State legislation has prohibited California police agencies from participating in federal immigration enforcement operations since 2018 – but a Los Angeles County sheriff candidate wants to change that.

Oscar Martinez, a watch commander and lieutenant for the LA County Sheriff’s Department, is running against seven candidates for sheriff, including incumbent Robert Luna and his predecessor Alex Villanueva, in the upcoming June 2 primary election. A candidate must win a majority of votes to avoid a runoff election in November.

Martinez’s platform includes reinstating the 287(g) program – a collaboration with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement that gave state and local police the authority to conduct immigration enforcement, which is now outlawed by the California Values Act. To reinstate the program, the state would have to pass a new law overriding aspects of the California Values Act, which would require approval from the state legislature and governor.

President Donald Trump ramped up immigration enforcement in his second term, with ICE detaining about 400,000 people since January 2025, according to a Brookings study. The mass deportation campaign began in LA, with immigration enforcement officers arresting more than 10,000 people between June and December 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

[Related: ‘This shouldn’t be happening’: Students react to troops, ICE raids in LA]

LA County has the nation’s largest jail system, whose inmates consist of people who have been arrested, are awaiting trial or are serving short sentences. About 32% of all people arrested in LA County from January to June 2025 went to jail, according to LASD reports.

Jails differ from prisons, which are run by the state or federal government and house people convicted of state or federal crimes.

Under Martinez’s proposal, LA sheriffs could transfer people arrested and held in county jails to ICE upon the federal agency’s request. LASD previously participated in 287(g) from 2005-15, during which sheriffs only transferred people who were incarcerated with convictions, former sheriff John Scott said in a 2014 letter to the LA County Board of Supervisors.

Martinez said he does not care whether the incarcerated people he transfers have been convicted of a crime in LA County.

“If you are in jail, it’s because you committed a crime, and a judge sent you there,” he wrote on his campaign website. “It is not the system’s fault; it is your own responsibility.”

Ahilan Arulanantham, a professor at the School of Law and faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, said 287(g) changes the concept of a jail sentence for noncitizens versus citizens.

About 150 287(g) agreements between local law enforcement and ICE, which need to be signed to activate the partnerships, existed in 2021, according to an archived version of ICE’s website.

There were 1,844 agreements as of Tuesday, half of which were signed after ICE announced a financial rewards program for participating agencies in September. The program included $100,000 for new vehicles upon signing, as well as reimbursed salaries and benefits for members of law enforcement agencies that sign task force model agreements, which allow local officers to join ICE-led task forces and report people based on their suspected immigration status.

Additional bonuses are also available when officers identify immigrants and make arrests.

The reimbursements are only redeemable for task force model agreements.

“By joining forces with ICE, law enforcement agencies are not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities,” an ICE spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “They are becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family.”

Martinez said he wants LASD to follow the jail enforcement model, which enables sheriffs to conduct immigration enforcement in county jails, instead.

Martinez said he plans to work with state legislators to modify California’s sanctuary law to allow local law enforcement agencies to join the 287(g) program.

He added in an emailed statement that he is only advocating for the California Values Act to allow the jail enforcement model, not the task force or warrant enforcement models. The jail enforcement model includes and expands on all the powers granted by the warrant service officer program.

Martinez, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic as a child, said he believes 287(g) could make LA County a safer place to live.

“It will bring us the ability to share information and intelligence with the federal government,” he said. “It will provide a better safety net for our citizens.”

Martinez added that he believes ICE is less likely to conduct enforcement actions in local communities when it works alongside police.

Before 2025, ICE primarily depended on transfers from jails and prisons to enforce immigration law, according to the Deportation Data Project, which a UCLA professor co-founded. After Trump’s inauguration, the number of street arrests increased by 11 times – and jail and prison transfers doubled.

[Related: ‘It’s eye opening’: Deportation Data Project maps rise in immigration enforcement]

However, federal agents will continue to do their job regardless of 287(g), said Talia Inlender, the Center for Immigration Law and Policy’s deputy director. Allowing the program will not lead to safer communities, she added.

Inlender said she believes 287(g) agreements erode trust between law enforcement and both immigrant and non-immigrant communities.

“They can help expand and speed up a discriminatory enforcement system, which we know is operating at this moment with racial profiling and with an utter lack of guardrails and due process,” Inlender said.

If ICE issues an arrest or removal warrant for a person who is incarcerated, a jail facility participating in 287(g) can hold them for up to 48 hours after their regular sentence concludes, according to sample ICE memorandums. Law enforcement can also interrogate people who are incarcerated about their immigration status, request to place people in ICE detention and obtain sworn statements from people who are incarcerated on ICE’s behalf under the jail enforcement model.

