By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday that it would pay state and local law-enforcement officers’ salaries and benefits in places where governments join a program to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
The offer, which begins October 1, would also provide up to 25% of an officer’s salary in overtime costs and bonuses to agencies based on performance, DHS said.
President Donald Trump’s administration aims to deport record numbers of immigrants in the U.S. illegally and has intensified enforcement across the country.
The Republican-led Congress in July passed a spending package that gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement $75 billion over a little more than four years, a funding surge that ICE plans to use to ramp up operations.
The Trump administration has worked to expand so-called 287(g) immigration-enforcement partnerships with state and local law enforcement, and their number has risen from 135 to 958 since Trump took office in January, DHS said.
Immigrant advocates say the agreements sow mistrust of law enforcement in immigrant communities and could lead to racial profiling.
The partnerships fall under a program called the Task Force Model that was terminated under former President Barack Obama but restarted in Trump’s second term. It allows state and local law enforcement to make immigration arrests while performing their policing duties.
In a June fact sheet, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights called it “the most dangerous and invasive” form of the Task Force Model. A Justice Department investigation in 2012 found that North Carolina sheriffs illegally stopped and detained Latino drivers under the program.
Nayna Gupta, policy director of the pro-immigration American Immigration Council, said tasking local police with immigration work means they spend less time on “actual public safety threats in our own communities and immigrants become scared to report actual crimes.”
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Editing by Mary Milliken and Cynthia Osterman)
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