Despite ICE having one of the largest budgets of all carceral agencies in the United States, it turns to local jails and police to meet its goals for arresting and deporting people each year. Rather than doing more investigative work to locate suspected undocumented people or people who have removal orders, it’s easier for ICE to go to a local jail to gain custody of someone who is already locked up and who did not yet have a profile in federal identity databases.
In 2008 President George W. Bush launched a program called Secure Communities. Under this program, fingerprints taken during local booking—typically submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of standard criminal background checks—were automatically shared with the Department of Homeland Security for immigration status screening. If these checks indicated that a person might be deportable or “otherwise removable,” ICE could issue a “detainer,” a request that local law enforcement hold the person in custody up to forty-eight hours beyond when they would otherwise be released so that ICE could come to the facility, interview them, and potentially take custody prior to deporting them.
Secure Communities, which the immigrant rights community referred to as S-Comm, was interpreted by local law enforcement across the country largely as a mandate to help ICE. This was primarily because agencies could not meaningfully opt out of the program, and local officials often believed that ICE detainers carried legal authority, even though they did not.
Through widespread, nationwide cooperation with ICE, jails became the primary source where ICE found people to deport, and deportations skyrocketed under the late Bush and first Obama administrations. Refocusing jails as hubs of deportable people and using police and sheriff’s deputies as the finders and preliminary detainers of these deportable people turned local law enforcement agencies into what immigrant rights organizations characterized as paramilitary extensions of ICE.
Over time, ICE began to refer to local, county, and state law enforcement that performed this work as force multipliers. That is, they considered local police to be integral partners, boots on the ground that did much of the identifying, arresting, and detaining of people prior to their transfer to ICE custody. When it came to the enforcement of immigration law, in other words, they helped multiply ICE forces.
As the Secure Communities program was rolled out state by state, and local law enforcement integrated the program’s automatic data-sharing process into their booking procedures, they also began to adopt the terminology.
Immediately after Secure Communities launched in 2008, the immigrant rights movement pushed for jurisdictions to withdraw from agreements that had been signed to begin local participation in the program. When ICE responded a few years later that the contracts were no longer necessary because the program was effectively mandatory, the movement began to educate agencies nationwide that ICE could not legally mandate them to enforce immigration law.
States have the right to control how their local resources—including law enforcement resources—are used, and the federal government cannot require them to use those resources to enforce immigration law. Further, the immigrant rights movement, primarily its advocate attorneys, undermined the legitimacy of the “detainers” sent to local law enforcement. They informed local law enforcement that the detainers were not warrants signed by a judge and did not confer legal authority to the local agency to hold someone after they were releasable on the infractions or crimes they had been arrested for. To do so would expose the local agency to lawsuits from the person held on the basis that the agency infringed their habeas corpus rights—that is, that the individual was being imprisoned unlawfully.
Immigrant rights advocates helped draft and circulate sample “detainer policies,” which jurisdictions could adopt to clarify when they would and would not honor ICE detainer requests. The policies were written under the same guiding logic and values as more general “sanctuary” policies, which had been in existence since the 1980s and which prohibited the use of local resources in many ways for enforcing immigration law.
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As local agencies—and even entire states like California—adopted detainer policies and sanctuary policies to reduce their participation in Secure Communities and in immigration policing more generally, deportations resulting from local jail cooperation dropped dramatically. In 2015 the Obama administration, with the wind taken out of its Secure Communities sails, attempted to address the legal liability concerns that had motivated many law enforcement agencies to adopt detainer policies.
The underlying fingerprint-based data sharing between local law enforcement, the FBI, and DHS remained in place. But instead of asking agencies to hold people after they’d otherwise be released, the administration asked them to inform ICE in advance of when people they suspected were deportable would be released. They continued to issue detainers, but key forms had been modified so that ICE requested release information instead of extended detention. ICE officers could then use the requested information to show up at the release and make an immediate arrest. (In “special circumstances,” however, ICE continued to request that law enforcement agencies detain individuals, though only in limited cases and not for more than forty-eight hours.) The administration called this approach the Priority Enforcement Program; the immigrant rights community named it PEP-Comm to demonstrate that it was a continuation of Secure Communities using a slightly different tactic.
