Point. Click. Gone

June 2, 2025

287(g)

I don’t even know how many times I’ve commented on this increasingly more and more obvious pattern. But here are a few previous instances;

Slew of EOs, Uber for Mercenaries, Fed or Not?, Mass recruiting of Civilian vigilantes, Triple Canopy/Blackwater from the beginning, more, and there’s more I just can’t find it. The point is I’ve been actively watching this conflation of federal and local and civilian and private enforcement for years. Many, many years before I started writing this blog.

But I’ll be honest, until this week, I had never even heard of 287(g). It wasn’t on my radar at all. I never saw it in a news cycle or mentioned in any legal briefings. It’s never popped up as a hashtag or viral post. Nor has it been a footnote in the long list of creeping authoritarian policies I’ve been tracking. But someone restacked one of my posts and commented an article by Jack Jones, better known online as @quadzillahikes, titled “The brownshirt paramilitary army is here and it’s all legal.”

It’s one of the most important breakdowns I’ve seen since I began this journey. And not just because it reveals a brand-new (to me!) policy, but because it connects the dots between long-standing federal law, quiet interagency partnerships, and the decentralized power of local law enforcement in a way that sketches out an actual operating system for authoritarian violence. The infrastructure doesn’t need to be built. It’s already in place. And it’s already legal. Go read that article. It is quite long but worth the trek. I read it multiple times, taking notes so I could try and distill it down for you.

What follows is a summary and paraphrase of Jones’s article, with direct quotes marked sectioned out. I’ve added additional commentary and context where relevant, especially on the collapse of accountability structures and the use of legal ambiguity as cover for paramilitary authority.

Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act was created in 1996 as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. It allows the federal government, specifically ICE, to enter into memorandums of agreement with local law enforcement agencies. In practice, that means your local sheriff can quietly sign a deal that turns his deputies and anyone he chooses to deputize into federal immigration agents. That matters because it hands federal power to local actors with no federal oversight, no required training in immigration law, and often a political agenda.

If you don’t read anything else read that last paragraph carefully a few times and consider the implications with everything else we’ve been noticing and commenting on these last few months.

But ICE didn’t even exist when this law was passed; it was created six years later, in 2002, after the dissolution of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in the wake of 9/11. “So how does 287(g) benefit ICE so directly?”, you may ask. Well, let me tell you. Because when INS was dismantled and immigration enforcement functions were handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE inherited the interior enforcement role and with it, the full authority granted by 287(g). Today, ICE uses those agreements to deputize local police and sheriffs as immigration agents. Once signed, these MOAs permit those local officers to carry out federal immigration enforcement actions, including questioning, detaining, and transferring people suspected of immigration violations. In effect, 287(g) federalizes local officers, giving them the authority to act as extensions of ICE within their own communities. Again, this is a straight pipeline to giving any random civilian federal powers without any training or oversight.

Now, most of these agreements are not with big-city police departments or highway patrol agencies. They’re with county sheriffs. And sheriffs hold a uniquely dangerous combination of power and isolation. They are elected. They are rarely opposed. They answer to no one. They run jails, oversee patrols, and in many states, can deputize civilians at will. This means that when a sheriff signs a 287(g) agreement, they gain not only the legal authority to act on ICE’s behalf, but also the power to extend that authority to anyone they choose.

Click the image to check this map for your local area to see what agreements are in place. Keeping in mind that it appears many times these agreements can be practically invisible and not even listed on public resources such as this. You would have to go digging in your local government archives to find any paper trail.

“Most 287(g) agreements were with county sheriffs, rather than other enforcement agencies… Sheriffs run the county jails where all law enforcement agencies in the county book people they arrest; thus, jails function as a strategic node for ICE in the larger enforcement system.”

This is where the Constitutional Sheriffs movement enters the picture. Over the past decade, particularly since the Obama administration, a growing number of sheriffs have embraced the belief that they are the ultimate legal authority in their county. Many refuse to enforce federal regulations, court orders, or public health laws. Others have openly aligned with militia groups and white nationalist rhetoric. Some run posses, AKA volunteer groups of civilians who are handed badges and allowed to carry weapons, make arrests, and patrol communities with no formal oversight.

“Constitutional sheriffs assert that they have the power to determine the constitutionality of the laws they are entrusted with enforcing, and to refuse to enforce any law that they believe is unconstitutional.”

“Sheriffs and their deputies aren’t always trained in law enforcement. Elected sheriffs may have backgrounds in business or real estate instead.”

Combine that ideological framework with 287(g), and you have a legally sanctioned pipeline from ICE to armed civilians loyal to a single individual. That sheriff can deputize anyone they want. Once deputized, they can be empowered to enforce federal immigration law. It’s a chain of command with no training requirements, no checks, and no accountability.

This framework plugs directly into the pattern I’ve been writing about for months: the collapse of distinction between civilian, law enforcement, and military roles. Over and over again, we’ve seen authority handed off to loyalists, posses, contractors and volunteers with guns.

