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Only the federal government can grant amnesty. But cities and counties can effectively opt to stop deportationsand increasingly, they are.

Jim Young/Reuters

States and cities are taking immigration reform into their own hands. With prospects for comprehensive legislation bleak in Washington, local governments have begun making decisions about who gets deported and who doesnt by refusing to participate in a system that has come to rely on them. After a few years of slow but steady progress, local reform is now taking off.

In the last three weeks, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver, and counties in Oregon, Colorado, Washington, and California have announced they will no longer help federal immigration police carry out deportations. These decisions, spurred by recent federal-court rulings, add to the growing chorus of state and local governments that have recently backed away from the deportation system: dozens of major cities and counties, two states, and counting.

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This movement is a big deal, because local jails have become the frontline for immigration enforcement during the Obama Administration. As the wait for administrative action from the White House continues, local resistance is already stopping thousands of deportations every month. Even if Congress is able to pass a comprehensive reform bill, the current wave of local policy changes and judicial decisions will have altered the structure of immigration enforcement by making it much harder for federal officials to rely on local police and sheriffs. National reform is still crucial. But once you understand the depths of federal-local collaborationand the recent pattern of resistanceits clear that the backbone of the immigration-enforcement dragnet is starting to weaken. Pushback is coming from places with some of the largest undocumented populations, and yet many outside the immigration policy world have overlooked it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leans heavily on local law enforcement to help identify and arrest deportable immigrants. Every day, ICE sends local jails across the country thousands of detainers, which are requests to hold people after theyve bailed out, been acquitted, or served their sentences, to give ICE time to pick them up. The agency also uses local jails to identify potential candidates for deportation. Through a program called Secure Communities, jails send fingerprints to ICE after every arrest nationwide, which led the agency to identify more than 1.5 million people between 2009 and 2013. Less well known but perhaps more consequential is the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), in which ICE agents interrogate foreign-born inmates in local jails. Between 2007 and 2011, CAP facilitated 2.5 million such interrogations. If either Secure Communities or CAP leads ICE to think a person could be deported, the agency issues a detainer to facilitate their arrest.

These federal-local programs have been crucial to the sharp rise in deportations in recent years. Federal agents cant police every corner of the country, but local law enforcement can. (One supportive scholar calls local police a massive force multiplier.) The impact has been powerful. The Obama Administration is on pace to deport more immigrants than any before it. (Recent statistical quibbling should not obscure that fact. While removal orders through immigration courts are down, thats largely because of new strategies to deport people without a hearing before an immigration judge.) More than 300,000 of the 2 million people deported under Obama were identified through Secure Communities, a number that doesnt even account for CAP.

The governments that are now refusing detainer requests have identified a number of problems with participating in immigration enforcement. For one, deportations in recent years have expanded in arbitrary ways. ICE has used local governments to help deport record numbers of immigrants with no criminal records or only extremely minor offenses, despite professing an intention to devote its limited resources to violent criminals and other public-safety threats. Many of these deportees have U.S. citizen children and would have a path to legal status under a bill the President supports. Relying on jails might seem to zero in on criminals, but in practice, that has largely not been the result. In racing to meet its apparent 400,000-per-year target, ICE has swept up any and all who come into contact with the criminal-justice system, including victims, witnesses, and others who should not have been arrested in the first place. There is also evidence that connecting immigration consequences to normal law enforcement encourages racial profiling.

Another consequence of local collaboration has been to effectively remove police protection from many immigrant communities: Crime victims dont call the police when local officers carry the banner of immigration enforcement. Anyone who is fingerprinted can end up on ICEs radar through Secure Communities, and every foreign-born person who enters a jail can be interrogated through CAP. Domestic-violence victims, who are often erroneously arrested alongside the perpetrator, have been particularly vulnerable. As many law-enforcement officials have now pointed out, the public-safety consequences can be dire.

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How Local Governments Are Hacking Immigration Reform