It was something that really began to happen when the United States decided that it would interlock the immigration system with the criminal legal system. So some people call it the criminal immigration system, which is not a term that I coined. It's something that immigration law experts coined.
But when Congress passed a certain series of laws in the 1980s and 90s, what they wanted to do was create a system in which people who were accused of crimes, particularly at the time, drug crimes, would be able to be immediately deported in a way that was basically faster. So they didn't have to be convicted. So normally, if you're accused of a crime, you have a right to a trial, then you might be convicted or acquitted, or you might plea out.
But if you are determined to be undocumented, you can actually be put into deportation proceedings before anyone brings you to trial. So you just are arrested and charged, and you can go immediately into deportation proceedings. And it turned out that this was a pretty effective way for police to interact with the immigration system.
And sheriffs became a lynch point originally because they run county jails.
So county jails are kind of the first stop if you're arrested. If you are unfortunate enough to be arrested, you will go through the county jail, at which point they take your ID, your fingerprints, right?
They take a variety of information. And sheriffs kind of became really useful because they were in the jail already, so they could interview people, ask them where they were from, ask them if they had proof of citizenship, and then help ICE put them into deportation proceedings. And alongside that, sheriffs were also able to make some money by housing people awaiting deportation in their jails.
That's also the benefit for them. The federal government houses about 25% of immigrants in detention in county jails right now. And they pay these sheriffs a per diem.
So they get paid sort of per day to keep people in their jails. And it's one of the ways that sheriffs are able to use that jail kind of as a political tool, right, to make money for their county.
So under Trump, two things happened. One was that anti-immigration groups, so I mentioned the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. That was a group that was already in existence.
They are an anti-immigrant group. And they began to email sheriffs, especially sheriffs that they knew were kind of constitutional sheriffs or in the far right sheriff atmosphere and say, hey, would you like to help the Trump administration deport more people? And many of them said, sure.
And so using this anti-immigrant group, the Trump administration recruited more sheriffs to join a program called 287G. And 287G is a federal program that essentially deputizes sheriffs and their deputies to act as immigration agents. So under Trump, many, many more sheriffs joined this 287G program.
Now, the 287G program is a bit interesting because it doesn't include any funding for the sheriffs, but it is something that sheriffs used to say that they were tough on immigration.
-Jessica Pishko, The Unchecked Power Of Sheriffs
