Summary

  • The Department of Homeland Security’s 287(g) task force program pays participating law enforcement agencies $60,000 per deputized officer annually after a single qualifying immigration arrest, with no requirement for subsequent apprehensions.
  • A Wall Street Journal analysis of government data found the 287(g) program has yielded fewer than one in ten immigration arrests nationwide — about 46,500 of approximately 576,000 — during January 2025 through July 2026.
  • DHS has distributed more than $200 million to law enforcement partners from January 2025 through Aug. 1, 2026, according to a Trump administration official, with Congress having earmarked $1 billion for the partnership programs as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
  • The per-officer formula produces divergent per-arrest reimbursements at different agency scales: the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office received more than $2 million per arrest in one quarter, while Doddridge County, West Virginia received more than $137,000 against two arrests.
  • A bystander-video record compiled by the Journal documents state and local officers deploying Tasers, chokeholds, and vehicle-window tactics during traffic-stop apprehensions — methods resembling those the Obama administration’s Justice Department identified in 2012 Maricopa County and Alamance County investigations before shelving the task force.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of federal immigration data has found that the Department of Homeland Security’s revived 287(g) task force program pays participating law enforcement agencies $60,000 per deputized officer annually after a single qualifying arrest, with disbursement requirements so low that two arrests in a West Virginia county of roughly 7,600 residents unlocked more than $137,000 in federal funds — and more than $2 million per arrest for the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office in a single quarter. The formula’s decoupling of per-officer compensation from arrest volume, applied across more than 1,800 enrolled agencies since President Trump’s January 2025 revival of the program, has produced a federal payment structure the Journal characterized as “a cash cow for state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide.” The consequences now extend beyond the program’s stated enforcement target: U.S. citizens in mixed-status vehicles, bystanders recorded on video, and the residents of sparsely populated jurisdictions whose county budgets are now partly funded by federal immigration payments have become constituencies the program reaches by structural design.

The payment formula and its scale

The 287(g) partnership, named for its section in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996, offers state and local jurisdictions three paid roles in immigration enforcement: serving federal warrants, holding people in jails for immigration violations, and detaining people eligible for deportation through the task force program. The Trump administration revived the task force component in January 2025 after the Obama administration had shelved it in 2012, following Justice Department investigations that found sheriff’s deputies in Arizona’s Maricopa County and North Carolina’s Alamance County disproportionately detained and arrested Latino drivers, including U.S. citizens, for minor violations or without cause.

The 2026 program operates under a per-officer reimbursement structure that, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of government data, pays $60,000 per deputized officer annually to agencies that have transferred at least one deportable immigrant to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — regardless of additional arrests. DHS enrollment requirements remain limited: two years of law enforcement experience and an online training course. A DHS spokesperson said agencies become eligible for reimbursement only after an ICE-directed enforcement action — such as an apprehension or serving a warrant — and must show “continued performance” to receive quarterly funding. Agencies are not obligated to request the money, and DHS requires participating agencies to obtain its permission before disclosing how many arrests they make or how much federal money they are eligible to receive; DHS declined to release those figures for any participating agency. The Journal used DHS’s published funding formula to calculate eligible reimbursement amounts, and 14 agencies in five states confirmed those findings.

DHS has distributed more than $200 million to law enforcement partners from January 2025 through Aug. 1, 2026, according to a Trump administration official. Congress earmarked $1 billion for the partnership programs as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Justice Department this summer announced $3 billion in grants to state and local governments that cooperate on immigration enforcement. More than 1,800 law enforcement agencies have enrolled since the program was revived — state police, county sheriff and local police departments, state wildlife agencies, and even state auditors, the Journal reported. About 80% of the local agencies participating in DHS partnerships are now in the task force program, according to the Journal.

What happens next: divergent per-arrest ratios across agency scales

The formula’s structural feature is the decoupling of per-officer compensation from additional apprehensions. After a department makes a single qualifying arrest, the per-officer payment continues annually with no minimum-arrest requirement, and disbursement is left to each department’s discretion. The same formula, applied at scale, produces larger per-arrest reimbursements at large departments. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office in Florida signed up more than 970 deputies, making it eligible for roughly $14.5 million in DHS funds from April to June, state records show — more than $2 million for each of its seven immigration arrests in that quarter. The Venice Police Department in Florida tallied one federal immigration detention in September 2025 and has since requested $895,000; it can continue collecting funds every quarter as long as it remains on the task force. The Lee County Sheriff’s Office claimed $7,500 per qualified officer during its first three months on the task force and $15,000 per officer every quarter after January 2026; from September 2025 to June 2026, the office requested more than $2 million from DHS, including $181,784 for Axon Tasers, $103,215 for 26 laptops, and a new transport van, state records show. At least 127 agencies across Florida are eligible for the funds, with more than 7,600 active officers statewide and at least $400 million annually available to the cohort as of June, state records show.