ICE must direct and supervise these actions, per the memorandums.

Mark Reichel, the chief of the Isle Police Department in central Minnesota, said in an emailed statement that ICE encouraged his department to join 287(g) in late January. The department signed a task force model agreement and plans to receive reimbursements, said Jamie Minenko, an Isle city clerk-treasurer, in an emailed statement.

ICE field offices regularly perform outreach and build relationships with local law enforcement areas of interest, as well as network with law enforcement leaders, said Teresa DiBella from ICE’s Office of Partnership and Engagement in an emailed statement. DiBella declined to comment on Martinez’s campaign.

Arulanantham said law enforcement officials may feel pressured by the federal government to join 287(g). Inlender added that they may be enticed by the financial benefits.

“There’s political incentives to do it, because the Trump administration has specifically attacked jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement,” Arulanantham said.

However, Martinez said he would enter a 287(g) agreement for free.

“I don’t care if we make a profit out of it,” he said. “It’s all about public safety. I do not want to release these criminal illegal aliens back into the community to revictimize the victims.”

After Villanueva was elected sheriff in 2018, he canceled multiple programs that facilitated the transfer of people who are incarcerated in jails to ICE, including a federal initiative that paid LA County $122 million for information on people who are incarcerated and undocumented. Villanueva was a Democrat at the time but switched to the Republican Party in 2025.

Martinez said he believes Villanueva’s suspension of communication between federal and local law enforcement caused an increase in street enforcement. Martinez added that he worked in a county correctional facility when 287(g) was active and saw what he called a perfect working relationship between the sheriffs and ICE.

When ICE requested people who were incarcerated, sheriff deputies would bring them, Martinez said.

“Instead of releasing them back to the community where they can victimize people, we turned them over to ICE with the hope that they would get deported,” he said.

Only about 14% of 287(g) encounters from October 2023 to September 2024 were with people with prior convictions of assault, sex offenses or “dangerous drugs,” according to an ICE infographic.

A Central District Court judge ruled in 2017 in an American Civil Liberties Union class action lawsuit that ICE used unreliable federal databases to erroneously identify thousands of suspected immigrants it then issued detainers for in LA County jails. The lawsuit, filed in 2013, also alleged the jails held people who were incarcerated on detainers for more than 48 hours, which is the ceiling for holding under 287(g).

“When you’re asking about what the benchmark of effectiveness of a program is, it’s telling that a federal court found the practice of holding people on civil detainers past their criminal release date violated their rights and held the county financially accountable for doing that,” Inlender said.

Federal and local immigration enforcement partnerships greatly increased after former President Barack Obama significantly expanded the Secure Communities initiative in 2008, Arulanantham said. Former President George W. Bush launched the initiative in seven counties in 2008, and it expanded to 1,400 jurisdictions by June 2011 under the Obama administration.

Through Secure Communities, which former DHS secretary Jeh Johnson discontinued in 2014, the FBI automatically sent fingerprints of people held in law enforcement custody to DHS, according to ICE’s website. If the department determined a person was removable based on immigration status, ICE would seek to detain or deport them, per the website.

In 2017, Trump reinstated the initiative with Executive Order 13768, which former President Joe Biden revoked with a 2021 executive order.

“The concept was that any contact with state and local law enforcement provided an opportunity for state and local enforcement to enforce immigration laws,” Arulanantham said. “It didn’t matter whether the person was innocent or guilty, or the arrest was valid or not. If you encounter someone on the street, then you could enforce immigration law, so why not?”

Martinez said while sheriffs do not decide who goes to jail, he believes they are tasked with keeping “bad” people in custody. He added that ICE mostly detains people with criminal convictions in their home country.

ICE arrested almost nine times more people without prior criminal convictions in the six months following Trump’s inauguration than in the six months before, according to the Deportation Data Project.

Arulanantham said he believes modifications to the California Values Act permitting 287(g) are unlikely to pass the state legislature. However, he added that Martinez’s jail enforcement provision has a higher possibility of passing than other models of 287(g), because people generally have less sympathy for immigrants who have come into contact with law enforcement.

Inlender said she believes California civilians will reject 287(g) outright to protect their families and communities.

“There’s strong recognition of how harsh and unfair our immigration enforcement system is now,” she said. “The idea that we would spend our state and local resources to contribute to that is a tough pill to swallow.”