Cooperation with federal immigration enforcement is rising as a serious dividing line between red and blue states — and a supply of intensifying battle between President Donald Trump’s administration and native Democratic officers.
Even as Republicans and Democrats in Congress conflict over setting new limits on the ways utilized by federal immigration brokers, red and blue states are pulling aside on whether or not to enlist in Trump’s agenda of mass deportation. Red states at the moment are passing legal guidelines requiring all native regulation enforcement businesses to signal formal partnership agreements with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, at the same time as extra blue states are shifting to prohibit native regulation enforcement from coming into such agreements.
As on many fronts, Trump and congressional Republicans are attempting to strain blue states into adopting the red-state insurance policies. Trump has repeatedly sought to dam federal funding for states and cities that don’t present unfettered cooperation with his deportation agenda — only to have his attempts repeatedly stopped by courts.
As a part of the ongoing negotiations over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, some congressional Republicans are now redoubling efforts to punish so-called sanctuary states or cities that restrict their participation in immigration enforcement, together with via prison penalties towards native officers. But Republicans have nearly no likelihood of attracting the 60 Senate votes they would want to advance such proposals.
Even the administration’s enforcement agenda itself has been structured to extend strain on blue jurisdictions. US Attorney General Pam Bondi at one level told Minnesota officials they may “bring an end to the chaos” in the state by turning over delicate voter registration data to the federal authorities. (They refused the request.)
Trump and border czar Tom Homan have additionally repeatedly steered that communities that permit the entry to native jails and prisons ICE desires received’t see the extremely militarized deployments which have disrupted Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and different cities.
But the menace to topic new cities to that intrusive type of enforcement could also be much less persuasive after the intense public backlash towards the president’s preliminary deployments, significantly in Minneapolis.
Trump’s potential to beat these obstacles and compel higher participation from native governments might resolve the destiny of his deportation drive. Traditionally, immigration specialists say, about 70% to 75% of all ICE arrests have come via transfers of undocumented immigrants already apprehended for different offenses, even minor ones, by native regulation enforcement.
Given the rising public unease with the direct federal incursions into blue cities, many specialists consider there is no politically believable manner for Trump to strategy his unprecedented objectives for arresting undocumented migrants — 3,000 a day, over 1 million a yr — with out convincing or coercing native regulation enforcement to broaden their very own involvement. “It remains true that state and local law enforcement is the key to engaging in mass deportation,” mentioned Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.
That dynamic offers leverage to state and native Democrats — which officers in states akin to New York, New Mexico and Maryland are utilizing to erect new obstacles to cooperation with ICE. Their willingness to push again towards Trump in that method is a measure of how a lot the politics of immigration have shifted in simply the 15 months since the problem helped propel the president’s return to the White House. “From the minute” Trump’s city enforcement drives have “deployed, it seems very clear to me that the optics and politics of this are entirely different,” mentioned Charles Coughlin, an Arizona Republican political marketing consultant.
The principal mechanism for state and native regulation enforcement businesses to accomplice with ICE is a program known as 287(g). That program was created by a 1996 immigration reform regulation handed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed into regulation by Democratic President Bill Clinton.
Under 287(g), state or native regulation enforcement businesses can enter into three types of partnerships with ICE. One strategy, known as the Jail Enforcement Model, empowers native regulation enforcement to interrogate prisoners of their custody about their immigration standing and to execute so-called detainers — administrative requests from ICE to carry prisoners for as much as 48 hours after the expiration of their sentence. A associated technique, known as the Warrant Service Officer strategy, empowers native regulation enforcement to serve ICE warrants on prisoners in native jails or state prisons (however to not interrogate them about their standing). The broadest type of cooperation, the Task Force Model, authorizes native regulation enforcement to implement federal immigration legal guidelines throughout their routine policing.
On its website, DHS says that as of February 6, it has signed partnership agreements below 287(g) with 1,381 regulation enforcement entities in 40 states, almost exactly 10 times as many as had been in place when President Joe Biden left workplace. That contains the sweeping process power agreements with 770 businesses in 35 states, up from zero when Biden left.
