Local Police Departments Are Enabling ICE’s Deportation Machine

In the last week, local police have played a central role in enabling the arrests and detention of immigrants, suppressing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and defending federal detention facilities at the front lines in several major cities, including Omaha, Nebraska; Los Angeles, California; and New York City.

While many mayors of major U.S. cities claim to oppose ICE actions — and have even implemented formal “sanctuary city” policies — local police often act as a “force multiplier” for ICE, even when they aren’t directly involved in detaining migrants themselves. That is, even in sanctuary cities that claim to support their immigrant residents and restrict collaboration between ICE and local police, the police are essential to ICE’s success.

The roots of this seeming contradiction can be found in the decision of these mayors to rely on local police to criminalize anything they deem disorderly, with devastating consequences for our poorest communities and the right to protest.

On May 28, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) violently arrested two dozen people for demonstrating against ICE detentions during immigration court proceedings in Manhattan. The protests were motivated in part by the detention of a Venezuelan high school student the previous week during his scheduled visit to immigration court. We have seen this pattern of courthouse arrests — in which immigrants are following the directives of the Department of Homeland Security — increasing all over the country, further fomenting distrust among migrants in the immigration system.

On June 7, several hundred demonstrators attempted to block ICE agents from exiting the Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. It was the NYPD, not federal police, who attacked the protesters, making nine arrests.

On June 9, it was Dallas police that violently dispersed a protest, forcing people out of the roadway using batons and pepper spray.

On June 10, it was Philadelphia police who broke up a peaceful protest that was blocking traffic, making 15 arrests and causing more than a dozen injuries.

And these are just the cases that were reported by national media. Every day, in communities throughout the U.S., local police enable the arrest, detention, and deportation of immigrants, often by entering them into the “traffic stop-to-deportation pipeline” or by collaborating with ICE on immigration home raids.

Many “sanctuary cities” have policies prohibiting police from directly assisting ICE. Some of these policies instruct police not to ask about immigration status when they interact with the public during traffic stops or taking a crime report. Sanctuary cities attempt to reassure immigrant residents that local police are not a part of what historian Adam Goodman calls “the deportation machine” in hopes that members of the community will come to police in a time of crisis, send their children to school, and access essential services like hospitals without fear of being asked about their immigration status.

But even in these cities, we see police departments acting as force multipliers for ICE. In a recent multiagency federal enforcement action in Minneapolis, local police were seen engaging in traffic enforcement and crowd control following arrests by ICE, FBI, and other agencies at a local restaurant. Local officials attempted to reassure the public that local police were not coordinating their actions with ICE or other federal agencies, and that their role was strictly to “maintain public safety” during the ICE actions. When ICE removed more than 70 workers from a meatpacking plant last week, the Omaha Police Department (OPD) claimed to play only a peripheral role, directing traffic and “maintain[ing] safety,” and emphasized that the community could continue trusting the OPD. These statements from police — of being completely uninvolved in immigration enforcement yet directing traffic and managing crowds around it — are not new; they can be seen both now and in 2018, when the Trump administration resumed worksite raids. For example, when ICE detained 146 workers during a raid on Fresh Mark in Salem, Ohio, in 2018, the Salem police chief said that officers were on the scene to direct the flow of traffic and help identify the children of those detained.

This indirect assistance is still assistance. As Peter Mancina documents in his forthcoming book, On the Side of ICE: Policing Immigrants in a Sanctuary State, this assistance frees ICE resources that would otherwise be used to manage crowds. In addition, “crowd control” is often simply the management of those protesting ICE arrests. Local police assist ICE in these instances by keeping people concerned about the arrests of immigrants away from ICE officers and preventing them from directly interfering or documenting what is happening. In this way, local police are facilitating ICE’s raids.

When resistance becomes more active, as we have seen in the last week in New York City and Los Angeles, local police are tasked with the suppression of that resistance, both when directly protesting ICE’s presence and later when disrupting the larger deportation machine. For example, police clashed with protesters attempting to prevent ICE vans from driving away from a courthouse in Seattle. During last weekend’s protests, it was Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers using projectile weapons and tear gas to disperse protesters, and it was NYPD officers who arrested 80 people outside the Federal Building in New York on June 11.

