Between mid-October and early November, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a pair of agreements that will authorize some state police within DPS’s Criminal Investigations and Highway Patrol divisions to effectively operate as ICE agents.
The move marks a significant expansion of what are called 287(g) task forces in Texas. Since late January, around 50 law enforcement agencies have signed such agreements in the state—primarily rural county sheriff’s offices but also the Texas National Guard and the Texas Attorney General’s Office. Late last month, the AG’s office announced it had made 35 arrests across the state under the program. But DPS’ newly inked agreements mark a sea change in the program, with the state police agency employing nearly 5,000 commissioned officers.
“We’ve heard reports from around the state already about local police working with ICE and kind of conducting these kinds of racial profiling stops where they see brown people driving a work van, and they’ll pull them over on a pretext, and then just immediately call ICE,” said Danny Woodward, a policy attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “So I expect that to ramp up. … U.S. citizens get subjected to these kind of horrific and brutal traffic stops and rights violations—and even children can be subjected to this kind of enforcement.”
