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Homeland Security's newest deportation ploy will make you rage [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2025-09-03

The Trump administration is trying so hard to hire enough Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, but what if they could just bribe local law enforcement instead?

When you’re tasked with fulfilling Stephen Miller’s dream of deporting 3,000 people per day, you’ve got to get creative. It’s not enough for the Department of Homeland Security to eliminate age requirements for ICE officers or to drastically cut training time or pay retirees as much as $50,000 to return, just to net a paltry 10,000 federal agents. They can hit much bigger numbers by getting state and local law enforcement agencies to help them with their dirty work, and there’s already a mechanism in place for them to do it.

Under the 287(g) program, local law enforcement can “partner” with ICE, which really just means that ICE gets to tell local law enforcement what to do regarding immigration enforcement. In the past, relatively few state and local agencies participated, with only 141 agreements at the end of fiscal year 2022, but under Trump, ICE already has 957 287(g) agreements in 35 states, and it wants more, more, more. So now they’re going to start sliding cash across the table to make it happen.

Related | ICE is paying retirees big bucks to come back and terrorize immigrants

On Tuesday, DHS issued a release saying that, under a 287(g) agreement, ICE will pay the full salary and benefits of every eligible officer, including up to 25% of that officer’s salary in overtime pay. But wait, that’s not all! Every 287(g) task force officer will be eligible for quarterly bonuses based on how much they help ICE:

Law enforcement agencies will be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards based on the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE and overall assistance to further ICE’s mission to Defend the Homeland: 90% - 100% - $1,000 per eligible task force officer

80% - 89% - $750 per eligible task force officer

70% - 79% - $500 per eligible task force officer

Given that everything that comes out of this administration is shambolic and vague, you will not be surprised to learn that nowhere is there any explanation of what those percentages are in reference to. Is it that ICE gives an officer a list of 10 people, and if they help ICE deport them all, they hit 100%? Or is it just more vibes-based, like the officer gave 100% by being the most willing to don a mask and commit violence? No matter how you slice it, the more immigrants your local police officer helps feed to the maw of Trump’s deportation machine, the more money they will get.

And the administration knows full well that this may be an impossibly attractive offer to small and rural police departments, even if they aren’t entirely suffused with that MAGA spirit. Almost half of the local law enforcement agencies in America have fewer than 10 sworn officers. Some small towns have shuttered police departments, turning policing over to the county sheriff instead. For those small departments struggling to stay open, the notion that the federal government will cover salaries is tough to pass up.

Covering salaries only helps the law enforcement agency itself, though. Hence the pot-sweetener for individual officers. Rural law enforcement agencies struggle to recruit officers because of the relatively low pay, so wouldn’t it be nice to have a pile of federal money to cover bonuses?

For DHS, these 287(g) agreements may be even more attractive than whatever underqualified Nazis they can directly hire as ICE agents. Where federal ICE agents crack heads and then leave town, local law enforcement persists. So, weaponizing local officers against immigrant communities doesn’t just mean increased targeting of people for deportation: It also means that trust between those communities and the police will continue to erode. That means a population less willing to report crimes or otherwise seek law enforcement assistance.

For the tyrannical Trump administration, that’s a feature, not a bug.

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