The Florida Cops Who Act as ICE Agents

0:11Our colleague, Arian Campo Flores, who covers Florida, has been on plenty of police ride-alongs before. Drug busts, gang investigations, routine patrols. But this one, in Lake Worth, Florida, this one was different. I honestly didn't know what to expect. I've never done a ride-along of this nature before. Ariane rode along with Master Sergeant Tony Kingery of Florida Highway Patrol. You know, those state troopers with the wide-brimmed hats and khaki uniforms. The officers who might ticket you for speeding. Except, on this day in July, Sergeant Kingery was keeping an eye out for something else.

0:52Undocumented immigrants. So, at one point, we were driving through this commercial district, and then he noticed a white van. So there's a van over here, but he ain't gonna go now. A white van missing a bumper. A clear violation of traffic law. It doesn't have a front bumper, which is illegal in the state of Florida. You have to have a front bumper. And so Sergeant Kingery then pulled another U-turn to get behind him. And that's when he also noticed that the van was missing a rear taillight. And he, you know, flashed his siren. And so he decided to pull it over.

1:40Kingery walked up to the driver and told him about the missing bumper and broken taillight. He also asked the driver for his license. And that's when the traffic stop became more than just a traffic stop. The guy behind the wheel didn't speak English. And instead of producing a license, the driver handed over a Guatemalan consular ID. And so at that point, Sergeant Kingery asks him, Sir, are you a U.S. citizen? Are you a U.S. citizen? That question isn't something you'd necessarily expect during a routine traffic stop. But that's changing. The driver and his passenger both ended up in handcuffs, on suspicion they were in the country illegally.

2:25This quick escalation, from broken bumper to immigration arrest, was made possible by a federal program that grants immigration enforcement powers to state and local police. And Florida is leading the way. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, September 22nd.

2:52Coming up on the show, when state troopers enforce immigration law.

3:10So how does a routine traffic stop on a Florida highway end with people in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement? The answer lies in a federal program called 287G. 287G. The 287G program. A controversial program called 287G. 287-G basically authorizes state and local officers to perform some immigration enforcement duties under ICE supervision. The idea was to partner with ICE to expand the agency's reach. How did this program, 287-G, how did it come about? So 287-G got its name from this provision of federal law, a law that was passed in the late 1990s. I signed a presidential directive to the heads of all executive departments.

3:56That allowed for federal immigration agencies to deputize state and local law enforcement to carry out certain immigration-related functions. Instructing them to very quickly expand and strengthen our program to reduce illegal immigration. And that program, 287G, has gone through a lot of iterations depending on which administration has been in power. So, for instance, under the George W. Bush administration, that program expanded. Under the Obama administration, it shrank. Under the first Trump administration, it grew again. When Trump was elected a second time, he revived a controversial form of 287G called the task force model.

4:45That's the model that lets police act almost like ICE agents while they're going about their usual law enforcement duties. So things like checking immigration status during a traffic stop, detaining people they think are here illegally, and handing them over for processing. Reviving this part of 287G would go towards achieving one of Trump's key campaign promises. Immediately upon taking the oath of office, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. The Trump administration, as part of its broader illegal immigration crackdown, has made clear that it would like to have the support of state and local law enforcement to act as what they term force multipliers in immigration enforcement operations.

5:31What's the goal here? Like when you talk about force multipliers, what does that mean? The goal here is basically to enhance the capabilities of ICE. Really, the thrust here is just to have more personnel available, more resources available, more vehicles out on the roads, more traffic stops, and more encounters with potential undocumented immigrants. And so far, no state has embraced Trump's illegal immigration crackdown as forcefully as Florida. The Sunshine State this year allocated nearly$300 million into immigration enforcement work. It also built an immigration detention center in the Everglades, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, a fortress-like compound rising from the wetlands.

6:14Now, the state is going all in on 287G. Florida is the leader, it's the leading state in striking 287G agreements with ICE. Across America, there are about 500 task force agreements under 287G. And of those agreements? More than half of those are Florida agencies, whether they be at the state level or local police. And the Florida Highway Patrol specifically, of the roughly 1 ,800 troopers that the Florida Highway Patrol has, nearly all of them have undergone the training and have achieved the designation of designated immigration officers, DIOs. But while Florida is leaning in, civil liberties groups and advocates for immigrant rights are raising alarms.

7:06These are our neighbors, not criminals, murderers or rapists. 287G has no place here. We are the people. The criticism is that it is a recipe for racial profiling, that it encourages officers to use the pretext of a traffic stop to actually further this deportation agenda.

7:35When they're asking me for my papers and they're not asking you for your papers, then they're making that determination on their own. Critics like the ACLU also argue that 287G pulls local police away from their usual work, stuff like traffic safety, crash scenes and neighborhood patrols. In this new system, how does oversight work? ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told us and the head of the Miami field office that this is all done under their supervision. Because ICE and Border Patrol have undergone significant training to actually carry out immigration enforcement duties. You're not going to be able to learn all the complexities of how to do that with one week of training.

8:23Meanwhile, the Trump administration sees the program as an important tool for expanding its immigration crackdown. And I wanted to see how it was being used. And so I was just really curious to be able to see firsthand how this was being put into practice. You know, what did this look like? Also, the back light out is here. We'll go ahead and let the traffic stop on it and check it out. After the break, the rest of Arian's ride-along with Florida Highway Patrol.

