Donald Trump’s Plan to Outsource Immigration Enforcement to Local Cops

Bed space was so hard to come by inside immigrant detention facilities across the country last fall that federal officials scrambled to rent out extra room in county prisons and jails. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration-enforcement arm, had thousands more immigrants in custody than it had the capacity to detain. As a result, hundreds of Haitian immigrants wound up wherever there was open jail space, often in remote regions like the Yakima County jail in eastern-Washington state and far from where they were first apprehended at the southern border.

The federal immigrant detention network was bursting at the seams even before President Donald Trump entered office. Those problems will likely exacerbate after the the pool of immigrants up for deportation. The Obama administration put in place a solution that is already proving beneficial to Trump: a blueprint on how to outsource immigration enforcement to local cops, leveraging their resources and infrastructure to execute Trump’s to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants who have “criminal records.”