SALT LAKE CITY — Utah law enforcement officials are split on whether President-elect Donald Trump’s deportation agenda will help or hurt their mission to keep the state’s residents safe.
Some county sheriffs are excited for a new presidential administration that will prioritize deporting migrants who commit crimes. Other current and former law enforcement officials in the state worry that expanding deportation efforts could deter witnesses from coming forward and take resources from addressing other criminal activity.
For many, the distinction is drawn between whether Trump’s plans to deport millions of people will focus on those who have committed crimes while living in the United States, or whether the effort will include peaceful members of a community who may or may not have entered the country illegally.
“Utah sheriffs are willing to work really closely with the Trump administration and be fairly aggressive at deporting criminal aliens,” Kane County Sheriff Tracy Glover said.
But the question becomes more complicated “when it comes to mass deportations of people that are here and not committing crimes,” said Kane, who was recently elected as president of the Utah Sheriffs’ Association. “I think you’ll see less interest from sheriffs on just mass deportation issues than you will on criminal alien issues.”
Ultimately, as Glover pointed out, the enforcement of federal immigration law — including workplace raids or indiscriminate document-checking — are “a little bit more outside of the realm of what sheriffs do in the state of Utah to maintain public safety.”
What has Trump said about deportations?
Trump committed to use every tool at his disposal to implement large scale deportations of migrants who entered the country illegally. By designating the recent surge in immigrant border crossings as an “invasion,” Trump has promised to activate the military, including the National Guard, to deport migrants.
Using military service members against domestic actors will likely face legal obstacles, even if Trump follows through with his proposal to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime authority allowing presidents to detain and deport natives of an enemy nation.
The president-elect has also said he will utilize local law enforcement to help identify migrants who are in the country illegally, of which there are likely between 11 million and 20 million. While his campaign declarations have been far from consistent, Trump has repeatedly said his initiative will begin with those who committed crimes after entering the United States.
In response to a question from the Deseret News at an August press conference, Trump said that federal authorities will “work with locals” to apprehend migrants who have broken the law “and they’re going to bring them to us — and we’ll get them over the border.”
Since the 1990s, programs have existed allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to authorize local law enforcement to help with certain “immigration officer functions,” like identifying and removing “incarcerated criminal noncitizens.”
In November, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox issued a statement in support of “the incoming presidential administration’s priorities on illegal immigration.” Cox proposed five policy priorities to increase coordination between federal and local partners to identify and deport “more illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and pose a threat to public safety.”
The proposals include adding more checkpoints to identify whether arrested individuals are migrants who entered the country illegally and developing additional trainings for local and state authorities to turn over migrants who committed crimes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An uptick in migrant-related crime, including by Tren de Aragua
Glover and his predecessor as sheriff’s association president, Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith, welcomed Cox’s statement in light of the “uptick in crime” the state has experienced in drug trafficking, Smith said.
In the last year, Utahns have seen: migrants who entered the country illegally commit more than half of the drug-related felony offenses along the Jordan River Trail; members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua appear in connection to multiple criminal incidents; and Riverton courts double their budget for translation services to keep up with migrant-related crime.
In Utah prisons, there are an estimated 285 migrants who entered the country illegally — 181 were convicted of sex offenses, 59 were convicted of murder and eight are serving sentences of life without parole.
While there is a consensus among studies that migrants who entered the country illegally are significantly less likely to commit violent and drug crimes than native-born Americans, migrant-related crime is expected to grow in Utah unless Immigration and Customs Enforcement increases its cooperation with local law enforcement and the southern border with Mexico is secured, Smith said.
“The unfortunate projections are that it will continue to rise,” Smith said. “It’s criminal syndicates, it’s these national organizations that are moving their operations into Utah. And that’s kind of a bleak outlook, but that is the reality of what we’re seeing here.”
Under the Biden administration, sheriffs have reported a lack of cooperation from immigration officials in removing migrants that should be entering deportation proceedings after being convicted of a crime and serving out their sentence in Utah jails and prisons.
Citing a lack of detention space — caused by onerous Biden administration policies for housing civil detainees — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials began the practice of regularly releasing previously convicted migrants who entered the country illegally back into Utah communities.
