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Last August, officers for Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and Conservation, the agency tasked with protecting wildlife and the environment, approached a group of Hispanic men fishing on a dock and asked to do a routine inspection of their fish.

According to body camera footage obtained by a local television station, the officers called Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One said they had been told to do immigration checks on people who look a certain way.

“We’ve been instructed to check with immigration on anyone that just gives us a passport and doesn’t appear to be a citizen,” he said. It’s not clear who gave the instructions.

The officers arrested five men and turned them over to ICE.

The wildlife officers were doing federal immigrant enforcement duties because Florida, months earlier, had expanded its 287(g) agreement with the federal government. It’s a program that allows local and state law enforcement agencies to perform duties that are usually reserved for the federal government, such as immigration enforcement. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, multiple red states have pushed through legislation to expand law enforcement’s cooperation with the president’s deportation agenda.

“They’ve deputized police into the ‘show me your papers patrol,’” Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst with Florida Immigrant Coalition, an immigration advocacy group, told HuffPost.

Across the country, blue states have been scrambling to figure out how to push back against the federal surge of immigration officers into their states. But in red states where lawmakers are happy to comply with immigration actions, quietly dangerous operations are also underway.

Traditionally, police departments do not have the authority to stop or detain someone based on alleged immigration violations, meaning the 287(g) agreements offer a workaround. While the program has several different models, they all essentially allow local law enforcement agencies to engage in immigration enforcement: They can question suspected immigrants, arrest someone on suspicion of being in the country without authorization, and refer people who have been arrested for other alleged crimes to immigration enforcement agencies.

Federal 287(g) agreements are not new, but under this administration, red states have been doubling down and expanding their scope. Typically, local police use their own budgets for operations. But the Trump administration has offered to pay police salaries in order to make it easier for local agencies to sign up. Last year, it gave $39 million to law enforcement in Florida alone, according to a recent report from the Migration Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to immigration research. As of this January, according to the institute, 1,313 law enforcement agencies across the country have entered into these agreements, up from just 135 in September 2024. About half of those fall into what is called the “task force” model, meaning officers can engage in immigration enforcement in the course of otherwise regular police work.

“You have seen an exponential growth in 287(g) agreements in the Trump administration,” Cori Alonso-Yoder, a law professor and director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Maryland Francis Scott Key School of Law, told HuffPost. “The current enforcement model is the on-the-street, mass roundup style.”

According to a DHS map, 39 states have at least one 287(g) agreement in place. (Seven states, including the entirety of the continental West Coast, have state regulations prohibiting such agreements, while others have pending laws looking to ban such agreements.)

Last year, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that Florida was expanding its 287(g) agreements to include not just local police departments but other state agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Florida State Guard.

“Florida is setting the example for states in combating illegal immigration and working with the Trump Administration to restore the rule of law,” DeSantis said that February, barely one month after Trump took office following an election campaign focused on mass deportation.

Republicans tout the program as an effective way to reduce crime, but studies have found that immigrants do not commit crimes at higher levels than native-born Americans. Further research from the American Immigration Council has shown that agreements with ICE do not effectively reduce crime, but they can stretch the resources of cash-strapped police departments.

For one thing, new responsibilities require new training — something that even official immigration agents aren’t necessarily getting. The FWC officer in Florida joked about how little training they’d received before being sent out to detain immigrants. “Looking like a newborn giraffe with wobbly legs trying to make his way around,” he said of himself and his colleagues after arresting the men. He also said that he had about one hour of online training.

Former immigration officials have said inexperienced and untrained officers increase the risk of violence and are a threat to public safety.

In August 2025, West Virginia entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE under the task force model, allowing the National Guard and state police to undertake immigration enforcement.

“This level of coordination between West Virginia’s law enforcement and ICE will significantly speed up the process by which we arrest, detain, and deport illegal aliens,” Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey said at the time.

