Oh No! New Yorker Worried that Sheriffs Will Comply With Federal Immigration Law

(Newsbusters)—Imagine local sheriffs who actually comply with federal immigration law. What a concept.

Perhaps The New Yorker magazine is more comfortable with local police officials who defy such laws because their jurisdiction is in sanctuary cities. However, when faced with the reality that many sheriffs around the nation are more than willing to comply with federal law in order to protect their citizens, the New Yorker finds this problematic as you can see in their Thursday story by Jessica Pishko, “How Sheriffs Might Power Trump’s Deportation Machine.”

Pishko finds it highly problematic that local sheriffs are willing to cooperate with the deportation policies of incoming President Donald Trump and his designated no-nonsense “Border Czar” Tom Homan.

Both Trump and Homan have indicated that local law enforcement would be involved in carrying out the mass-deportation plan. Ryan Zinke, a Republican representative for Montana, who served as Trump’s first Secretary of the Interior, declared, “The sheriffs know the bad characters.” And there’s an advantage to the county sheriff in particular: nearly all of them are elected officers who are not beholden to other officials, even blue-state governors, many of whom have shown a willingness to work with Trump anyway.

Because immigration is in the realm of federal law, the role of local law enforcement in policing the border has historically been limited. But, in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which expanded the criminal charges for which a person could be subject to deportation. As immigration became linked to criminal law, local law enforcement—especially county sheriffs, who enjoy relative autonomy free from direct oversight and have jurisdiction over much larger areas than, say, urban police departments—began to play a critical role in the deportation machine. In counties along the U.S. border, sheriffs receive funding, through a FEMA grant program called Operation Stonegarden, to purchase equipment such as snowmobiles and squad cars for use in conjunction with Border Patrol.

Ironic that it was a Democrat president who made it easier for sheriff’s to aid in the deportation of those in the USA illegally. Of course, that was an era before Democrats encouraged open border policies to the extent of defying federal immigration law via sanctuary cities.

Because most sheriffs are elected, governors or attorneys general have little power over them. They are excluded from the Hatch Act, which bars some government employees from engaging in political activity while on the job, and largely permitted to campaign in uniform. They can make decisions about department policy without seeking approval and with low risk of public opprobrium. They often voice political opinions; before the Presidential election, one Ohio sheriff went so far as to threaten residents who publicly supported Kamala Harris. In a 2021 fund-raising letter, the Claremont Institute—a conservative think tank that the Times has called a “nerve center of the American right,” and a part of the advisory board for Project 2025—asserted that sheriffs have “jurisdictional latitude.” In the institute’s view, this “places them on the front lines of the defense of civilization.”

For that reason, Claremont—alongside other anti-immigration groups, such as FAIR, whose new “law enforcement advisor” is Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, a Homan collaborator—has turned its focus to recruiting and training sheriffs to help execute its agenda. In 2021, it created an annual weeklong retreat called the Sheriffs Fellowship, which received funding from Betsy DeVos, “to study and discuss the political-philosophical, institutional, and historical arc leading from the American Founding to today’s militant progressivism and multiculturalism,” according to a promotional brochure sent to potential applicants.

Notice that conflation of “anti-immigration” with enforcing immigration law by Pishko? We saw what you did there. Oh, and nice touch by nefariously describing Sheriff Mark Lamb as a “Homan collaborator.” You can almost read swastikas between the lines.