In quickly increasing its community, ICE has benefited from strikes by Republican governors and legislatures to mandate that every one native regulation enforcement businesses signal at the very least one type of the partnership settlement. Florida approved such a mandate in 2022. In 2024, after scholar Laken Riley was murdered by an undocumented immigrant, Georgia’s Republican legislature and governor required local law enforcement to accomplice with ICE. In 2025, Texas and Arkansas joined them in mandating that native regulation enforcement signal ICE partnerships. Texas, Florida and Georgia alone now account for over half the partnerships DHS lists on its web site.
Other Republican-controlled states, including South Carolina and Kentucky, are contemplating comparable payments of their present legislative session. Tennessee could also be the state most probably to approve such a mandate on native regulation enforcement this yr.
Cameron Sexton, the Republican speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, advised me the laws wouldn’t mandate which sort of partnership with ICE native governments should approve, however would require they select considered one of them.
“We feel like a statewide policy that is uniform is the most beneficial,” Sexton mentioned. “We have 95 counties, 95 sheriff departments — you don’t need 95 different policies. It’d be like saying we would allow them to define what murder is defined as, or carjacking is defined as, and that creates chaos.”
The dynamic in Tennessee illuminates the problem the Trump administration faces in attempting to draft native regulation enforcement businesses nationwide into its deportation dragnet. According to DHS, even earlier than Tennessee’s potential passage of a statewide mandate, 68 jurisdictions there have already got signed agreements with the company. But Davidson County, the dwelling of Nashville, the state’s largest metropolis, has not.
Nashville, which cooperates in some methods with ICE, might be pressured to signal an settlement if the Tennessee laws passes, however its preliminary reluctance reveals a bigger sample. An examination of the DHS web site exhibits that in states which have neither mandated nor prohibited partnerships with ICE — which stay the overwhelming majority of states — the entities which have dedicated to working with the company are typically smaller jurisdictions and never the main inhabitants facilities the place most immigrants, authorized and undocumented, reside.
In North Carolina, as an example, ICE lists 28 partnerships, however not with Charlotte or Raleigh. In Ohio, there are 17 partnerships, however not with Columbus or Cleveland. In Pennsylvania, 55 businesses have signed agreements, however not Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. In Arizona, there are 9 partnerships, however Tucson and Phoenix aren’t amongst them.
Compounding the administration’s problem is that extra blue states over the previous a number of years have moved to prohibit native regulation enforcement businesses from partnering with ICE, together with California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois and New Jersey.
In latest months, the depth of Trump’s deportation drive has impressed different states to hitch them. On Thursday, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation banning 287(g) agreements with ICE. Maryland is anticipated to finalize its personal statewide ban inside days. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey final month issued an executive order prohibiting any new agreements. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, the newly elected Democratic governor, has endorsed codifying the existing limits — that are contained in an government order often called the Immigrant Trust Directive —into formal laws. Vermont and Hawaii are additionally contemplating limits.
The most revealing instance of the shifting politics round partnering with ICE could also be in New York. In 2022, Republicans hammered Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul — who confronted an unexpectedly tight race towards Lee Zeldin — over unlawful immigration, significantly after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of undocumented migrants to New York City.
Today Hochul has taken the offensive on immigration towards Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, her presumptive GOP opponent. Late final month, Hochul proposed a package of bills to restrict federal immigration actions in New York, together with a measure to ban future agreements between native regulation enforcement and ICE and invalidate the 14 current ones throughout the state.
Releasing the payments, Hochul used language nearly unattainable to think about from Democrats a yr in the past, when the get together was nonetheless reeling from the backlash towards Biden’s immigration insurance policies that helped energy Trump’s 2024 victory. “Over the last year federal immigration agents have carried out unspeakable acts of violence against Americans under the guise of public safety,” Hochul declared. “These abuses — and the weaponization of local police officers for civil immigration enforcement — will not stand in New York.”
