How Sheriffs Might Power Trump’s Deportation Machine

One of Donald Trump’s main campaign promises—one that was printed on signs at the Republican National Convention and at Trump rallies across the country—was mass deportation. In November, Trump announced that Tom Homan, the architect of family separation during his first term, would be his pick to see this promise through, as a “border czar.” Homan is enthusiastic about the task ahead of him. “They ain’t seen shit yet,” he said in July. The effort would look less like “mass sweeps” and more like “targeted arrests,” he said recently on “60 Minutes.” “We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ’em based on numerous inve— You know, investigative processes.”

Both Trump and Homan have indicated that local law enforcement would be involved in carrying out the mass-deportation plan. Ryan Zinke, a Republican representative for Montana, who served as Trump’s first Secretary of the Interior, declared, “The sheriffs know the bad characters.” And there’s an advantage to the county sheriff in particular: nearly all of them are elected officers who are not beholden to other officials, even blue-state governors, many of whom have shown a willingness to work with Trump anyway.

Because immigration is in the realm of federal law, the role of local law enforcement in policing the border has historically been limited. But, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which expanded the criminal charges for which a person could be subject to deportation. As immigration became linked to criminal law, local law enforcement—especially county sheriffs, who enjoy relative autonomy free from direct oversight and have jurisdiction over much larger areas than, say, urban police departments—began to play a critical role in the deportation machine. In counties along the U.S. border, sheriffs receive funding, through a FEMA grant program called Operation Stonegarden, to purchase equipment such as snowmobiles and squad cars for use in conjunction with Border Patrol.

Like all law-enforcement officers, sheriffs have a great deal of discretion in how they conduct traffic stops and arrests, which can bring more people into jail, where some deportations begin. (In county jails, most of which are run by sheriffs, arrestees submit to background checks and can be held or processed for deportation proceedings.) A program called Secure Communities, started by George W. Bush and expanded by the Obama Administration, identifies potentially deportable people in jails. At a national law-enforcement conference, in 2008, a former sheriff in North Carolina said, “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” In 2014, the program was modified slightly, to prioritize the deportation of individuals accused of felonies—the so-called “felons not families” guidelines. The following year, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set several agency records related to arrests and deportations. It was led, at the time, by Tom Homan.

Another federal program, called 287(g), grants sheriff deputies permission to act as immigration agents themselves, questioning arrestees about their nationality and transferring them to ICE’s custody. During the first Trump Administration, sheriffs clamored to join 287(g), and John F. Kelly, then Secretary of Homeland Security, called the program a “highly successful force multiplier.” Many people who were deported had been charged with misdemeanors, even something as simple as a broken taillight. The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which is part of a network of anti-immigration groups linked to the far-right figure John Tanton, recruited sheriffs to join 287(g) as a way to project a tough-on-crime image.

Trump’s new Administration is poised to alter existing guidelines so that even more arrestees can enter deportation proceedings. In some states, it is possible that sheriffs will be able to arrest people for simply crossing the border. In 2023, Texas passed Senate Bill 4, which would allow local law enforcement to arrest individuals suspected only of violating immigration law; it is being disputed in the courts. Similar bills passed in Iowa and Oklahoma, where they are also under court challenge, and in November Arizonans voted to implement Ballot Measure 314, a comparable law. Though the newly elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Jerry Sheridan—the lieutenant to the infamous sheriff Joe Arpaio—has said that he doesn’t think the law applies to his office, he has expressed a willingness to detain people in something “similar” to Arpaio’s Tent City.

Because most sheriffs are elected, governors or attorneys general have little power over them. They are excluded from the Hatch Act, which bars some government employees from engaging in political activity while on the job, and largely permitted to campaign in uniform. They can make decisions about department policy without seeking approval and with low risk of public opprobrium. They often voice political opinions; before the Presidential election, one Ohio sheriff went so far as to threaten residents who publicly supported Kamala Harris. In a 2021 fund-raising letter, the Claremont Institute—a conservative think tank that the Times has called a “nerve center of the American right,” and a part of the advisory board for Project 2025—asserted that sheriffs have “jurisdictional latitude.” In the institute’s view, this “places them on the front lines of the defense of civilization.”

For that reason, Claremont—alongside other anti-immigration groups, such as FAIR, whose new “law enforcement advisor” is Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, a Homan collaborator—has turned its focus to recruiting and training sheriffs to help execute its agenda. In 2021, it created an annual weeklong retreat called the Sheriffs Fellowship, which received funding from Betsy DeVos, “to study and discuss the political-philosophical, institutional, and historical arc leading from the American Founding to today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism,” according to a promotional brochure sent to potential applicants.

At the end of October, just a few days before the 2024 election, a dozen sheriffs fellows gathered in Huntington Beach, California, to discuss pressing topics for the potential Trump Administration, including “The Three Pillars of Trumpism,” “The American Censorship Complex,” “How the Deep State Operates,” and, of course, “Immigration & National Security.” They spent five days studying such texts as an essay by the former Hoover Institute scholar Jeremy Carl, who advocates for eliminating temporary-protected-status designations, challenging birthright citizenship, and allowing the military to “legally fire, where necessary, on anyone invading US territory.”

The fellowship culminates with the American Sheriff Award, bestowed upon a Claremont fellow “to recognize and honor the sheriff ’s extraordinary sacrifice in their steadfast defense of the Constitution, its blessings of liberty, and the American way of life.” This year, the winner was Sheriff Bill Waybourn, of Tarrant County, Texas. (He posed for pictures with a statuette of John Wayne.) Waybourn has faced criticism in his community—which includes Fort Worth—because, since he took office, in 2017, more than sixty people have died while in the custody of the county jail. In 2020, Chastity Congious, a twenty-one-year-old with multiple mental-health disorders and an intellectual disability, gave birth, alone, in a cell of Waybourn’s jail, and her baby died. When asked about Waybourn’s record of jail fatalities, Ryan Williams, the president of Claremont, responded via e-mail, “Public officials face difficult choices and tradeoffs, especially those in law enforcement. We hope that the training they receive with Claremont (and, I pray, the guidance of Almighty God) will help them make these decisions in wisdom and justice.” On November 5th, Waybourn won reëlection.

Inviting county sheriffs into the fold moves Claremont closer to real political power. Sheriffs have great influence in rural and suburban communities, where voters are probably more likely to know their sheriff’s name than that of their senators or governor. And it’s clear that the incoming Trump Administration sees sheriffs as crucial partners in the work ahead. On a recent trip to Arizona, with the talk-show host Dr. Phil, Homan met with a group of sheriffs. There, he emphasized his eagerness to “help these sheriffs make their communities safer and secure the border once again.” And he intimated that the work could start before Inauguration Day. “We’re not waiting,” Homan said. “Game on, today.” ♦