Far-Right Sheriffs Want to Carry Out Donald Trump's Mass Deportations. That’s Not Possible

A growing cohort of extremist and far-right sheriffs are vocally endorsing president-elect Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations. They promise unquestioning loyalty and say they stand ready to take part in a sweeping round-up of undocumented migrants from the first day of his new term in office—despite admitting that they have no idea of what such a plan might entail.

But a WIRED investigation—including interviews with sheriffs and experts, and a review of reports detailing the fiscal cost of carrying out the administration’s claims of deporting up to a million undocumented migrants in a year—shows that such a scenario is virtually impossible.

“It's synthetic hyperventilation,” Jonathan Thompson, executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association, tells WIRED. “It's all designed to scare people, and it won't happen like that, period.”

Despite the administration sharing no details of how it will carry out the mass deportations that Trump and others in his team have promised, sheriffs across the country have been publicly declaring their willingness to do whatever the president-elect and his “border czar,” Tom Homan, demand of them.

"I absolutely, positively will support that very much,” Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, from Maryland’s Frederick County, told the Baltimore Sun this week. “It's going to be a mass deportation of criminals.”

“We’re going to be in the business again,” Sheriff Richard Jones from Butler County, Ohio, told the Wall Street Journal last month, adding that he was preparing his jails to house ICE detainees again. “We have space available, and they’re going to need space from day one.”

But the loudest voice pushing to have sheriffs on the front lines of the deportation effort belongs to Richard Mack, a former sheriff who now heads up the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). He tells WIRED he has been in contact with Homan in recent weeks.

“We discussed trying to get the sheriffs involved [in mass deportations] and he kind of liked that idea,” Mack tells WIRED, adding that the pair have been exchanging voice mails and text messages.

WIRED was unable to verify Mack’s claims, which he’s repeated on dozens of right-wing podcasts and talk shows—including several appearances on Steve Bannon’s influential War Room podcast—over the past few weeks, adding at every opportunity that he was willing to step up and play a role in the new administration.

“I'm willing to help, and I think it's a good idea that they look at sheriffs now, and I think every sheriff should help,” Mack tells WIRED.

“With his recent media blitz, Mack is trying to maintain relevance by pushing far-right CSPOA sheriffs and their posses as a vital cog in the brutal deportation machine envisioned under the next administration,” Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, tells WIRED. “The notion of CSPOA sheriffs and throngs of armed vigilantes going door to door hunting immigrants would be a profoundly troubling turn akin to pointing a rifle barrel in the face of the Statue of Liberty.”

A number of right-wing sheriffs have said they have been speaking with Homan or the administration in recent weeks. “I’ve been in contact with people who are involved in the transition team,” Jones told Newsmax this week. (Earlier this year, he called for legislation that would allow law enforcement in Ohio to charge unauthorized immigrants with felonies.)

Meanwhile, Sheriff Brad Coe of Kinney County in Texas, who was approved to buy—and reportedly bought—weapons that shoot pepper balls or tear gas in an effort to deter migrants earlier this year, told Inkstick that he is planning to send Homan a list of like-minded sheriffs along the border who are willing to work with the administration.

And when Homan himself visited the border recently—alongside television personality Phillip “Dr. Phil” McGraw—and had a meeting with four Arizona sheriffs, including constitutional sheriff Mark Lamb, it appeared the claims that sheriffs would play a pivotal role in the expected migrant round-ups were accurate.

But one of the sheriffs who met with Homan tells WIRED the idea the administration will coopt sheriffs to round up immigrants is completely inaccurate.

“That's a false media narrative that's out there,” Sheriff Leon Wilmot from Yuma County says. “There's nothing like that that came out of [Homan] and he doesn't expect sheriffs to do that either. That's a false media narrative that some people and groups are pushing, and it has no bearing on what this incoming administration intends on doing.”

When asked for details of what the administration does intend, Wilmot says, “We didn't get into the intricacies of it, because that's not our realm of responsibility.” Wilmot adds that the Supreme Court had already ruled that local law enforcement cannot enforce immigration law.

“If we wanted to do immigration law, we would go work for Border Patrol,” Wilmot says.

Homan, Lamb, Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County, and incoming Pinal County Sheriff Ross Teeple, who were also at the meeting, did not respond to requests for comment about what they discussed.

When asked about Mack and his push to position sheriffs as a critical part of the mass deportation efforts, Wilmot dismissed the former sheriff’s claims.

“No one listens to him,” Wilmot says. “He hasn't been a sheriff in a long time. He is not engaged with sheriffs across the country. He's not involved in any of our decisionmaking. He pushes his own agenda.”

In response, Mack claims that he has held more than 100 seminars and conventions with more than 1,200 sheriffs since leaving office. “I invite Sheriff Wilmot to do what we ask of all the sheriffs, just come and see our class for yourself,” he tells WIRED. “If you don't like it, then criticize me and the work I do.”

Jessica Pishko, a lawyer and author of the recently published The Highest Law in the Land, a book that examines sheriffs’ unchecked power, agrees with Wilmot. “I would be wary of taking anything Richard Mack says at face value,” she says. “He was not a part of the first Trump administration, and there's no reason to think that they need Mack. Everything he's doing is with the intent of publicizing himself.”

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment about what, if any, role Mack or other sheriffs will play in helping to achieve campaign pledges to rid the United States of unauthorized migrants.

Trump promised mass deportations during his first term, but failed to achieve his goals. The average yearly total of deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement between 2016 and 2020 was just over 300,000—a significant drop compared to the 380,000 people deported annually during Barack Obama’s presidency.