Sparsely populated jurisdictions with few immigrants make up the majority of new recruits, according to the Journal. Sheriff Clinton Boring of Doddridge County, West Virginia — a jurisdiction of about 7,600 residents — joined the program in February. He said he did not expect to see many immigrants and had his sights on new squad cars. “I honestly don’t think there are any Hispanics that live in Doddridge,” Boring said. “When you get an opportunity to get possibly $100,000 for equipment or vehicles, that’s a no-brainer.” Within six months, Boring said, his deputies detained two people living in the U.S. illegally along a stretch of U.S. 50, a federally funded highway that runs from West Sacramento, California, to Ocean City, Maryland, and the department received more than $137,000 in federal funds; even if his deputies take no one else into custody, the department is eligible for a payment equal to more than a quarter of its annual budget. Boring said he will not request further funds until his deputies deliver another arrest: “I’m an old country boy. If you sign up to do a job, then you do that job. If you don’t do that job, you don’t get paid.” He is awaiting delivery of two new squad cars paid for with DHS funds. In West Virginia, where 14 agencies have joined the task force since February, about 1% of the workforce is immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Law enforcement agencies serving communities with few immigrants are eligible for the same per-officer pay as those serving communities with many — a feature that produces the divergent ratios observed in Miami-Dade and Doddridge County as the product of a single policy applied at different scales.

State mandates compound the federal flow

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was among the first governors to require state and county law enforcement to join the task force, adding $250 million in state funding for participating agencies, including those outside state control. Texas and Georgia passed similar mandates for their county sheriffs. The combined federal-and-state flow — the federal per-officer formula plus state supplements plus the $3 billion DOJ grant pool — creates a recurring-reimbursement structure in which withdrawal would mean declining a budgeted federal payment. California and New York, among the states with the largest immigrant populations, bar local police from joining the DHS program, with the federal-state boundary becoming a structural feature of how immigration enforcement is distributed across the country.

Traffic stops as the program’s spine

Traffic stops have become a central tool for immigration arrests in the three most productive task force states — Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma — where highway patrol troopers make the bulk of the stops, either for apparent infractions or based on a tip from DHS. The Florida Highway Patrol has taken more than 8,300 immigrants into custody since August 2025, the largest number of any single agency in the country, according to a Journal analysis of state records and federal immigration data; the agency was eligible for nearly $26 million from April through June. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, speaking at a National Sheriffs’ Association conference in June, urged sheriffs to join the task force so that federal agents could “be as invisible as possible” during their patrols: “We’re not in the streets arresting these individuals. You guys are simply picking them up for a traffic stop.”

A Wall Street Journal review of bystander videos from Florida showed state and local officers deploying tactics similar to their federal counterparts during traffic stops — Tasers, chokeholds, and breaking vehicle windows. In one recorded incident, Florida Highway Patrol officers pulled over Kenny Laynez, a U.S. citizen en route to a landscaping job with his mother and two co-workers, and called Customs and Border Protection agents for backup. A CBP officer fired a Taser at one of Laynez’s co-workers while officers pinned the man to the ground; an unidentified officer said moments later: “Just remember you can smell that too, with a $30,000 bonus.” Laynez and the two other passengers were taken into custody by federal immigration agents; Laynez was later released. Neither DHS nor the Florida Highway Patrol responded to questions about the arrest or the officer’s comment.

Documented violence and the suspension that did not hold

A separate Journal investigation identified 13 instances of immigration agents firing at or into civilian vehicles during the first year of President Trump’s second term, leaving at least eight people injured and two shot dead; at least five of those victims were U.S. citizens. The fatal shooting of Renee Good in January drew national attention to traffic-stop violence. In July, after two fatal shootings by federal officers in Houston and Biddeford, Maine, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin suspended traffic stops by ICE; President Trump overruled that decision a day later. Last month, an ICE officer shot and wounded a Venezuelan DoorDash delivery driver in Texas.

The bystander-video record documented by the Journal in 2026 — Tasers, chokeholds, broken vehicle windows, and stops resembling those the prior investigations identified — describes a methodology that recurs across three decades of section 287(g) authority. The program’s revival in January 2025 has placed the same authority, and a similar enforcement pattern, in the hands of state and local officers operating with quarterly federal reimbursement. The 2026 program operates under the same section 287(g) authority as the program those prior investigations identified; the bystander-video evidence in the Journal’s review documents stops resembling the conduct that once led to the program’s suspension.

Forward signals

Continuation signals include continued reporting of high per-arrest reimbursement ratios in large departments, continued enrollment of low-population jurisdictions with few immigrants, continued bystander-video documentation of traffic-stop encounters in Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma, and any change in DHS’s funding formula or disclosure requirements. Reversal signals include a sustained drop in participating agencies, a state-level reversal in Florida, Texas, or Georgia, or Justice Department civil rights findings comparable to the 2012 Maricopa and Alamance investigations.

The Trump administration’s January 2025 reversal of the Obama-era suspension, combined with state mandates in Florida, Texas, and Georgia, has converted what was once a discretionary opt-in into something closer to a default in roughly four-fifths of the nation’s participating DHS-partner agencies. In states that mandate participation, the task force is becoming part of the standing architecture of local law enforcement, financed by a combination of federal per-officer payments, state supplements, and Justice Department grants; in states that bar participation, the federal-state boundary becomes a structural feature of how immigration enforcement is distributed.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

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