What makes this so effective is the legal ambiguity it creates. Is the person detaining you a sheriff’s deputy? An ICE agent? A contractor? A civilian volunteer? That’s not a design flaw. That’s the design. For instance, check out this recent video. One of many examples coming out daily of ambiguous militarized authority/enforcers attempting to intimidate people all over the country. Notice how when pressed on who he is, he finally answers by shoving a ‘badge’ as close as possible so it’s hard to really see it an says ‘We work with the US Marshals”. That is extremely telling. A US Marshall would flat out tell you who they are and any other agency, Police, ICE, HHS, ect would also identify themselves as agents of that branch.

“These fuckers aren’t law enforcement. They’re not anything. They’re civilians, part of their deranged sheriff’s posse, LARPing as LEO.”

This entire model of decentralized enforcement with centralized ideological loyalty is not new. It’s been tested. Jack points to Joe Arpaio’s posse in Arizona, which conducted raids, crowd control, and traffic stops with thousands of armed civilians. He points to Blackwater contractors in New Orleans, who carried state-issued badges and said they had the authority to arrest and kill. He points to Erik Prince, who has submitted a $25 billion proposal to create a private immigration enforcement army, which I have discussed previously. All of these precedents were tolerated, legitimized, or quietly copied.

“The federal government deputized Blackwater, a private military mercenary group during hurricane Katrina and gave them broad powers to carry weapons and use deadly force.”

What 287(g) does is plug those precedents into a formal legal framework. It gives ICE an incentive to outsource its work. It gives sheriffs legal cover to deputize enforcers. And it provides a layer of legal insulation and plausible deniability all the way down.

If a raid turns violent, whose fault is it? The ICE liaison? The sheriff? The contractor? The civilian? By the time a lawsuit or investigation starts, the damage is done and no one can be held clearly responsible.

“287(g) creates a command and control structure that allows ICE to oversee all of these disparate local law enforcement agencies.”

Because it’s done with memorandums of agreement, not legislation, there is no public vote or hearing. There has never been an opportunity for protest. Just a signature behind closed doors. Much the same way they privatized detention. The same way they privatized war. The same way they are now privatizing law enforcement itself.

“This will be their model across the US. Their posse and deputized white supremacists will be the muscle, led by actual trained law enforcement.”

That final sentence is the real warning. This isn’t a theory. It’s a prototype. It’s already in effect. And it’s one of the most direct, scalable models for authoritarian consolidation I’ve seen laid out plainly. It does not require a constitutional crisis. It does not require an executive order. It just requires enough sheriffs to sign the dotted line and enough civilians willing to take the badge.

I’ve been saying for months that we’re watching the hard boundaries between military and civilian, contractor and cop, dissolve. This article and this law show how easily those blurred roles become formal. And in fact, are already formalized. How quickly can a posse becomes a task force? How quickly does ICE become the hub for an entire extrajudicial enforcement network? How quickly a paper badge become a gun in your face?

It’s all legal. As of today. Now.

Prototype Punching Bags

When federal authority is handed off to local actors without oversight, it creates more than a legal loophole, it creates a permission structure. One that doesn’t stop at one category of target. It spreads. It adapts. It looks for practice.

Look what is happening in Phoenix, and soon to spread to local jurisdictions nationwide.

Last year, the Department of Justice released a scathing report detailing widespread abuse by the Phoenix Police Department specifically targeting unhoused people. Officers were jailing them en masse for things like sleeping in public, trashing their belongings, using Tasers in routine encounters, and, in at least one case, kneeling on a man’s neck while another officer shocked him. Homeless people made up less than 1% of the city’s population but accounted for nearly 40% of all arrests between 2016 and 2022.

The DOJ found systemic civil rights violations. And then, this May, it dropped the case. No consent decree or oversight plan. No reforms. Simply a quiet withdrawal.

No explanation was given. But the message was loud and clear.

If you're a police department looking for targets, there's one group you can treat as subhuman. One group you can test tactics on, calibrate force against, normalize brutality with and no one in Washington will stop you. There will be no political cost or legal consequences.

And if they are building a hybrid force comprised of a loose confederation of ICE agents, sheriff’s posses, and private contractors where do you think they will start? They will start with the people no one will defend. The people already being treated like threats for existing. They will start with homeless people. Well, they started with Immigrants. And Protesters. And dissident foreign students. But the American unhoused will be the next large group of ‘non criminal’ and ‘non immigrant’ status they will go after. Many of whom will be natural born citizens.

Because this is a test run and a training ground. It’s a public rehearsal for unaccountable force.

When the federal government steps away from civil rights enforcement, it’s a green light that signals to local enforcers that the gloves are off and if no one stops you from using them on the people at the bottom. And no one will stop them when they start moving up the list.

And make no mistake: the list is already being written. This IS happening.

They Knew, Of Course They Knew

The 238 men shipped to CECOT Death Camp that started this whole public fracas over due process. They knew these people weren’t criminals. And that’s really important.

It’s no longer something we have to guess at. According to internal Homeland Security files obtained by ProPublica, more than half of the Venezuelan migrants deported this spring to El Salvador’s CECOT prison had no criminal convictions at all. None. Not in the U.S. Not abroad.

