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Several states are stepping up to help the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - or ICE - to deport immigrants who are here illegally. Enforcing immigration is a federal responsibility, but state and local law enforcement are being asked to support that work under an existing program that's been given new life by the Trump administration. As NPR's Greg Allen reports, Florida is leading the way by requiring local officials and law enforcement to cooperate with ICE or lose their jobs.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Florida recently passed new measures aimed at combating illegal immigration, including one that Governor Ron DeSantis says that's aimed directly at local law enforcement statewide.
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RON DESANTIS: All state and local law enforcement have a duty to participate to the fullest extent possible with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
ALLEN: It's called the 287(g) program, named for the federal statute under which it was set up in 1996. DeSantis says help from the states and local law enforcement departments is vital if Trump hopes to make good on his pledge for mass deportations of people here without legal status. At a recent Florida cabinet meeting, he said that's why he insisted all local officials would have to participate in the program or face the consequences.
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DESANTIS: I, as the governor, have a power to remove those local officials from office, as well as administer fines. And so...
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DESANTIS: ... It has teeth, and that's what you need. You need to have teeth.
ALLEN: A number of other states are taking steps to coordinate with ICE on deportations, but none have gone as far as Florida. Sheriffs in all of Florida's 67 counties have already signed agreements with ICE. Bob Gualtieri, the sheriff in Florida's Pinellas County, calls it a big deal.
BOB GUALTIERI: Because it means criminals like these will be deported directly from jail and not released back to the street.
ALLEN: For law enforcement agencies in Florida and other states ready to begin working with ICE, the holdup now is training, which is slow to get started. In the past, it took about a month of training for local cops to be certified to conduct investigations and to serve warrants to people charged with immigration violations. Gaultieri says federal authorities have told him they're speeding up that process.
GUALTIERI: The training now is probably going to be able to get done within a matter of about five days and be able to get law enforcement officers across Florida and across the country trained in a more reasonable amount of time so they can go out and do this.
ALLEN: The Trump administration is reviving parts of the 287(g) program that had been dormant since 2012 because of legal issues and allegations of racial profiling. Amien Kacou, a lawyer with the ACLU, represented a Florida immigrant, in the country legally, who was wrongfully detained under the program. He reached a settlement last year with the Marion County Sheriff's Office. Kacou worries that ICE now is rushing training and lowering the standards for local officers.
AMIEN KACOU: With very little regard for well-known risks of racial profiling that are associated with this program - and we're very concerned that this will increase the number of pretextual stops and false arrests.
ALLEN: All law enforcement agencies in Florida now have to cooperate with ICE, but it's up to them to decide how much they want to do. Some counties are gently pushing back.
GREGORY TONY: Everyone calm down and take a deep breath. We've been doing that for years.
ALLEN: That's Gregory Tony, the sheriff in Broward County. He says despite all the noise, the new Florida law hasn't changed much about how his department will operate. At a recent county commission meeting, he said the department has long had officers certified to work on a part of the program now being revived by ICE - street-level immigration task forces. But he says he's committed no additional resources to immigration enforcement.
TONY: I didn't sign up to be ICE. My patch doesn't say ICE. My patch says Broward County. I'm a constitutional officer. I work for the 2 million people in this county.
ALLEN: Tony and other Florida sheriffs say their focus will be on helping ICE deport immigrants who are here illegally and who have committed crimes. That's a small subset of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants without legal status who, at least for now, call Florida home.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
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