President-elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations of undocumented immigrants in his new administration. Now, he’s appointed former acting ICE head Tom Homan as his so-called "border czar" and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem as the head of the Department of Homeland Security to help him do it.
This week, there have been headlines about potential workplace raids and fear in immigrant communities For many here in Arizona, it all stirs up memories of longtime Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio — workplace raids carried out on the nightly news, racial profiling lawsuits and Department of Justice investigations.
Jessica Pishko — a lawyer, journalist, and author of the new book "The Highest Law in the Land" — says sheriffs’ roles in deportations in this country goes back to the 1990s. Pishko says that is when the country changed the way it handled immigration in response to the War on Drugs. For the first time, most people who ended up in deportation proceedings, got there through the county jail.
So, sheriffs are likely to play a big role in President-elect Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations. Pishko joined The Show to talk about what it might look like.
Full conversation
JESSICA PISHKO: The thing about this style of immigration enforcement is that because local law enforcement has a lot of discretion, both in who they pull over and then what they decide to do after they pull those people over, the immigration process can look different depending on who’s doing it.
So for example, when Joe Arpaio was sheriff, one of the things he did do was, in essence, racial profiling. So he pulled over a lot of drivers who looked Latino, and he might pull them over for a broken taillight, for failing to signal for some other kind of traffic violation. Then he would often check to see if that person had their driver’s license. This is a really common tactic that local law enforcement use to see if someone might be eligible for deportation because most of the time, people who aren’t documented don’t have driver’s licenses.
So if someone didn’t have a driver’s license, that was an infraction that you could arrest them for. Now, once arrested, you’re in police custody, and at that point they can run your name through databases. So this was actually an invention of Barack Obama. It was called Secure Communities. And it’s basically just a really large federal database of individuals who might have warrants out, who might have been previously deported, who might have some issue with their immigration status.
And that was where Joe Arpaio — and other sheriffs as well — can then move that person into deportation proceedings. Now, there’s a lot of steps along the way. And of course, there’s also a lot of discretion involved.
LAUREN GILGER: So let me ask you about the discretion aspect there and ICE’s role in this. At this point and — and pending any change that may come from an incoming Trump administration — does ICE always respond? Do they always deport a person who could be deportable?
PISHKO: So they do not. Because ICE cannot simply pick up every single person in every single jail who might be deportable. There’s a few different ways to get around it. One of those is a program called 287(g), which Joe Arpaio also used. It deputized sheriffs deputies to act sometimes as immigration agents, which basically means they can question people about their immigration status and put them into deportation proceedings.
But also, the truth is ICE just simply doesn’t come all the time. And most of the time, sheriffs or other local law enforcement prioritize by looking at people who have been accused of serious crimes. That was the “felons not families,” right? They would focus on people who had committed usually crimes with a sentence of over a year or so, serious assault, robberies, that sort of thing. So in general, that is how it works right now.
GILGER: Right. So that’s what it looks like now. Let’s talk about what it might look like under a Trump administration that’s carrying out mass deportations that we’re hearing promises of. I wonder if this will become a big question. Can the federal government force local law enforcement — local sheriffs, local police agencies — to cooperate with ICE, to to turn people over to ICE?

PISHKO: So under the mass deportation system, one of the things that could happen is that priorities will shift. Now Tom Homan, who is likely to be the next head of ICE, has said that he is going to focus on “people who commit crimes.” And so one of the things that I do think will happen is that this same method of, in essence, targeting people who have been arrested by local law enforcement will continue and perhaps will be amped up.
During the Biden administration in many sheriffs, less the 287(g) program. Some of them started to participate less in deportations. But this is something that the federal government can quickly ramp up because it’s an already existing program.
And in particular, county sheriffs who want to look like they are cooperating with the Trump administration, that want to show their constituents that they are “very serious” about public safety, about reducing crime that may or may not be committed by immigrants, this is something that they will join — which they did during the first Trump administration — to kind of show their bona fides.
GILGER: Let’s talk about what this might look like in Arizona, in particular under a new immigration law that voters just passed pretty overwhelmingly: Prop 314. This is not going into effect anytime soon. It is similar to SB 4 in Texas.
But as we’ve had that discussion with law enforcement, with sheriffs leading up to this vote in Arizona, many of them say “We don’t have the resources to carry this out, to be immigration agents,” essentially.
PISHKO: And here’s the thing: Sheriffs, when they don’t really agree with the law, will always say that the reason they don’t agree with it is because they don’t have the resources, right? And that’s a question of prioritization. So when, for example, states asked county sheriffs to enforce firearm registration laws or bump stock bans when those were in effect, sheriffs who didn’t want to enforce those said “I don’t have the resources to enforce firearm regulations.”
And so similarly, when immigration laws come up, sheriffs will say, “I don’t have the resources to enforce those.” And to be fair, for a lot of counties on the border, a lot of rural counties, they do not have large staff. They may not be interested in using their time to specifically target immigrants for deportation. I think in a lot of places, these sheriffs are also elected by constituents who don’t want them doing that.
So Arizona, like Texas and also like Iowa and Oklahoma have these state laws, which in essence are attempting to require local law enforcement not only to cooperate with ICE, but also to use their resources specifically to target immigrants.
And of course, as you pointed out, the Texas bill is currently being litigated in court. So these bills in Iowa and Oklahoma and Arizona are all on pause because people are trying to sort out what they mean.
GILGER: One other thing I want to ask you about, Jessica, before I let you go is the new Maricopa County sheriff elect, Jerry Sheridan. He was a deputy of Joe Arpaio, but he has talked very openly about immigration arrests and says, “I don’t want to do that” — attempt to enforce immigration law. What do you make of his role in what it might look like going forward?
PISHKO: Joe Arpaio just did an immense number of immigration sweeps and very, very publicly on TV. So he was doing it brazenly and out in the open. I think that Jerry Sheridan is simply not interested in courting that kind of litigation that ultimately ended up with the department under a consent decree. I mean, he is still operating under a Department of Justice consent decree, so he cannot say that he will violate the law at this point.
On the flip side, Jerry Sheridan has expressed an interest in reopening Tent City. He has said that he would like to detain more people. So I think that it remains to be seen exactly what he’ll do. But I do think that what he is trying to promise is basically enough compliance with the law to get out from under the consent decree. But he also appears to be very willing to bring back a lot of the same policies that Joe Arpaio used.