And yet, in full view of the press and the public, the administration lined the White House lawn with their mugshots. Photos blown up for the cameras. Names broadcast on Fox and Newsmax. “Violent offenders.” “Hardened criminals.” “The worst of the worst.” Every official mouth hole repeated it. ICE spokespeople, DHS officials, press secretaries, even the president himself.

But the government’s own files tell a different story. They knew these were not gang leaders or terrorists. They were immigration violators, many of them seeking asylum. The charges didn’t exist. The convictions didn’t exist.

But the lie was useful, so they printed it big, shouted it loud, and ran with it. Over and over and over and over.

It was a campaign. A full-court PR blitz designed to condition the public to accept extrajudicial deportation and to cheer for it. And many, many people did.

They wanted you to believe these men were monsters because that made it easier to disappear them. It made it easier to strip due process and to outsource their imprisonment to a military dictatorship with a taste for spectacle. And now those men sit in a foreign supermax without charges, trial or timeline.

Despite the outrage, legal blocks and public protests, these actions haven’t stopped. They have intensified.

In New York, attorney Rachel Levenson watched ICE agents seize a client during a civil housing hearing. They never notified her. They never gave him a chance to call anyone. They just took him. She spent days trying to track him down. “We’re literally fighting disappearances,” she said.

Please consider all of this within the context of the previous section. This is the same ICE, with those same methods, that is now being replicated across the country through 287(g) agreements, which let local sheriffs and their chosen deputies operate as immigration enforcers without federal oversight or training. Yet they still have access to the tools, the databases, and the authority to make people vanish on command.

One of those tools include Clearview AI, the facial recognition platform scraping billions of images from your social media, DMV records, and public photo galleries. ICE has already used it thousands of times, often without warrants, identifying immigrants through decade-old driver’s licenses or tagged Instagram posts. And under 287(g), local agencies can now use those same tools, often without even telling you they’re doing it.

It’s automated now. Disappearing people has a user interface.

ICE Director Todd Lyons bragged that he wanted the agency to operate like Amazon Prime for human beings. Fast, invisible and with zero friction. That is exactly what is taking form now.

Point. Click. Gone.

But here’s the part I implore you to really meditate on.

They lied. And they knew they were lying.

They told you these men were monsters, and they weren’t. They said it on live TV. They printed it in national papers. They backed it with state seals and flags. Every outlet that repeated it without checking or pushing back helped it spread.

Every anchor who praised it played a part. Every voter who swallowed it without asking questions helped make it normal.

And that should burn a hole straight through your trust.

Because if they’ll lie about this. About who deserves a trial, about who’s a criminal, about who gets to vanish, they’ll lie to you about anything. And if the press doesn’t call them out, we have to. You don’t need permission to doubt them. You don’t need credentials or expertise to think for yourself. Especially when they prove over and over the lengths they will go through to deceive you.

Remember this forever. They fucking knew, of course they did.

And now you do to.

Final Thoughts

Politicians lying isn't news. That’s practically part of their job description like kissing babies and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. American politics has always been a messy dance of exaggeration, spin, and outright bullshit. But what we're facing now is not your standard political corruption, the kind that can be brushed off as the predictable mischief of elected officials padding their pockets or bending rules for personal favors. What we're seeing is the deliberate construction of a mechanism designed to bypass accountability entirely, to reshape law enforcement into something both powerful and deniable.

This didn't happen overnight. It's been evolving in plain sight since Reagan's "war on drugs" gave local police militarized weaponry, since Clinton's crime bill drastically expanded incarceration, since Bush's post-9/11 security state threw constitutional rights out the window and created ICE. And yes, even since Obama's drone warfare and unchecked surveillance expanded executive power without meaningful oversight. Not one of them is innocent and we are all complicit.

At each step, we normalized and accepted the incremental erosion of clear lines between federal and local, civilian and military, accountable and anonymous.

We shrugged at each little change, telling ourselves it was politics as usual. But there is always a tipping point and we've passed it. Now sheriffs deputize their own private armies under the shield of federal authority. Immigration agents act without warrants, raids are outsourced to mercenary contractors, and human beings vanish behind walls of secrecy and deliberate confusion.

This isn't about one politician or one party. It's about a systemic and seismic shift from transparent governance to rule by force, hidden behind badges handed out to untrained loyalists and fueled by propaganda campaigns that don't simply ‘lie’. They rely on your willingness to believe without question. Every lie unchallenged is permission for the next one, more brazen, more dangerous, until truth itself becomes a quaint relic of democratic nostalgia.

Think for yourself! Demand accountability from everyone, not just the politicians you dislike. Question your heros. Hold your favorite writers, thought leaders, journalists and public speakers to the fire more than any other.

Reject the impulse to dismiss the warnings as paranoia or partisan fear-mongering. What we ignore as routine corruption today becomes tomorrow’s weaponized state power.

So ask yourself now, before the next crisis, before the next disappearance where your line is. Because this isn’t politics as usual. This is something new, something intentional, something already here. And if we don’t think clearly, critically, and independently right now, there may not be another chance in our lifetime.