Police chiefs are signing lucrative agreements to deputize cops as deportation agents without approval from elected officials — with some then finding themselves facing a wall of local resistance.
Some small towns put the deals with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on hold. Others have torn up the contracts. And typically mundane municipal meetings have erupted in passionate debate over whether local officers should assist federal immigration enforcement.
“Someone signs, then everyone else says: Wait, what did you just do?” said Alana Greer, an attorney in Florida who runs a group called the Community Justice Project that provides legal support for organizers.
The contracts have brought to city halls the national debate over the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration patrols, with some residents expressing fears that the agreements could lead to their neighborhoods being the scenes of the next social media videos of masked agents using force.
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The town council in Stinesville, Indiana, got an earful last month when its police chief defended his decision to unilaterally sign a deal that brought in $122,500, enough for three used cars and some body-worn cameras or bulletproof vests. The deal is now in limbo.
Brooklyn Nicole, a chemistry engineer who lives there, spoke up at a town meeting on Sept. 22 and said it was inappropriate that the town was not notified of the deal signed in February.
“That’s the thing I hate the most about it. It comes off as shady and inappropriate,” Nicole said in an interview. “I just don’t think we should be supporting any kind of violence against anybody. For me, it’s a slippery slope. Maybe you’re just transporting people now. But that could escalate.”
Signing the ICE contract without telling the town “sets a precedent for getting away with whatever you want,” Nicole said. “It’s a reserve police department. They work for us, and they should listen to the public.”
The number of partnerships between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement across the country has exploded in President Donald Trump’s second term, according to ICE’s database. There were 150 contracts in Trump’s first term; there are now 2,631 and counting.
The Trump administration plans to spend $1.6 billion on the program through September 2027, a sum that far exceeds previous funding. The money boost comes to the Department of Homeland Security through the 2025 reconciliation law, according to the department.
The Trump administration has advertised $7,500 for equipment per trained officer, $100,000 for new vehicles per partnership, salary and benefits reimbursement and overtime funds. A DHS brochure features a simple equation: “Your Agency + Federal Law Enforcement = SAFER COMMUNITIES.”
In reality, the finances of the program don’t always pan out for the law enforcement agencies. A University of North Carolina study found that the pioneer in that state, Mecklenburg County, spent $5.3 million in the first year of an ICE partnership that it later canceled in 2018, and nearby Alamance County spent $4.7 million during its first year, mostly in immigrant detention costs — until the Obama administration’s Justice Department yanked away the program over a finding of racially discriminatory policing tactics under Sheriff Terry Johnson. (The same sheriff inked a new deal in 2020.)
In the rural borough of Clarion, Pennsylvania, the monthly meeting for October began with a hat-in-hand address from Police Chief William Peck IV over the way he’d signed the deal in July. Elected officials didn’t find out about it until sometime in August. The anger that simmered over the next few weeks manifested at that hearing.
“Oh my gosh, we had 50 to 80 people, which to us is a huge crowd. The council meeting was just filled with outraged people that we had entered this agreement,” Borough Council President Carol Lapinto said in an interview. “Bill said he felt a police car is not worth dividing the community or council. He’s such a good-hearted person, and he just felt terrible about it.”
By the night’s end, the deal was kaput.
“We try to be really transparent, and this really shot us down. It just raised questions,” Lapinto said. “You need to check with your councils to discuss it before signing anything, because it ends up being the elected officials’ responsibility.”
The heartbeat of Clarion is the PennWest University campus, which hosts foreign students studying biology, chemistry or economics who are vulnerable to ICE’s aggressive patrols.
Last month, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported how in Schuylkill County alone, 14 law enforcement agencies have taken on ICE duties — setting up human checkpoints outside a popular ice cream shop called Freeze and inspecting trucks on rural highways — creating what one columnist there called “a climate of fear.”
The ICE partnerships are dubbed 287(g) agreements, in reference to the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in work normally reserved for deportation agents. Nearly three in four agreements are for a “task force” model, in which officers are essentially deputized as ICE agents.
In Pitcairn, a suburb of Pittsburgh, residents discovered that their police chief signed on to the ICE program in July without first getting council approval. Council member Lisa Petrosky on Sept. 14 cautioned about the lack of transparency and her concerns over potential town liability if a local officer gets sued over bad behavior in service of ICE.
