The ICE-ification of Texas Police Departments

Representatives Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Greg Casar (D-TX) are calling to end partnerships between immigration enforcement agencies and local law enforcement, warning that local police have turned into an extension of federal immigration enforcement.

In Texas, several cities have 287G agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), allowing the agency to deputize state and local police officers to carry out federal immigration enforcement. Now, these Texas lawmakers are asking every city mayor to refuse these agreements.

“It effectively turns a hometown police department into an arm of federal immigration enforcement,” Rep. Castro said. “So they're turning local law enforcement into ICE agents and receiving money to do that.”

A Financial Incentive

At a press conference earlier this week in Bear County, Texas, Rep. Castro raised concerns over how patterns of racial profiling in local and federal law enforcement practices will increase discrimination and harassment against immigrants across the state.

“So if you are someone who has brown skin, who speaks Spanish in public, or who works a certain job or goes to a certain place, they've been staking out places like Home Depot and Lowe's and other places where hardworking men and women will go to get supplies,” he said.

Rep. Castro said he has spoken to council members and mayors in the major cities in which this profiling by ICE and local law enforcement is taking place. According to him, these partnerships are a way to increase immigrant surveillance without additional costs.

“They’re trying to balance their budgets with this money because they receive money from each officer that is trained to carry out this partnership with ICE,” Rep. Castro said.

Who is Being Targeted?

Rep. Casar emphasized that this profiling of suspected undocumented immigrants is not a “hypothetical.”

“In places that have signed these deals, sheriff's departments have set up checkpoints outside of Latino neighborhoods, and they pulled people over just for looking like so many of us here in San Antonio,” Rep. Casar said.

Rep. Casar said ICE, though meant to detain undocumented immigrants, is instead continuing to target individuals with little to no crime record at all.

“We know who he's actually going after: dads at job sites, kids at schools, grandmothers on the way to church, victims of domestic violence are being arrested by police officers and handed over to ICE,” Rep. Casar said.

These agreements, Reps. Castro and Casar argue, have turned local law enforcement into a tool that strikes fear into the community rather than protecting it.

“Our communities deserve police who protect them, not law enforcement that troll that fuels Donald Trump and Greg Abbott's mass deportation machine,” Rep. Castro said.