Under Blakeman, Nassau County has entered into the most sweeping type of ICE partnership, which permits native regulation enforcement to implement immigration legal guidelines, and he has mentioned he’ll think about suing if the laws passes. Following Zeldin’s playbook, Blakeman has disparaged Hochul as “the most pro-criminal governor” in the US.
But Democrats are assured Blakeman has fallen onto the incorrect aspect of public opinion via his resolute protection of ICE and Trump, and his refusal to condemn the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. A Siena University poll released last week discovered that two-thirds of New Yorkers consider ICE ways have gone too far, three-fifths oppose a attainable ICE deployment to New York City, and a 47-36 plurality agreed that the state ought to combat, fairly than assist the administration’s deportation drive. Overall, the survey discovered Hochul main Blakeman by nearly 2-to-1.
In swing states, Democrats aren’t pushing again as forcefully towards ICE. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, the newly elected Democratic governor, didn’t attempt to ban native governments from partnering with ICE, but she did repeal GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s order requiring them to; last week she went further by canceling all partnerships between state businesses and ICE. In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs last spring vetoed a Republican-passed invoice to require ICE partnerships, however additionally has not proposed to ban them. In the key Rust Belt battlegrounds, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and the main Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin have criticized ICE’s ways — however have not known as for banning ICE partnerships of their carefully divided states.
And even most Democratic governors in states which have restricted cooperation with ICE have been fast to level out that they cooperate on the switch of prisoners convicted of violent offenses. Democratic Govs. Gavin Newsom in California and Tim Walz in Minnesota have every highlighted the substantial variety of violent prisoners their states have transferred to ICE.
Nanya Gupta, coverage director for the American Immigration Council, a gaggle that helps immigration reform, says the variation in state and native insurance policies that restrict cooperation with ICE means there is no single rule on how these jurisdictions deal with violent criminals who may be eligible for deportation. But, she says, generally “cities and states that have limits on how much local law enforcement (can) work with ICE will still call the agency when there is someone who poses a bona fide public safety threat, who is also possibly in violation of immigration law.” (Minnesota officials have complained that a few of the violent noncitizen criminals the Trump administration has taken credit score for capturing had been merely transferred to them by the state.)
The administration’s calls for for higher entry to jails and prisons via the 287(g) program, Gupta argues, is actually meant to permit them to extra simply deport the a lot bigger variety of undocumented individuals who work together with the prison justice system for minor offenses, akin to site visitors violations, or who’re arrested and by no means charged in any respect. But even if the administration persuaded each regulation enforcement company to supply them full entry to jails and prisons, together with for the most minor offenses, Gupta says, “there are not enough immigrants with criminal records to meet the daily (deportation) goals the White House is setting.”
Trump and congressional Republicans have vastly enhanced the federal authorities’s capability to pursue deportations by itself. The One Big Beautiful Bill handed final summer season showered ICE with enough new funding to rent 10,000 extra brokers; the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority allowed federal agents to make use of a person’s ethnicity or language as a think about deciding who to cease.
Yet even so, recent research by the left-leaning Prison Policy Initiative discovered that ICE nonetheless depends on transfers from native businesses for almost half of its arrests — with red states akin to Texas, Florida and Georgia that mandate partnerships transferring folks in a lot higher amount than blue states.
Perhaps much more necessary, the occasions in Minnesota have proven that the actual constraint on the administration will not be funding or operational capability, however public tolerance. “It turns out … people really are unhappy about being subject to mass suspicion-less detention and arrest, and it’s politically difficult to accomplish it even if the Supreme Court allows the government to run roughshod over” constitutional protections, mentioned UCLA’s Arulanantham.
That public discontent has emboldened extra blue state leaders to withstand Trump’s deportation calls for, at the same time as extra red states are enlisting in his effort. In a Fox News poll last month, 85% of self-identified Republicans mentioned native governments ought to be required to cooperate with ICE, whereas 83% of Democrats mentioned that native leaders mustn’t.
That factors to a future the place the each day realities of immigration enforcement, like so many other aspects of modern American life, look very completely different in red states or blue.
