From Traffic Stop to Deportation: Trump's Expansion of the 287(g) Immigration Enforcement Program
The Washington Post published an article yesterday on the expansion of 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements under the Trump administration. It’s about time. 287(g) was one of the aspects of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda that received very little—remarkably little—attention. Given my research background on this program, I wanted to take a moment to shed some additional light on 287(g), particularly the relationship between local immigration enforcement and traffic stops.
What’s in this post
About 287(g)
287(g) and Traffic Stops
Rethinking the Gold Standard of Racial Profiling
The Takeaway
Sidenote: Although I aim to write for a general non-specialized audience, there will inevitably be some posts that are more specialized—which may include this one. I would benefit enormously from any feedback or questions that you post in the comments below, which will help me refine this newsletter over time.
About 287(g)
287(g), as some of you will know, is a program that allows local law enforcement to effectively participate in immigration enforcement activities to various degrees. The federal government has long understood that it does not have the capacity to deport over 11 million people, hence interagency cooperation has been viewed as crucial by ICE officials over the years. The provision for which 287(g) is named—section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act—was added in 1996, but went mostly unused until well after 9/11. The program has been associated with a broader shift in immigration enforcement as something that happens not just at the border, but in many regions of the interior of the United States, as well. You can read more about 287(g) in this short paper by the American Immigration Council published in July of this year.
287(g) and Traffic Stops
The Washington Post article points out that the Trump administration was responsible for massive growth in 287(g) agreements between 2019 and 2020, mainly in Florida.1
The article says that this growth happened despite concerns by immigrant rights advocates that the 287(g) program contributes to discriminatory policing practices, particularly at traffic stops. The trouble with traffic stops is that the combination of somewhat inadequate laws around traffic stops as well as the banality of traffic stops as a routine practice of law enforcement means that traffic stops have often been the mechanism by which immigrants are screened for their immigration status.
“What 287(g) has done is taught every officer in that jurisdiction that they can potentially get somebody deported merely by bringing them into custody — that’s all you need to do. Once that chain is ignited, the resulting transfer to ICE is almost inevitable.” –Lena Graber, senior staff attorney at the nonprofit Immigrant Legal Resource Center
Reporter Tanvi Misra (on Twitter here) also wrote about this recently in her article “Another Consequence of Traffic Stops: Deportation.”
Important observations, but let’s add some data to the conversation.
Rethinking the Gold Standard of Racial Profiling
Research that Mat Coleman (Ohio State University) and I published in 2019 titled “Rethinking the “Gold Standard” of Racial Profiling: §287(g), Secure Communities and Racially Discrepant Police Power” which examined the impact of routine policing on immigrant communities in Wake and Durham Counties in North Carolina.
We digitized and mapped hundreds of police traffic checkpoint data (which we call “roadblocks” in the article) and contrasted that data with race and ethnicity data in the counties. What we found was that areas with a higher density of Latino residents experienced a higher density of police checkpoints.
We were emphatic in the article that these data do not rise to the level of what counts as racial profiling. But, in a sense, that’s where the problem begins, not where it ends. Because (1) legal claims about discriminatory policing typically rely on intentionality and because (2) the literature on policing tends to assume that policing is racially uneven, there is an enormous barrier, indeed, to really demonstrating that 287(g) promotes or encourages racial profiling—so long as sheriffs don’t go so far as to use racial slurs.2
As we wrote about our experience trying to make sense of our data:
“We were slow to understand the ways in which mainstream methodological practice in criminology makes it difficult—if not impossible—to reach the “gold standard” of racial profiling by insisting that racially discrepant policing is a normalized, defensible aspect of police work.”
And on the topic of police research more generally, we argue for a broader need for research to
“move beyond institutionalized, practice-based discriminatory intent to focus instead on racialized discrepancy, or the fact that in practice, policing is defined by racialized disparate impact.”
The Takeaway
The short story is, the growth of 287(g) under the Trump administration was regrettably underreported at the time, but I am seeing growing interest in the topic more recently. This is good news! We need more reporting and more research on local immigration enforcement programs.
The most controversial aspect of the 287(g) program remains the degree to which the program incentivizes racialized policing practices. And while discriminatory policing is a slippery thing to study empirically, some of us have spent a good bit of our lives trying to get at this question using a mix of grounded qualitative research and original quantitative datasets, like the one that Mat and I have written about above.
I have a much more detailed analysis of this trend in an upcoming academic article with an outstanding graduate student Mario Marset, but I won’t spoil the findings here.
Not all do, of course. Sheriff Terry Johnson of North Carolina, who also had a 287(g) agreement, was found to engage in anti-Latino policing practices by the Department of Justice in 2012 and reportedly used the term “taco eaters” with his staff to describe members of the Latino community. Not that it seems to matter. Johnson remains in office as sheriff to this day.