In Los Angeles, there were well-documented incidents of LAPD officers intentionally firing projectile weapons at reporters, legal observers, and lawyers. In one incident, a video shows an LAPD officer turn toward Australian TV reporter Lauren Tomasi, take aim, and directly fire at her, even though she was away from the protesters and had not been given any warning to disperse — a direct violation of LAPD policy on the use of projectile weapons.

In another incident, an LAPD officer fired projectile rounds at several peaceful demonstrators, hitting one of them in the groin. When well-known civil rights attorney Shakeer Rahman attempted to obtain the badge number of the officer, he too was shot, despite being separated from the officer by a glass barrier. The officer had removed his badge number from his helmet and justified the shooting by saying that Rahman was “taking up his focus.” In 2024, the City of Los Angeles paid out $1.5 million in damages for shooting someone in the groin with a projectile weapon, implying a violation of LAPD policy.

On June 7, longtime photojournalist Nick Stern was shot with a projectile weapon by an LA County Sheriff’s Deputy. The projectile lodged in his leg, causing extensive damage and requiring surgery. A spokesman for the National Press Club asserted that journalists were intentionally targeted and called on the LAPD to respect the rights of journalists to cover protests.

During the June 8 anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, a local LAPD helicopter buzzed over a demonstration, announcing, “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.” This act of taunting demonstrators suggests a mindset among police that meshes with the imperatives set out by political leaders: The job of the LAPD is not to facilitate peaceful protest or protect immigrant communities from unlawful ICE actions. Instead, the police exist to suppress “disorder” in its many forms, including protest activity. The LAPD, and police more broadly, have come to see protests as inherently disorderly and therefore, inherently undesirable. And the journalists who cover those protests and the lawyers who defend the demonstrators are considered legitimate targets because of their role in facilitating, and at times legitimizing, this disorderly dissent.

If cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis assert that they don’t cooperate with ICE, then why do we see a massive outpouring of local police resources to assist their raids indirectly and directly suppress protests? One part of the answer is that local officials have come to rely on their police for order maintenance, a central feature of urban policing directed at a range of “quality of life issues” tied to growing inequality and social exclusion.

Austerity policies at the local level have exacerbated social insecurities that are being systematically labeled “problems of disorder” to be managed by ever-more intensive and invasive policing. And when people on the losing end of these arrangements protest, their acts of dissent are met with increasingly militarized local policing. The widespread and indiscriminate criminalization of homelessness, mental illness, and poor youth of color have set the stage for a politics of order maintenance that relies on the mobilization of police violence to manage the failures of local economic policies to provide broad prosperity.

Every disruptive behavior has become framed as an outrage to be managed by ever more police enforcement. This intolerance and criminalization of disorder has spilled over into the policing of protests as well. Massive sums have been poured into beefing up protest units such as the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and L.A.’s Metro Division so that they can more effectively suppress disorderly political behavior.

After witnessing the protests in Los Angeles, New York City Mayor Eric Adams sought to instill fear among potential demonstrators: “I understand that some New Yorkers may be angry, afraid and ready to express that. New York City will always be a place to peacefully protest, but we will not allow violence and lawlessness,” he stated.

These views were echoed by NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch, who said:

We have no tolerance for violence, none. We have no tolerance for property damage. We have no tolerance for people blocking entrances to buildings or blocking driveways or blocking cars from moving. Any attacks against law enforcement will be met with a swift and decisive response from the NYPD. We are responsible for public safety and maintaining order in this city and we will never abdicate that responsibility.

It was Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass who ordered a nighttime curfew for the city’s downtown, not federal officials. The curfew played into the hands of federal officials who were attempting to depict Los Angeles as out of control and in need of federal troops to restore order.

For these big city mayors, the suppression of disorderly protest is much more important than defending the well-being of immigrant communities or the right to protest. Using police to violently suppress protests in order to keep traffic moving is a political decision rooted not in public safety but in a profound intolerance of disorder. As long as we continue to allow these mayors to pander to fears of disorder by further empowering policing, we are enabling the deportation machine and the broader Trump agenda.

The Trump administration is attempting to make good on its promise of mass deportation. Police departments — many of which claim not to collaborate with ICE — are essential cogs in this deportation machine, spending resources to control both traffic and public dissent.