The Lafayette Parish Sheriff’s Office has joined a growing list of agencies in Louisiana that have entered agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, empowering some of the agencies’ staff to fulfill federal immigration enforcement functions.
While local law enforcement agencies have long assisted ICE by acting as backup during enforcement operations or holding immigrants arrested for criminal offenses in jail for a limited time at the agency’s request, the 287(g) program gives them the power to detain individuals based solely on suspected immigration infractions, even if they aren’t suspected of having committed a criminal offense.
The program, named after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that created it, has been around since 1996, but has seen an explosion in usage under the second Trump administration. In Louisiana, 29 agencies, from the Gueydan Police Department to the state’s fish and wildlife agency, signed new agreements last year.
The sheriff’s office will be partnering with ICE under the program’s warrant service officer and task force models, which allow specially trained deputies to arrest people suspected of immigration offenses and proactively hold people already in the local jail based solely on their suspected immigration status…