initiate deportation proceedings, depending on which of the models they’re operating under. State and local agencies can choose to participate in 287(g) under one or more of three models:

• The Task Force Model deputizes local officers, while patrolling the communities they are sworn to protect, to question, detain, and arrest individuals they suspect of violating civil immigration laws. Advocates have been particularly critical of this model.
• The Jail Enforcement Model deputizes officers to interrogate incarcerated suspected noncitizens with pending or actual criminal charges in order to determine their immigration status. Then deputized officers can issue a an administrative hold request from ICE to keep the person up to 48 hours after they would otherwise be released, allowing ICE officers to pick the individual up.
• Under the Warrant Service Officer Model, ICE deputizes officers to execute ICE administrative warrants within the agency’s jails or correctional facilities but not interrogate alleged noncitizens about their immigration status. 

Some participating agencies publicly announce how many of their officers are involved in the program. For example, the county executive in New York’s Nassau County, within Long Island, said in February that 10 county police detectives would  participate in the program.

To get a sense of how many officers an agency typically nominates into the program, The Markup contacted 14 agencies to ask how many they nominated, focusing on state-level agencies and counties that listed the names of their public information officers in agreements published by ICE. Of the 14 we contacted, six responded. A spokesperson for the Collier County Sheriff’s Department in Naples, Florida, said the department nominated 40 officers who were already in the process of completing their training. The Missouri Highway Patrol said the agency expects to nominate 40 officers. The Florida Highway Patrol  said in an email on March 20 to The Markup that 850 troopers completed their training for the program. ICE did not respond to requests for confirmation of these figures.

It’s just a tool for racial profiling.

Mai Nguyen, University of California, San Diego, Design Lab director

Kocher said the 287(g) program has “ the potential to be one of the most powerful pipelines from local law enforcement agencies to federal immigration enforcement authorities”  — critical for a president whose supporters recommended nearly quadrupling the number of immigration enforcement officers to 20,000. Initial figures from the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency suggest his administration has struggled to keep pace with the number of deportations during Biden’s last year in office. 

Immigrant rights groups and legal experts say ICE delegating immigration enforcement to state and local police often leads to immigration arrests of individuals with only minor or no criminal histories and discourages immigrants from reporting crimes. A 2021 report from Congress’ Government Accountability Office found ICE does not sufficiently train or supervise local police under the system. 

“It’s just a tool for racial profiling,” said Mai Nguyen, the director of the University of California, San Diego’s Design Lab who wrote a research paper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill about the use of 287(g) in North Carolina. “It’s a tool for deportation of whoever the law enforcement agency wants to deport.”