Trump wants police to help with mass deportations. Will Utah law enforcement comply?

Utah law enforcement officials are split on whether President-elect Donald Trump’s deportation agenda will help or hurt their mission to keep the state’s residents safe.

Some county sheriffs are excited for a new presidential administration that will prioritize deporting migrants who commit crimes. Other current and former law enforcement officials in the state worry that expanding deportation efforts could deter witnesses from coming forward and take resources from addressing other criminal activity.

For many, the distinction is drawn between whether Trump’s plans to deport millions of people will focus on those who have committed crimes while living in the United States, or whether the effort will include peaceful members of a community who may or may not have entered the country illegally.

“Utah sheriffs are willing to work really closely with the Trump administration and be fairly aggressive at deporting criminal aliens,” Kane County Sheriff Tracy Glover said.

But the question becomes more complicated “when it comes to mass deportations of people that are here and not committing crimes,” said Kane, who was recently elected as president of the Utah Sheriffs’ Association. “I think you’ll see less interest from sheriffs on just mass deportation issues than you will on criminal alien issues.”

Ultimately, as Glover pointed out, the enforcement of federal immigration law — including workplace raids or indiscriminate document-checking — are “a little bit more outside of the realm of what sheriffs do in the state of Utah to maintain public safety.”

What has Trump said about deportations?

Trump has committed to use every tool at his disposal to implement large scale deportations of migrants who entered the country illegally. By designating the recent surge in immigrant border crossings as an “invasion,” Trump has promised to activate the military, including the National Guard, to deport migrants.

Using military service members against domestic actors will likely face legal obstacles, even if Trump follows through with his proposal to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime authority allowing presidents to detain and deport natives of an enemy nation.

The president-elect has also said he will utilize local law enforcement to help identify migrants who are in the country illegally, of which there are likely between 11 million and 20 million. While his campaign declarations have been far from consistent, Trump has repeatedly said his initiative will begin with those who committed crimes after entering the United States.

In response to a question from the Deseret News at an August press conference, Trump said that federal authorities will “work with locals” to apprehend migrants who have broken the law “and they’re going to bring them to us — and we’ll get them over the border.”

Since the 1990s, programs have existed allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to authorize local law enforcement to help with certain “immigration officer functions,” like identifying and removing “incarcerated criminal noncitizens.”

In November, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox issued a statement in support of “the incoming presidential administration’s priorities on illegal immigration.” Cox proposed five policy priorities to increase coordination between federal and local partners to identify and deport “more illegal immigrants who have committed crimes and pose a threat to public safety.”

The proposals include adding more checkpoints to identify whether arrested individuals are migrants who entered the country illegally and developing additional trainings for local and state authorities to turn over migrants who committed crimes to ICE.

An uptick in migrant-related crime, including by Tren de Aragua

Glover and his predecessor as sheriff’s association president, Utah County Sheriff Mike Smith, welcomed Cox’s statement in light of the “uptick in crime” the state has experienced in drug trafficking, Smith said.

In the last year, Utahns have seen: migrants who entered the country illegally commit more than half of the drug-related felony offenses along the Jordan River Trail; members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua appear in connection to multiple criminal incidents; and Riverton city courts double their budget for translation services to keep up with migrant-related crime.

In Utah prisons, there are an estimated 285 migrants who entered the country illegally — 181 were convicted of sex offenses, 59 were convicted of murder and eight are serving sentences of life without parole.

While there is a consensus among studies that migrants who entered the country illegally are significantly less likely to commit violent and drug crimes than native-born Americans, migrant-related crime is expected to grow in Utah unless ICE increases its cooperation with local law enforcement and the southern border with Mexico is secured, Smith said.

“The unfortunate projections are that it will continue to rise,” Smith said. “It’s criminal syndicates, it’s these national organizations that are moving their operations into Utah. And that’s kind of a bleak outlook, but that is the reality of what we’re seeing here.”

Under the Biden administration, sheriffs have reported a lack of cooperation from ICE officials in removing migrants that should be entering deportation proceedings after being convicted of a crime and serving out their sentence in Utah jails and prisons.

Citing a lack of detention space — caused by onerous Biden administration policies for housing civil detainees — ICE officials began the practice of regularly releasing previously convicted migrants who entered the country illegally back into Utah communities.

Over the past several years, Weber County Sheriff Ryan Arbon has been in contact with ICE officials to find detention space in the state for ICE detainees to wait in while ICE initiated deportation proceedings. He was stonewalled and met with a lack of trust from ICE’s national leadership, Arbon said.