Last week, ICE and the West Virginia governor’s office boasted in a press release that more than 650 undocumented immigrants had since been arrested in the state as a result of these partnerships. That’s up from the 88 undocumented immigrants that the state said it had in custody at the time the agreement was signed.

But the partnerships with half-trained agents do not always result in a strong case for law enforcement. In early January, West Virginia state police pulled over a vehicle allegedly because its license plates were unclear. Officers turned two of the occupants, who were immigrants from Venezuela and Honduras, over to federal immigration agents.

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that they had been wrongly jailed, had been cooperating with immigration policy and posed no threat to national security. The court ordered them released. “There’s not a shred of evidence to support the government’s position,” the judge said during the hearing. “Not one iota. Not a jot or a tittle.”

Nor are these agreements the only way states are rushing to comply. Florida has paired its 287(g) expansion with laws aimed at forcing compliance with ICE actions: In February, DeSantis signed into law a bill requiring state agencies to use their “best efforts” to support federal immigration enforcement.

The style of law is being echoed by other Republican-led states eager to make their states inhospitable to immigrants: Tennessee, for example, enacted eight immigration-related laws in just 10 months, including a law to hold charities liable if they housed undocumented immigrants who committed crimes and a law declaring that types of out-of-state driver’s licenses available to undocumented immigrants are not valid in the state.

“Tennessee has long been a testing ground for an anti-immigrant agenda,” said Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrants and Refugee Rights Coalition, told HuffPost. “But this year is a little different. They’re working with Stephen Miller to make Tennessee a model for Miller’s vision for America.”

The Republican-led state legislature also announced a series of bills last month that they touted as the result of a monthslong collaboration with the White House. “We’re not only going to cooperate with the White House and our federal immigration enforcement officials, but we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they are successful,” state Senate Republican Majority Leader Jack Johnson told the Nashville Banner.

The proposed package of eight bills effectively forces people to interact with immigration enforcement in order to access the basics of public life: It includes a law that would force local law enforcement and governments to cooperate with ICE or risk penalties, require immigrants to show proof of legal status before being able to access any public benefit and make children verify their immigration status before being allowed to enroll in schools.

“They’re mandating cooperation with ICE and really trying to commandeer state and local resources to support the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda,” Sherman Luna said.

Regardless of the state, the outcome of such policies are similar. Immigrants afraid to leave the house, afraid that masked men could come snatch them or their families at any moment. Ironically, the chilling effect is similar to the states in which Trump has deployed federal agents with a loose interpretation of “excessive force.”

“We don’t have the militarized operations because those are punishments for states that don’t cooperate, but it’s all over the place,” Kennedy said about immigration enforcement in Florida.

It’s already having the effect of scaring the state’s immigrant population. After the Nashville area was struck by a debilitating ice storm in January that killed over two dozen people and left residents without power or water for more than a week, some immigrants were afraid to access shelters. “Our communities are terrified,” said Sherman Luna. “You have a portion of the population that doesn’t feel safe enough to access those shelters.”

Even as the fear of brutal enforcement tactics and legally dubious arrests at the hands of federal agents looms in the back of immigrants’ minds, a different approach that doesn’t use big displays of force could yield the same results.

The American people are growing increasingly weary of Trump’s immigration policies. A February Quinnipiac University poll found that 60% of voters believed the federal government was being too harsh in its treatment of undocumented immigrants, while more than half said that the administration’s immigration policy was making the country less safe.

But the expansion of 287(g) programs can, ironically, help soften public criticisms, experts suggest. Instead of frightening visuals of people being tackled on the street by officers in body armor, immigration enforcement becomes simply just another routine, bureaucratic interaction.

“Enforcement on the street is not the direction the Trump administration sees the political appetite going,” said Alonso-Yoder, referencing the harsh federal crackdown in Minneapolis that’s gone viral for its images of violence and drawn widespread disapproval among Americans.

“When people have seen what immigration enforcement looks like in their neighborhoods and communities, we have seen outcry and protest,” Alonso-Yoder said. “What 287(g) does is take the enforcement back behind closed doors.”