Whether a broken taillight turns into a deportation case can now depend entirely on which side of a county line a driver gets pulled over on. That's the practical effect of a federal program that has quietly turned thousands of local police officers and sheriff's deputies into immigration agents — and, as of last week, it covers more ground than ever.
ICE's own tracker showed 2,365 signed agreements spanning 39 states and two U.S. territories as of August 21, a jump so large it's easy to lose the scale of it: the same program covered roughly 135 agreements in January 2025, right before the current administration took office. That's better than a seventeen-fold expansion in a year and a half. For families in mixed-status households across LatinTimes' core coverage areas, the number that matters isn't the national total — it's whether their own sheriff or police chief signed on, and under which version of the program.
Three flavors of the same deal
Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act gives ICE three ways to deputize local law enforcement, and they are not interchangeable. The lightest-touch version, the Warrant Service Officer model, only lets jail staff serve federal paperwork on people already locked up, and 544 agencies have signed on to that version. The Jail Enforcement Model lets deputies question people booked into custody about their immigration status, with 181 agencies currently using it. The version civil-rights groups worry about most, the Task Force Model, pushes enforcement authority out of the jail and onto the street — traffic stops, calls for service, routine patrol — and it now accounts for 1,640 of the 2,365 total agreements, comfortably more than two-thirds of everything ICE has signed nationwide.
Miami-Dade and Broward: no county left out
South Florida offers the clearest picture of what full buy-in looks like. Back in February 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that every one of Florida's 67 county sheriffs — including Miami-Dade and Broward — had signed on to the Task Force Model, making Florida the only state where participation is universal. "If all the states did this, this problem would go away much quicker," DeSantis said at the time, framing the mandate as a model for the rest of the country. Eighteen months later, that remains the case: Florida is still the sole state with 100% county participation.
The reach extends well past the sheriff's office. Doral — a city that is home to one of the largest concentrations of Venezuelan residents in the country — signed its own municipal agreement in spring 2025, joining Coral Gables and Hialeah and Homestead as South Florida cities that put their own police, not just the county sheriff, into the program. Miami's city commission followed in June 2025, narrowly approving its own deal despite a packed room of public opposition.
Florida hasn't been shy about enforcing compliance, either. When Key West's commission voted in mid-2025 to void its agreement, Attorney General James Uthmeier warned commissioners the move effectively turned the city into a banned sanctuary jurisdiction under state law and threatened removal from office if they didn't reverse course. They did, within a week.
Houston's largest sheriff's office is still holding out — for now
Harris County tells a very different story, and it's the one genuinely unresolved thread among LatinTimes' five metros. Sheriff Ed Gonzalez walked away from the county's 287(g) agreement in 2017, and as of this writing, Harris County has not signed a new one. But that independence has an expiration date: Texas's Senate Bill 8, in effect since January 1, 2026, gives sheriffs statewide a deadline of Dec. 1, 2026 to fall in line — leaving roughly a hundred days before the state's largest sheriff's office is legally compelled to participate.
Here's where an earlier draft of this story would have gotten Houston's stakes wrong. SB8 originally would have left the state's five largest counties, Harris included, to cover 287(g) costs on their own. But that provision didn't survive conference committee, and the law that actually passed created a state-funded grant program with no such carve-out. The Texas Comptroller's office confirmed in January 2026 that sheriffs can draw grants scaled to county population — up to $140,000 for counties of a million residents or more, a bracket that covers Harris County outright. In other words, when Harris County's sheriff does sign, the state has already set aside money to help pay for it, not nothing, as earlier reporting on the bill's Senate-only draft suggested.
Los Angeles and Chicago: the law itself says no
Zero counties near LatinTimes' Los Angeles and Chicago audiences participate in 287(g), and for an identical structural reason in both places: state law forbids it. California's Values Act blocks local police from acting as de facto immigration officers, whether that's through 287(g) or any workaround, and Los Angeles County itself walked away from its own agreement back in 2015 after a contentious Board of Supervisors vote. Illinois's version, the TRUST Act, draws the same line for every police department and sheriff in that state, and Cook County's government has gone a step further: in October 2025, Board President Toni Preckwinkle signed an executive order barring county-owned property, resources and personnel from being used for civil immigration enforcement. That order doesn't touch 287(g) directly — Cook County was never signed up in the first place — but it signals the county has no appetite for informal cooperation either, even as separate fights over ICE access to the county jail continue.
New York's ban lands this week — and not everyone is complying
Of the five metros, New York is moving the fastest and least predictably. State lawmakers passed the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act this spring, and it voids every 287(g) agreement in the state effective August 25, 2026 — tomorrow, relative to this story's publication. Yet as of August 18, seven of the original twelve agencies notified by the state hadn't dissolved their agreements. Upstate, the sheriffs in Niagara and Cattaraugus counties near Buffalo, Steuben and Broome further south, and Rensselaer near Albany are all still holding out, and so is Nassau County's sheriff's office on Long Island — where the county police department maintains a second, separate agreement of its own.
Nassau, on Long Island, is the highest-profile holdout by a wide margin. County officials have said the partnership is on track to detain roughly 3,000 people on ICE's behalf by the end of 2026 — a running projection, not yet a closed final number — and County Executive Bruce Blakeman, now running against Governor Kathy Hochul, has been unambiguous about not backing down regardless of the state deadline. It's a standoff playing out in a county with one of the fastest-growing Latino populations on Long Island's western edge.
Why which side of the county line you're on actually matters
Civil-rights attorneys have argued for years that the Task Force Model blurs the line between "your local cop" and "an ICE agent," and that the blur has a chilling effect measurable in whether people call 911 at all. According to the ACLU of Texas, a frequently cited study found that 70% of undocumented immigrants become less willing to report a crime they witnessed or suffered once local police gain immigration enforcement authority — a figure that predates this year's expansion but that advocates say only gets more relevant as more departments sign on. For a mixed-status family, it's not an abstraction: a traffic stop, a noise complaint, a witness interview can end in dramatically different ways depending only on whether the responding department has a 287(g) deal on file.
With Texas's December deadline still ahead, New York's ban landing this week, and Florida's map already full, this patchwork is guaranteed to look different again within months. LatinTimes will keep tracking the agreements that touch its core coverage areas as ICE updates its published list.
