A six -day immigration sweep in Florida this month resulted in the trial of more than 1,100 people, the Trump administration said Thursday, since it depends more and more on the Local Police to help accelerate deportations.
The immigration and compliance officers of the United States Customs worked together with the Florida Fishing and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the State Corrections Department as they advanced in the communities.
ICE said the operation was one of the largest in a single state in the history of the agency.
“This is a model that will be implemented through the country, which allows us to have a force multiplier that can come to the table,” said Madison D. Sheahan, deputy director of ICE.
ICE officials said the operation attacked people with deportation orders and those with a criminal record. More than 60 percent of those collected had a trial or a conviction, the agency said.
Since January, the Trump administration has extended the number of agreements it has with local authorities to help with the application of immigration. Florida agencies involved in the operation this week had also signed these agreements. ICE has signed more than 400 agreements with the Local Police since January, the agency said.
These agreements are part of program 287 (G), which allows the local police to collaborate with federal officials on the application of immigration.
Typically, in recent years, that meant that the Local Police helped ICE with migrants already detained in their local blockade. But with Regio, the agency has given power to the application of the local law to make immigration judgments.
Austin Kocher, a research professor at the University of Syracuse who analyzes immigration data, said ICE has signed 200 agreements that allow local officers to issue judgments since the beginning of the administration. ICE has had the ability to match local authorities in operations, but the capacity of the Local Police to make arrests on its own would help the agency more, he said.
Scott Shouchart, a former ICE official at the Biden Administration, said the expansion of the application of the local law that helps ICE Cougd helps freely free the officers to handle other key parts of the deportation process, such as working with representatives of another country. If it happens elsewhere, he said, I could expand ICE’s ability to increase deportations.
Mr. Shouchart warned that the effort would be limited to the areas willing to help ice.
“It’s going to be very regional, he thought,” he said. “I hope that most of the big cities outside Texas and Florida want to maintain their fiscal income for the things that only the local police can do and leave the immigration work to the federals.”
The program has faced a setback in the past. The American Union of Civil Libertads wrote letters this year for several local law officials to advise them not to participate.
“They have a history of damaging public security, imposing serious financial burns in the localities and leading to civil rights violations,” reads a letter.
In 2010, the Inspector General of the National Security Department said that ICE and the Local Police “did not operate in accordance with the terms of the agreements.”
For 2012, the Obama Administration stopped signing agreements with the Local Police that allowed them to help with immigration trials and focused mainly on getting officers to help transfer migrants who were already in local blockages.