Arbon is “anxiously looking forward to Trump and his new policies,” he said, and hopes that a change in ICE leadership will give Utah better federal partners in removing migrants who commit crimes in the state.

But there are many unknowns surrounding how local law enforcement will participate in a program of mass deportations that includes migrants who have not broken Utah laws since entering the country. Police officers “are not authorized to enforce federal law,” Arbon points out, which includes arresting individuals solely because they have entered the country illegally.

“We need to be tougher on crime, absolutely, and I know the public supports that. We just need to see how it’s going to roll out,” Arbon said. “I don’t know what mass deportations look like.”

Could mass deportations increase crime?

Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said he shares the sheriffs’ concern for public safety. His message to migrants who enter the country illegally and then commit criminal offenses is “I’m going to prosecute you,” Gill said. But Gill believes the threat of mass deportations could actually make the prosecution of criminals more difficult.

Gill worries that Trump’s deportation policies could create “a culture of fear” among innocent members of the community who hesitate to report crimes to police, and “a culture of suspicion” surrounding the immigration status of community members who look like they may have been foreign born.

“I worry about sending a chilling effect as a local prosecutor, where I might lose access to those witnesses,” Gill said.

As an attorney, Gill said he is also worried that mass deportations could violate the rights of due process of his community members. Such a large scale effort will produce “collateral consequences,” Gill said.

These could include long-lasting suffering on the part of Utahns who may be divided from family members, as has been the case for those impacted by the Swift & Co. workplace raid in Hyrum, Cache County, 18 years ago.

“What I want to make sure that we don’t do is engage in gratuitous acts of violence against communities that are otherwise not harming our public safety,” Gill said.

In 2019, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that Utah’s “unauthorized population” numbered roughly 89,000. However, in the years since 2019, the number of new immigration proceedings filed in Utah courts — which can be a good indicator of how many asylum-seeking migrants have entered an area — have spiked more than 19-fold.

In fiscal year 2020, there were 1,369 new proceedings filed in Utah immigration courts. In fiscal year 2024, there were 26,509 — an increase of 1,836% over that four-year period. So far in fiscal year 2025, which began Oct. 1, there have been 2,464 new court proceedings filed in Utah immigration courts, according to according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data.

Former Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank said he believes Trump’s deportation agenda will lead to “racial profiling.” When someone is arrested for a crime, their fingerprints are automatically sent to ICE to determine their immigration status. But if police forces are tasked with identifying individuals to screen for their immigration status — regardless of their criminal record — it will require “racially motivated policing actions,” Burbank said.

“Not only are you going to impact people who might be undocumented, you’re going to absolutely impact people who look, dress, sound, speak, worship, in the same way that you would profile an individual,” said Burbank, who works as an adviser to the Center for Policing Equity, which he helped found.

During his nine years as police chief, Burbank gained a national profile for speaking out against a state bill that would require police to question the citizenship status of individuals and would allow the cross-deputization of city officers to enforce federal immigration law.

In addition to decreasing trust between law enforcement and the communities they are meant to protect, mass deportation policies could also decrease law enforcement’s ability to deploy resources in the way that is most beneficial to the community, Burbank said.

“What you’re doing is you’re saying this is the most important — it’s more important than rape, robbery, homicide, or anything else — is to deport people for no reason,” Burbank said. “So now what you’re doing is you’re occupying a very limited resource.”

The solution, according to Burbank, is for police departments to refuse to participate in Trump’s mass deportation agenda because local law enforcement “have all the latitude in the world” to choose whether to engage in federal immigration law enforcement, unless there is direction from the state.

According to Smith, if Trump wants his mass deportation rhetoric to translate into effective policy, he will need to do more than replace officials at the top. The federal government will need to “put the resources to problems that are really affecting our society, and this is one of them,” Smith said.

But another important resource is the public’s political support of Trump’s deportation policies. And public opinion is “apt to shift,” Smith said, amid what he expects to be negative “major media” spin surrounding local law enforcement’s efforts to help federal authorities enforce the country’s immigration laws.

“At some point the narrative is going to shift, and everybody that is trying to fight this problem and fight crime are going to be labeled evil and bad,” Smith said. “And we know that’s gonna happen.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Weber County Sheriff Ryan Arbon did not initiate contact with ICE officials about obtaining more detention space in the state.