But during this election campaign, Trump and his allies made it clear that the scale and speed of the deportation plans for his second term would be on a different level.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner who formalized the child separation policy alongside Homan during Trump’s first term, told The New York Times more than a year ago.

Vice president-elect JD Vance has said it’s “certainly reasonable to deport around a million people per year,” which most experts have said is an entirely unrealistic number.

A recent analysis by the American Immigration Council looking at the resources needed to deport 1 million unauthorized immigrants per year found that it would cost, on average, $88 billion annually—more than the entire Department of Homeland Security budget.

The rhetoric that Trump, Homan, and Miller have been promoting envisions that mass round-ups and arrests would happen all over the country simultaneously on the first day of the new administration. But such claims are designed to instill fear rather than anything else.

While Homan has said criminals would be targeted first, he’s also said that workplace raids—which are known to adversely impact families and children and could cause political blowback even among Trump supporters by causing the price of commodities like milk to spike—would be reinstated. He’s also claimed that “families can be deported together” even if the children are US citizens, in opposition to the US Constitution.

These objections aside, the simple fact is that no one can say for certain what Trump’s mass deportation plan will look like because no specifics have been revealed, with the administration instead filling the void with dangerous rhetoric.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the transition team claims to be already eyeing up locations and buildings along the border and in Democratic-run cities—where most unauthorized immigrants live—to turn into mass detention centers to avoid overcrowding in county jails across the country. The outlet also reported that the transition team is also considering giving sheriffs more power.

Homan is no stranger to sheriffs. Having worked as a Border Patrol agent for almost three decades and then as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he has forged close links with many sheriffs across the US over the years.

“I think it's reasonable that Tom Homan has been in touch with sheriffs. He was in touch with them before,” Pishko says. “In the first Trump administration, sheriffs used to email Stephen Miller and Tom Homan all the time about deportations.”

Sheriffs, though, are not ordinarily allowed to arrest or deport unauthorized immigrants. These functions are only carried out by ICE.

A program known as 287(g) “allows ICE—through the delegation of specified immigration officer duties—to enhance collaboration with state and local law enforcement partners to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens.” It does not, however, allow sheriffs or their deputies to round up suspected unauthorized immigrants.

The program has been in place for decades, but ICE says that currently, only 125 sheriff departments out of 3,081 have signed up. Because the program is voluntary and does not offer sheriffs any additional funding—in fact, it costs them money in many cases—most counties never signed up, even during Trump’s first term.

A transition source speaking to the Wall Street Journal said they “expect to see a historic number of new 287(g) agreements,” but it’s unclear why any more sheriffs would sign up this time around than did during Trump’s first term.

Complicating things further is the fact that some states are attempting to force sheriffs to take up the duties of immigration officers. In Texas, for example, local law enforcement can arrest and charge unauthorized migrants with a misdemeanor. And in last month’s election, Arizona voters approved Proposition 314, which potentially allows local law enforcement to charge migrants crossing the border illegally with a state felony—though for now the law is at least partially unenforceable.

Having canvassed many of his members, Thompson, the National Sheriff’s Association director, says they’ll enforce immigration laws if asked: “If sheriffs are called upon to assist, they do want to help keep communities safe, and they will work with the federal agencies as best as they're able to,” he says.

But there are a lot of sheriffs—even pro-Trump sheriffs—across the US who believe the practicalities implementing mass deportation at the massive scale Trump is promising would simply not work, and would place a huge burden on sheriffs’ departments.

Mike Murphy is sheriff of Livingston County in Michigan, and is such a big supporter of the president-elect that he held a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the sheriff’s office in August. (He is now being investigated for allegedly violating campaign finance law.)

But Murphy, who refused to impose a ban on guns at polling locations in Michigan in 2020, says he is not going to be dictated to by Trump.

“I still have a county to do police work in,” Murphy tells WIRED. “Just because the president says, 'Hey, go out and round them up,' that is not all of a sudden gonna move to the top of my priority list. If somebody's house is getting broken into, that's my priority. If somebody's involved in an injury crash and they're laying on the side of the road, that's my priority. I've got cases that are open.”

Other sheriffs around the country have voiced similar concerns about the financial strain it would put on their departments, while some say deportations should remain the remit of ICE.

“Personally, I’m not in favor,” Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez of Val Verde County, Texas, told NOTUS. “That is, at the end of the day, a federal responsibility.” Sheriff Ronny Dodson, from Brewster County, also in Texas, told the same outlet, “I don’t know that we want that authority to start putting them in jails, because it’ll break us. I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job.”

In Santa Cruz county, Sheriff David Hathaway oversees the largest ports of entry on the Arizona border. But he was not invited to meet Homan during the border czar’s visit earlier this month.

“They did not invite me,” Hathaway tells WIRED. “There are four border sheriffs in Arizona. They didn't invite the two that are Democrats, that are opposed to what Donald Trump is doing.”

Wilmot says the reason Hathaway was not invited to the meet-and-greet with Homan was that “both of them told the Arizona Sheriffs’ Association when they were elected that they did not want to be part of the organization.”

Hathaway says immigrants from Mexico have an overwhelming positive impact on his county and the US in general, and that he believes Trump’s mass deportation plan not only is unworkable, but also would erode the trust he has built up within his community.

“I'm not going to cooperate, because 95 percent of the residents of the town where I live, where my county is, are Hispanic,” Hathaway says. “I'm not going to go checking the documents of practically every single person in my county to determine their immigration status, because that would create distrust between law enforcement and all the people in my community.”