WASHINGTON — ICE has 11,600 deportation officers on its payroll. Doing the same work, on someone else’s payroll, are more than 29,000 sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, small-town patrolmen, campus cops and wildlife officers, deputized under a program the Justice Department once shut down for racial profiling, according to reporting by ace immigration journalist Francesca D’Annunzio at ProPublica.
That is the central finding of “Force Multiplied,” a report released today by FWD.us. It finds the number of local officers working for ICE through the 287(g) Task Force Model has doubled since February. The authors, Alison Silveira and Felicity Rose, estimate the deputized force at 26,000 to 33,000 officers. DHS’s own count, as reported by The New York Times, is 29,300.
The shift matters because it changes who knocks on the door. Under the Task Force Model, a local cop on a routine traffic stop can ask about immigration status, detain the driver and hand them to ICE. Federal agents don’t ne…