Police serve as border stopgap, fueling debate
Feds responsible, but their resources are thin
Migrants crossing the Rio Grande into the U.S. near McAllen, Texas, are likely to be met by U.S. Border Patrol agents in their signature white-andgreen SUVs.
Or police officers from nearby Mission, Texas, a border town of 84,000. Or deputies from the Hidalgo County Sheriff ’s Office. Or troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
To what degree local and state police on the border should engage with migrants and assist in immigration enforcement – under U.S. law, a federal responsibility – is a legal debate. It’s one that is increasing as more migrants arrive and police officers on the border are stopping groups of them or intercepting smugglers.
“They’ve always worked well together,” Clint McDonald, executive director of the 31-county Texas/Southwestern Border Sheriff ’s Coalition, said of deputies and federal border agents. “Now, it’s such an urgent situation that all hands are on deck.”
Federal agents encountered 172,331 migrants in March, higher than the 101,028 processed in February and nearly 70,000 higher than in March 2019, when large numbers of migrants arrived at the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics. The number of family units and unaccompanied minors are on pace to surpass 20-year highs.
In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, migrants cross in groups of 50 to 100 and often turn themselves in to authorities, hoping to be processed and released until their court date. As Border Patrol agents ferry migrants to holding facilities, sheriff deputies answer calls of migrants trespassing on private land or to try to block smugglers, McDonald said. “The border sheriffs do not want to be immigration officers,” he said. “But they’re having to be forced into the role of assisting Border Patrol because Border Patrol is spread so thin.”
Under the U.S. Constitution, immigration enforcement and border security are assigned to federal agents, said Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, a law professor at Penn State Law and director of the Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.
Communities with 287(g) agreements – or contracts with the federal government that delegate some enforcement duties to local agencies, such as alerting immigration officials when they arrest undocumented migrants – can assist in some enforcement, she said, but police officers are not trained in the complexities of immigration law or engaging with migrants.
“There are some positive roles that police officers can play in immigration,” Wadhia said. “But immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, and we should not be deputizing police officers to enforce immigration law.”
One of the main risks in allowing officers to engage with migrants is that it could dissuade immigrants in the community from reporting crimes, fearing run-ins with immigration officers, said Nayna Gupta, associate director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, an advocacy group.
Officers answering immigration-related calls have often engaged in racial profiling, she said.