Agencies throughout the country responded in a variety of ways to this move. Some agencies flat out posted all the release information for everyone in their custody on their websites so that ICE could simply look up the information and show up upon a person’s release to arrest them. This type of arrest would not be considered a custody transfer because the arrest would take place officially post-release, albeit on the agency’s property. In some cases, such “arrests” might occur in a corridor that would not be considered a public place, where the person had not been free to leave on their own and therefore should arguably be considered pre-release transfers.
In other cases, agencies would not post release information online for the public but instead include that information on the new detainer form and send it back to ICE. Others still would communicate more directly with ICE by, for instance, calling and providing release information. The immigrant rights movement, on the other hand, began drafting new policies and providing them to local agencies and legislatures to limit not only when agencies would hold people for ICE to pick up but also when they could provide release information to ICE. These policies did not grant law enforcement agencies new authority but rather asserted the authority they already had to decline ICE’s voluntary requests.
During the Trump administration’s management of ICE and its intensified efforts to terrorize immigrants, the federal government terminated the Priority Enforcement Program and reinstated the Secure Communities system, under which ICE returned to its former practices of requesting agencies hold people. It also requested that agencies provide release information. Despite his “tough on immigrants” approach, however, Trump never could return the program’s deportation numbers under Secure Communities to their highs under the Obama administration, likely because so many agencies throughout the country, including in highly immigrant-populated states like California, already had laws in place to require noncooperation or limited cooperation with ICE in responding to their detainer requests.
As the term “force multiplier” has been applied in new contexts, it has taken on many new meanings and has facilitated new kinds of professional relationships and new, collectively structured objectives.
Today, force multipliers take the form of the FBI-managed NCIC database; local police and jail booking processes linked to ICE through the Secure Communities fingerprint sharing program; cross-agency coordinating centers; local police officers in the street investigating immigration status; joint task forces between ICE, CBP, and local agencies; ICE’s Joint Criminal Alien Removal Task Force; ICE-led multi-agency task forces; ICE transnational crime and gang task forces; Anti-Trafficking Coordination Teams working with local police around the continental United States; Border Enforcement Security Task Force units along the U.S.–Mexico border; Department of Motor Vehicles administrators and staff who police identity document fraud; state or local law enforcement officers formally trained and deputized by ICE; law enforcement personnel authorized to enforce U.S. customs laws in external territories of the United States and foreign countries; ICE Transnational Criminal Investigative Units embedded in local law enforcement agencies throughout the world; transnational networks of policing officials, immigration officials, and corporate security heads brought together in regional conferences; and citizens’ academies and the well-positioned business, government, and media officials who brand ICE positively in the minds of locals in foreign countries.
At an abstract level, force multipliers are not merely strategically placed people who collaborate with ICE, but also forms of information, cultural practices, technologies, and strategic techniques forged in relationships. They link ICE capacities, authorities, and positions to those of many others to render new, increasingly efficient, and effective policing of crime, migration, and transnational social order.
The force multiplication of highly differentiated, segmented, and competitive national security, immigration control, and local public safety actors forms a global network of policing, one that targets certain populations of people on the move—immigrants, refugees, subversives, and criminals, as well as their organizations and circuits of movement. If these local actors and their agencies can be thought of as siloed data collectors and repositories within surveillant assemblages, linking them through force multiplication is a way they work together, aspiring to soak up all data by breaking down the firewalls that heretofore have made unimpeded interoperability impossible.
ICE and its partners in force multiplication therefore play central roles in forming each other’s institutions and legacies. Such collaborations and the assemblages they make do not always persist as institutionally consistent entities such as task forces, however. They may also arise in an impromptu manner and dissipate as soon as a single operation or arrest concludes. They may also arise with aspirations to create a fully comprehensive solution to a social order problem without ever truly achieving such a goal.
Local police carry out force multiplication in varying degrees: most officers, especially those not cross-designated or in specialized immigration units, participate only during slices of their workday, on certain days, or in specific phases of an operation. Furthermore, only certain officers rather than others in the same local police force might serve as force multipliers for ICE.
Thus, force multipliers and their collaborations, when they exist, are always in a state of becoming.
Adapted from On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State by Peter Mancina, reprinted with permission from NYU Press.
