Sedgwick County Sheriff’s deputies are carrying out limited immigration work after the office signed an agreement last week with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Some departments and local ICE offices have used the agreements as a kind of ‘force multiplier,” expanding the reach and strength of immigration operations.
Sheriff Jeff Easter said for his office and others in Kansas, the agreements are more about codifying an existing relationship with ICE.
“There’s several other sheriffs that have now signed up in Kansas,” Easter said. “We’ve talked about it, and it’s more so formalizing the process.”
THE SEDGWICK County Sheriff’s Office is one of 15 Kansas sheriff’s departments that have signed agreements with ICE this year. Two others — in Finney and Jackson counties — signed agreements in 2020.
The Coffeyville Police Department is the only local police department in Kansas to sign an agreement with ICE.
IN FEBRUARY, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation became the second state agency in the country to sign an agreement with ICE.
The expansion of the agreements is not without pushback. In 2022, the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas published a white paper about agreements between local law enforcement and ICE.
“Being undocumented is not a crime,” the ACLU wrote, “and local law enforcement have no obligation to help the federal government enforce immigration law.”
The ACLU contends that the agreements “have given rise to racial profiling, civil rights violations, and breakdowns in community relations” and “continue to disrupt communities and fuel racism and xenophobia in Kansas and around the country.”
THE AGREEMENT Easter signed is a 287(g) agreement — named for the 1996 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act. The amendment allows ICE to deputize local law enforcement and delegate some of its federal immigration work to the local departments.
The exact nature of that work has varied over the years, but today there are three models: a task force model, a jail enforcement model and a warrant service officer model.
The task force model is the most involved of the agreements.
It requires that departments nominate officers for the program and send them to six weeks of training at the federal law enforcement training center in Glynco, Georgia. When the training is done, the officers return home to their everyday assignments.
During the course of their regular work, the officers are allowed to question, investigate and arrest people they suspect of violating immigration law. They can also issue detainers — a request to hold someone for up to an additional 48 hours — arrest warrants and search warrants.
The jail enforcement model is more limited. Deputized officers are allowed to interrogate people about their immigration status. But they’re only allowed to question someone if they’ve already been arrested and are being held on local charges.
