Whether Rhode Island police can be deputized for federal immigration enforcement currently rests on municipal policy and an aging State Police order rather than state law, leaving those limits changeable without a vote.
On September 2, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement made 50,925 arrests in August — a monthly record by the agency’s own accounting, up from the 50,208 it reported for July and the 43,900 it reported for June. Six days later, ICE updated the page it maintains for its 287(g) program, the mechanism by which state and local police officers can be deputized to perform specified immigration functions, and put the current number of signed agreements at 2,466, spread across 39 states and two U.S. territories.
Rhode Island is not among the states with a documented local participant, at least according to the most recent explicit record available. A federal Freedom of Information Act complaint filed by the ACLU of New Hampshire on January 15 — a lawsuit seeking ICE’s own participation records — stated that while 13 New Hampshire agencies had signed on, Rhode Island had no local law-enforcement agencies participating at that time. That is a representation by a litigant rather than a judicial finding, and ICE’s current program page links a participant workbook updated September 8 whose agency-by-agency rows are the authoritative roster. But no Rhode Island police department has announced a 287(g) agreement, and the state’s largest municipal force and its state police have written policies pointing hard in the opposite direction…