Texas accounted for a quarter of all U.S. immigration arrests in July as the Trump White House stepped up its use of local and state law enforcement to carry out its mass-deportation agenda, the Marshall Project reports.
Some 2,000 state and local law enforcement agencies have signed agreements with the feds to conduct immigration stops and turn over migrants who end up in local jails, according to an analysis by the criminal justice-focused nonprofit newsroom.
The White House shifted to the cooperative approach after high-profile surges in Democrat-led cities yielded severe public backlash and led to the fatal shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents.
Cooperation has been especially strong in Republican led-states, the Marshall Project reports, and Texas, led by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, has been among the most willing partners in this quieter crackdown. Abbott, a Trump loyalist, has increasingly made anti-immigrant sentiment part of his political brand.
“We call it the ‘shadow surge,’” Jill Garvey, director of States at the Core, a group that supports grassroots resistance to authoritarian threats, told the Marshall Project. “It’s this much quieter, but no less violent or deadly, enforcement.”
Since June, ICE has set new monthly records for signing up local law enforcement partners, the Marshall Project reports, citing agency documents. As a result, immigration arrests from March through July increased from the same period last year in all but four states, according to data published by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA.
Texas immigration arrests accounted for 10,329 of July’s total of 41,748 busts nationwide, the universities’ database shows. Florida, the state with the next-highest number of arrests, recorded just half of Texas’ total at 5,468.
Growing Texas cooperation
The increased use of state and local police agencies has made it harder for observers to distinguish routine traffic stops from targeted immigration actions, Garvey told the Marshall Project. That, in turn, has made it harder for ordinary citizens to hold the administration accountable as it steps up immigration sweeps.
The Texas Department of Public Safety is far from the only Lone Star State law enforcement agency partnering with ICE in its new under-the-radar approach. As of this month, 432 law enforcement agencies in the state have signed a total of 514 agreements with ICE for any of its three types of cooperation partnerships, the Texas Tribune reports.
More than half of those agreements — a total of 314 — are for ICE’s most-controversial partnership, the “task force model” established by Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives local cops the authority to question people about their immigration status during traffic stops and other routine police work.
Last month, Democratic federal and state lawmakers called on six small San Antonio-area communities to end their task force agreements with ICE. The elected officials maintain the deals make residents less safe, expose people to racial profiling and undermine trust in law enforcement.
“ICE has become an abusive and rogue organization at this point,” San Antonio U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, an outspoken critic of the Trump’s mass deportation program, said during a press conference calling out the municipalities. “And for that reason, all of these relationships need to be reexamined.”
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