The term “cooperating with ICE” is often used to describe the closeness between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. But this cooperation comes in many forms, from sharing data to renting out jail space.
The ACLU of Wisconsin recently released a report called The Jail-to-Deportation Pipeline in Wisconsin. The report details the different ways local law enforcement in Wisconsin cooperates with federal immigration authorities and how local law enforcement is paid for this cooperation.
Tim Muth, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Wisconsin and the primary author of the report, spoke with Lake Effect’s Sam Woods to share what they found.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity
Let’s start with the formal agreements for cooperation with ICE that make up this jail to deportation pipeline, as you call it, beginning with the 287(g) agreement. Can you explain what a 287(g) agreement is?
It’s called 287(g) because that’s the section of the federal immigration statutes that authorizes these kinds of agreements between ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a local law enforcement agency. Essentially, they are delegating or deputizing local law enforcement to perform certain specified functions that would normally be performed by an ICE agent, and they take all sorts of different forms. The ones in Wisconsin are generally quite limited in terms of the number of functions that are being delegated to local law enforcement, but in other parts of the country, they’re actually deputizing local law enforcement to go out and make arrests, to pull people over on the street and take them right into immigration detention. But here in Wisconsin, they are fairly limited in terms of a set of small functions that ICE is delegating to local county sheriffs.
How has the 287(g) program grown over time in Wisconsin?
Originally, Waukesha County was the only county that had the agreement. Six more counties signed up in 2020, and little happened under those agreements, partly because of the change of administration in 2021. This year, with the second Trump administration, we saw six more sheriffs sign up before we issued our report. A couple of days ago, another county, Calumet County, signed a 287(g) agreement, making the total 14 counties that have these agreements in Wisconsin.
Let’s look to another form of cooperation: detainers. What is a detainer?
Let me explain it with an example. So somebody is arrested for some kind of a minor offense, and a judge or magistrate has said you can be released on bond to await trial on this offense. And let’s say you had to pay some bail and you paid the bail, and you should be entitled to walk out of the jail right away. A detainer is a request from ICE that says to a local law enforcement agency if that person is about to walk out of your jail, hold them up to an extra 48 hours beyond when they should have been allowed to leave so that we can come pick them up because we want to put them in immigration detention. The thing to understand about these requests is they’re purely voluntary. There is no obligation for a sheriff to honor those requests, and in fact, we believe the right interpretation of Wisconsin law is that it’s illegal for a sheriff to honor a detainer request and hold somebody who should have been able to just walk out of jail. Unfortunately, the vast majority of sheriffs in Wisconsin honor these detainers.
You mentioned how these detainer requests may be illegal under Wisconsin law. It seems like a kind of a big red flag. Why hasn't that garnered more attention?
To end an illegal practice, you need a plaintiff. When you think about the individual people impacted who are immigrants, who are being picked up and sent out of the country, they’re not around to bring lawsuits against sheriffs for illegally detaining them for extra time. It has been a challenge to put together a legal challenge, and up to now, you know, we have been trying to rely on the persuasiveness of the ACLU of Wisconsin. But I would say so far we have not succeeded in persuading more than a few sheriffs to not honor detainers in the state.
The report also mentions, though, that this may change in Wisconsin. There's 2025 Assembly Bill 24, Senate Bill 57, that would explicitly say local counties need to honor detainers. Can you talk about that bill?
This was a bill introduced by Republicans in both the Assembly and the Senate that would do just that, require sheriffs to honor detainers from ICE. I would hope that the governor would veto it if it ever made it to his desk, but it is something that there are at least, you know, votes for in Wisconsin's legislature, it appears.
So let's move into money, and how money plays a role in this and how counties and states are paid for aiding with deportation. And we'll start with the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, or SCAAP. Can you explain how SCAPP works?
SCAAP is a grant program run by the U.S. Department of Justice, and essentially it is there to reimburse a county jail for the costs of incarcerating an undocumented person who is serving a sentence for having committed two misdemeanors or one felony. Although ostensibly it’s about reimbursing jails for their costs, the real important practical effect is it is the federal government buying information about undocumented persons from local jails. Because to get these funds you have to know that a person is undocumented, meaning you have an incentive as a jail to investigate somebody’s immigration status. Then, in addition to providing a particular name to ICE, you provide various identifying information — last known address, that kind of information — to ICE as well.