Police Chief Scott Farally stood up and got defensive. “Every one of my officers is in agreeance with this program,” he said. “I don’t know where this came to light that I gotta ask the borough for the operation of the police department. I don’t … I can run my department.”
“I think you guys are a little lost on this,” he continued, noting that DHS also works on counterterrorism.
Council member George Burkhardt later expressed his frustration, saying: “I don’t agree with the way it went down. I totally don’t agree with it.”
Another council member, Deborah Marto, emphatically expressed her indignation about illegal immigration but still noted, “I was pissed when I found out. Somebody should have communicated at least with us so we could have done proper protocol.”
However, the council didn’t vote to cancel the deal — marking a tepid approval of something they never had a say in to begin with.
The agreements have also become something of a litmus test at the state level. Texas passed a law in 2025 requiring almost every county with over 100,000 people to sign onto one of these deals, and Florida that same year passed a law that incentivizes localities to join these partnerships.
Meanwhile, 10 Democratic-leaning states have outright banned cooperation with ICE through 287(g) agreements, a list that this year added Maryland and New Mexico. A Virginia law along those lines has been blocked by a federal judge, allowing existing deals to continue for now.
In New York, 15 sheriffs have sued Gov. Kathy Hochul to counter the “Local Cops, Local Crimes Act” law that was passed in May, saying the Democrat has decided “to second-guess the independent judgments of elected sheriffs concerning federal cooperation with immigration enforcement.”
Mateo Forero, an attorney with Federation for American Immigration Reform representing the sheriffs, said 287(g) agreements have “exploded” in popularity but stressed that it isn’t always about the money.
“They did not receive any kind of reimbursements,” he said. “Because for our clients it’s not about getting a bounty. The sheriffs in New York made a policy judgment that cooperating with immigration enforcement serves the public safety in the communities they serve that elected them.”
The fight over the ICE agreement in Stinesville has escalated into a statewide drama itself.
It was riddled with problems from the start. The 287(g) agreement was signed by Shane Pittman, who was merely the deputy police chief at the time. The town council claims it didn’t hear about it until the summer and still hasn’t voted on it — despite a state law that clearly says any Indiana political subdivision “must, by ordinance or resolution, enter into a written agreement.”
Pittman, now the chief of police, made an apology of sorts at last month’s town meeting, saying the department “fell short on procedure.”
“This town is better off when decisions like this are made out in the open,” Pittman said. “Going forward, going forward, my promise to you is simple. We’re going to do this the right way. We’re going to be transparent, and we’re going to keep what’s morally and ethically right in the center of every decision that we make.”
But when he invited the public to ask him questions, Pittman raised a caveat: He wouldn’t provide any answers about “specific activity” because the 287(g) agreement forbids a department from sharing information without first running it through ICE. An agreement of dubious legality was being portrayed as already binding.
Last month, the Monroe County Commission, where Stinesville is located, chastised the town and passed a resolution that concluded the deal “was inconsistent with the democratic process, with the letter and spirit of Indiana’s open government laws, and with the values of this community.”
Town officials then got particularly annoyed when the county engaged in what was perceived as epic trolling during the annual Stinesville stone quarry festival. Monroe County took part in the parade by sending over a big red snowplow with a sign taped to the side that read, “READY FOR AN ICE STORM.”
Indiana’s Republican attorney general, Todd Rokita, has gotten involved, putting out a curiously timed legal advisory opinion that blessed Stinesville’s ICE deal — issued the morning before town officials met to vote on it and just a week after his office inked its own 287(g) agreement.
“By the way, every county sheriff across the state should be — and can be — doing what we’re doing. And what sheriffs across the nation are doing,” his office said in a statement.
Christie Popp, an immigration lawyer in the nearby state capital of Bloomington, said the attorney general’s sudden rereading of the law “has many errors and contradicts the plain text of the statute.”
Although the attorney general now claims the statute doesn’t apply to deals with the federal government, Popp pointed out that it specifically regulates cooperation between law enforcement agencies. And while Rokita has determined police chiefs have the authority to enter these agreements, Popp and others have noted that Pittman wasn’t even the actual chief when he signed the deal.
“We cannot ignore one important statute just to further Rokita’s desire to eject all brown foreign nationals from Indiana,” Popp said.
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