In
No Country For Old Men Cormac McCarthy wrote about a black sheriff who knew the names of evey person in his county. Is there abook where the sheriff character is a slave lender? Or maybe getting creative and building an extra space ship or something with untracked money from Operation Stonegarden?? Inquiring Minds want to know!!
Jessica, let's talk a little about immigration for a moment because county sheriffs, as you write, have become almost like avatars for the anti-immigration movement. How did they become the law enforcement agency involved in immigration?
PISHKO: It was something that really began to happen when the United States decided that it would interlock the immigration system with the criminal legal system. So that's - some people call it the crimmigration system, which is not a term that I coined. It's something that immigration law experts coined. But when Congress passed a certain series of laws in the 1980s and '90s, what they wanted to do was create a system in which people who were accused of crimes, particularly at the time drug crimes, would be able to be immediately deported, in a way that was basically faster. So they didn't have to be convicted.
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PISHKO: That's also the benefit for them. The federal government houses about 25% of immigrants in detention in county jails right now. And they pay these sheriffs per diem. So they get paid sort of per day to keep people in their jails. And it's one of the ways that sheriffs are able to use that jail, kind of as a political tool - right? - to make money for their county.
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... using this anti-immigrant group, the Trump administration recruited more sheriffs to join a program called 287(g). And 287(g) is a federal program that essentially deputizes sheriffs and their deputies to act as immigration agents. So under Trump, many, many more sheriffs joined this 287(g) program. Now, the 287(g) program is a bit interesting because it doesn't include any funding for the sheriffs, but it is something that sheriffs used to say that they were tough on immigration.
MOSLEY: Trump sees sheriffs as his allies. But we should note that even after he left office, the Biden administration has also poured money into immigration enforcement at the border, at the Mexican border, more money than even before, and which translates really into big bucks for these sheriff's departments.
Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is in Pinal County, which is actually not on the border. But he is a person who receives quite a lot of money from the Department of Homeland Security under a program called Operation Stonegarden.
Operation Stonegarden is a bit of an unusual program because it funds local law enforcement to conduct sort of border policing. It's given also to sheriffs on the U.S.-Canada border, as well as the U.S.-Mexico border. And there have been previous reports that the DHS does not track where this money goes. So there's sort of a pre-existing problem in which they fail to track the money, see where the money is actually going and then monitor the effectiveness of the funding. So there's no reason here to think that putting more money into Operation Stonegarden in some way has a positive impact or any impact at all.
But Mark Lamb - I found that even though he did receive money under the Trump administration, that under the Biden administration, it had more than doubled. So he received money to purchase things like helicopters..
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PISHKO: Some of them are buying snowmobiles to, you know, drive through the snow. Stonegarden money was used to buy, like, snow suits. So that's one common use in the North. In the South, it's a lot of ATVs, helicopters. Overtime is another big one. And again, what's very interesting is that the federal government doesn't really track how this money gets used.
There's not very good information about, you know, exactly where these dollars go. Like, are they going to weaponry or vehicles or overtime or additional staff? They seem to be able to go to all of it, but it's something that the federal government hasn't really decided to look into.
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PISHKO: They wanted to take control of law enforcement in their county, and the idea was that if they elected a Black sheriff, that sheriff would protect them from forces like the Klan. Very logical thing to do. Now, it turned out that white people did not like that at all. And there's a quote that I found from someone saying that they would rather see a Black person elected to any other office than sheriff. And I think that points to how the sheriff was seen as the local figure who maintained the racial segregation.
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... this tradition persists today, which is why sheriffs among law enforcement officers still have a lot of pay-for-service mechanisms. In many places, for example, landlords pay the sheriff to evict tenants. It's just a flat fee. So among also those things was that they would take people and lease them out to white land owners. They didn't just lease them out for farming. They were sent to mines, to poultry processing plants. In Florida, they were sent to collect tar in the Everglades. And I think it can't be understated just how dangerous and violent convict leasing was.