9:07Today's date, we're going to be doing some saturation patrols here in Palm Beach County. The morning of Arian's ride-along, he sat in on a pre-operation briefing. That day's deployment included 10 troopers, several supervisors, helicopter support, two federal officers from ICE, and a Border Patrol agent. Sergeant Tony Kingery instructed the troopers. He's the officer Arian would end up riding along with. Look for those vehicles that could possibly have a large amount of vehicles in that vehicle. Stop those cars. So he wanted them to focus on this one particular geographic area that straddles both sides of Interstate 95.

9:49It was an area he said was believed to be saturated, in his words, with undocumented immigrants. We have a pretty high area that's saturated with possible illegals in those areas. He said that the troopers should go out and make what he called good traffic stops. Stop those cars for good violations, traffic violations. And if that then led to the potential apprehension of an undocumented immigrant. So be it. So be it. That was sort of the point of the operation. And so that was before the ride along. When you did go on the streets with Sergeant Kingery, you know, what did you see? Yeah, I got sort of a sampling of what stops they made.

10:34So for instance, one stop was of a pickup truck that was towing a trailer. The trailer was missing its license plate, which it's required to have. And so the trooper pulled the vehicle over. An officer stopped the driver and questioned him. He was suspected of being in the country illegally and detained. ICE agents were also on hand with laptops connected to federal databases. Those ICE officers can then pull up, get the person's name, run them through their databases, and then get information as to whether they maybe missed a court hearing or they were previously deported and reentered. In less than an hour, state troopers had stopped several vehicles and detained several people they suspected of being in the country illegally.

11:22It went on like this throughout the morning. The officers pulled folks over for traffic violations, including one passenger who wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and detained suspected undocumented immigrants. Several of the detainees were dressed in fluorescent green shirts bearing the name of a lawn service company. It was later on in the day that Sergeant Kingery encountered that white van, the one we told you about at the start of the episode, with the missing bumper and broken taillight. So the driver and the passenger were both Guatemalan immigrants. In the driver's case, he was 28 years old. He had had a conviction for driving under the influence.

12:00He had suspended driving privileges. And he had also been given a notice to appear in court that had been issued by Border Patrol. How did the driver react to this encounter with Sergeant Kingery? As more troopers arrived and the ICE officers arrived and the situation became clearly more serious for him, he repeatedly said in Spanish, I have a baby son at home. Please let me call home to talk to my baby son. He at one point crouched down and just started retching. His face got really red and he just looked like a ball of nerves. Very distraught. The passenger in the van said he was 18 years old and attending school.

12:46He pleaded with officers not to initiate deportation proceedings against him and deny that he was in the country illegally. Their protests didn't work. The officers led both men to another vehicle. They removed their handcuffs and put them in zip ties that were provided by the ICE agents. And they loaded them onto the back of this pickup to head toward this Border Patrol station where they would then be processed. The two detainees never made it there. Fifteen minutes after the pickup truck left, Sergeant Kingery's radio crackled with an update. The two men had escaped, apparently when the trooper's vehicle stopped at an interstate exit.

13:30The child locks were not engaged on the back doors. And so they bolted out of the car, took off running, went through like a car dealership and on through this area where there was warehouses and there was a parking lot full of school buses and other facilities. And that then initiates essentially a manhunt for these two individuals who had escaped. The Florida Highway Patrol helicopter was circling overhead, but after significantly more than an hour, they just called it and they moved on. By the end of the day, Florida Highway Patrol had detained 23 people, not including the two who escaped. The executive director of the Highway Patrol summed up how the operation went.

14:20In his words, he said, you win some, you lose some. Arian later learned that the driver, the guy who had begged to call his baby son, was eventually arrested. The younger passenger hasn't been caught.

14:36These state troopers already had a job before they were deputized in this way. They, you know, write speeding tickets, they attend crash scenes, things like that. How sustainable is it for local or state law enforcement to also take on the duties of federal immigration agents? It is time consuming and it is it does consume resources. But the DeSantis administration in Florida has made clear that this is a priority for the state, for his administration to support the Trump administration's illegal immigration crackdown. And so as a policy decision, you know, if that is a priority, then you're going to dedicate resources to it.

15:16And while immigrant advocacy groups remain concerned, supporters see that arrests and detentions are up. And by those measures, 287G is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The Florida Highway Patrol has been the lead agency involved in more than 3 ,500 apprehensions of people suspected of being in the country illegally. That's a big number, 3 ,500. So I think the evidence is there that if this is a policy you're in agreement with, 287G can help boost apprehensions of suspected undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration has said it would like to have at least 20 ,000 state and local law enforcement trained to carry out some of these immigration enforcement duties.

16:01In other words, this experiment could just be the beginning, and it could reshape the work of local and state law enforcement across the country. It's potentially a glimpse of where things could be headed. I mean, the director of the Florida Highway Patrol told me that he envisions the work that the Florida Highway Patrol is doing as a model for what other state and local agencies can do around the country. And there are hundreds of other task force agreements that have been struck by law enforcement agencies throughout the country. If there are jurisdictions and there are states that decide that this is a policy that they want to pursue, they can look at Florida as a potential model of how to go about doing that.

17:03That's all for today, Monday, September 22nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Scott Calvert and Elizabeth Pindell.

17:17Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.