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Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, named for the Georgia nursing student murdered by a Venezuelan man who'd crossed the border illegally. The law expands the list of criminal charges that can get a migrant deported, and it may become a legal tool for President Trump's effort to carry out mass deportations. But as NPR's Martin Kaste reports, that depends on the cooperation of local police and jails.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: The man convicted of murdering Riley had previously been arrested in a shoplifting case in Georgia but was let go. Now, under the Laken Riley Act, shoplifting is one of the crimes that call for deportation, along with burglary, violence that leads to injury or death, or assaulting a police officer.
TERRY JOHNSON: Those are the people that I would love to see out of the United States.
KASTE: Terry Johnson is sheriff of Alamance County in North Carolina. He supports the act because he believes the threat of deportation can deter everyday crime. He says that effect was apparent in his county almost two decades ago when deputies collaborated with federal immigration enforcement under a program known as 287(g).
JOHNSON: We've seen those individuals that were coming here for the wrong reason move out of our county to the surrounding counties, and if you looked, you would see their crime rate go up a little bit also.
KASTE: But that opinion is not universal among law enforcement. Jack Donohue spent three decades with the NYPD and is now a senior fellow on policing initiatives at Rutgers University. He says police detectives especially don't want to be seen as an arm of immigration enforcement.
JACK DONOHUE: Listen, I'm going to put somebody in the box, or I'm going to have a complainant sitting outside in the interview room, and I'm going to talk to them. I don't want the first thing in their mind to be, are you going to deport me?
KASTE: That's often cited as a reason for sanctuary-city-style laws, which restrict the information that local police and jails can share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. But Donohue says those restrictions are not absolute, especially when it comes to tracking organized crime groups.
DONOHUE: There's a reason why police agencies across the country are able to solve crimes and to learn what's happening and how those crews are working. It's because people are actually sharing information. We don't want to shut that down.
KASTE: Some police say that kind of cooperation could be shut down by the Laken Riley Act's mandate that people be deported for lesser crimes. They say it could make it harder for prosecutors to cut deals with people who could implicate worse criminals, especially because the act calls for deporting people who are merely charged with crimes, not convicted. But the reality is, if the Trump administration is going to ramp up deportations, current ICE staffers may not be up to the task.
AUSTIN KOCHER: The job of an immigration officer has changed fairly considerably in the last decade. It's much more of a desk job now.
KASTE: Austin Kocher studies immigration enforcement at Syracuse University. He says ICE's internal enforcement officers focus on watching arrest records and other data to find the people they want to detain, and then they often rely on cops to do their legwork.
KOCHER: When ICE has been able to be most effective - you know, during the Obama administration, for instance - it's been because they have leveraged the resources of local agencies - so partnering up with local sheriffs and local police departments - because, you know, ICE just isn't able to do it themselves.
KASTE: Traditionally, those partnerships were voluntary. The Feds didn't have the power to force local police to help them. But the Trump administration is turning up the heat. This week, the new leadership at the Justice Department circulated a memo promising to investigate and potentially prosecute local officials who, quote, "threaten to impede immigration enforcement." Martin Kaste, NPR News.
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