The deportation machine that is part of the Trump administration today is a machine that runs on data, compiling lists of names of undocumented persons where they live. This SCAAP program feeds that machine.
How prevalent is the SCAAP program in Wisconsin?
It's actually quite prevalent. There are 29 counties in the state that participate in the program. One of the largest participants was Dane County, which has now this year withdrawn from further participating in the program. Milwaukee County has never participated in the program. They have decided not to share information with ICE. But other than that, there's 28 other counties that are participating.
I noticed that the biggest beneficiary by total dollar amount for this SCAAP program is the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. So not only have 29 Wisconsin counties participated in this program since 2021, but so does the state prison system. Do I understand that correctly?
Yes. So, it’s not just a county jail but also the state prisons, which, if they are holding an undocumented person who’s committed a felony — and everybody in the prison system is there for a felony conviction — they are able to get reimbursement of certain costs of imprisoning an undocumented person. And they have been receiving around $1 million per year through this program.
The SCAAP program sounds like a very obvious financial incentive to arrest more people, question more people, and get information about people you arrest and so that you may get a paycheck from ICE. Am I being naive that the financial incentives are really that clear?
It's not clear to me that local sheriffs view it as a specific way to bring people into their jails as moneymakers and to arrest people for that purpose. And I certainly hope they are not.
What it does create — an incentive for — is to investigate the immigration status of people. Generally, somebody's immigration status is not relevant to what they are charged with. For example, if you are arrested for driving without a license, what is relevant is do you have a driver's license or not, not whether or not you are a U.S. citizen. Whether or not you have documents or not. So as a general rule, state and local law enforcement don't have any reason to investigate somebody's immigration status.
With this program where you can get reimbursed if the person in your jail is undocumented. So that creates an incentive to do that investigation that you wouldn't otherwise do, and to then provide the information to ICE.
In addition to this SCAAP program, Brown County, Sauk County and Ozaukee County all have separate financial contracts with ICE. Can you talk about those?
To start, Ozaukee County, apparently after this was first publicized in our report, has now said that they have walked away from that contract. So we don't know the status of the contract in Ozaukee County. But for Brown and Sauk County, both of those counties have agreed to hold people on behalf of ICE. So this is actually acting as ICE’s jailer.
So, we hear regularly about people being put into ICE detention. These counties are renting out cell space to ICE to hold people as part of the overall process of ICE immigration detention and then removal from the country. This is brand new for these two counties, before this only Dodge County acted as an immigration detention center for ICE under a long-term contract that they've had for more than a decade.
We've gone through several formal methods of cooperation; the 287(g) program, detainers and the SCAAP program. But are these types of formal methods of cooperation with ICE, the extent of Wisconsin's cooperation with ICE, or are there kind of informal agreements that may not show up on paper?
Yes, there are definitely different law enforcement agencies, different county sheriff's departments that may informally provide information to ICE about the immigration status of people who may be arriving in their jail — the immigration status of people they encounter. So that cooperation may be as simple as, you know, a phone call or an email to ICE saying, you know, "We encountered this person, we couldn't arrest them because they hadn't done anything wrong in Wisconsin, but it seems clear to us that this person doesn't have papers, so you might want to add them to your list." We have seen indications of those kinds of things happen.
Usually it is not an official policy of a given county or police department, but rather an individual officer or sheriff's deputy who takes it upon themselves to make those contacts with ICE.
So taking all this together, what's being built here in Wisconsin? Where does this end?
The Trump administration talks about these agreements, particularly the 287(g) agreements, as force enhancers for the deportation machine. That is, they can’t do it alone, just with the resources that the federal government has. The number of ICE agents that they have and the so-called big, beautiful bill includes another $10 billion to use with local law enforcement across the country to aid in the deportation machine and more. That money is going to find its way into Wisconsin, seeking to have even greater participation by local law enforcement with immigration actions in Wisconsin.
The one thing I would hope listeners understand is that these are all agreements being entered into at the very local level by your local sheriff. A local sheriff who has to respond for his budget and other reasons to the county board, and you've got the ability to ask the questions of the sheriff whom you elect. Talk to your county representatives, because each of these agreements are entered into one by one, county by county, and we hope people will take the time to learn about what their local sheriff is doing when it comes to cooperating with ICE.
