How have state laws mandating local cooperation with ICE changed arrest volumes in Florida, Texas and California since 2020?
Executive summary
States that have enacted laws or policies compelling local law-enforcement cooperation with ICE—most notably Texas and Florida—have seen markedly higher volumes of ICE arrests since 2020 than jurisdictions that limit cooperation, a pattern driven largely by jail-origin transfers, 287(g) deputizations, and state-run enforcement programs [1] [2] [3]. California’s restrictions on local transfers and sanctuary protections have shifted ICE toward more “at‑large” street operations and produced far fewer jail-origin arrests per capita compared with Texas and Florida, producing stark state-to-state differences in arrest volumes [2] [4].
1. Law and policy as the lever: mandating cooperation raises jail-origin arrests
When state law requires or heavily incentivizes local agencies to honor ICE detainers or deputize officers under 287(g), ICE is able to convert routine local arrests into immigration custody much more often, and those handoffs have powered the bulk of interior enforcement; analysts estimate that 70–75% of interior ICE arrests are handoffs from another law-enforcement agency, a pipeline amplified where states mandate cooperation [5] [1]. Florida’s universal sheriff agreement posture and Texas’s statutory requirements have translated into high volumes of transfers from jails into ICE custody, with reporting showing Florida’s local jails accounting for a large share of state arrests and more than half of Texas’s ICE arrests coming from local jails since 2024–2025 [6] [7] [2].
2. Instruments of escalation: 287(g), detainers, and state facilities
The practical tools that turn mandates into numbers are concrete: 287(g) memoranda deputize local officers to act for ICE, detainers request that local jails hold people beyond release for ICE pickup, and state-built detention capacity lets states and feds process larger flows; Florida alone led the nation in active or pending 287(g) agreements as of mid‑2025, and the state opened a dedicated detention site (Alligator Alcatraz) to house transfers—both developments that expand ICE’s capacity to make and process arrests [8] [3] [6].
3. The Texas case: Operation Lone Star and a surge in jail pickups
Texas’s combination of statutory mandates, a long-running Operation Lone Star enforcement program, and substantial detention and transfer activity produced some of the highest arrest counts in the country, with reporting showing Texas leading national tallies in 2025 and a disproportionate share of arrests originating in jails and via 287(g) cooperation [2] [3]. Independent analyses find that for every 20 jail-origin arrests in Texas, fewer than one comparable jail-origin arrest occurred in California, underscoring how the legal obligation to cooperate correlates with large differences in arrest volumes [4].
4. Florida’s pipeline: near-universal local cooperation, rapid increases
Florida’s statewide posture—reportedly with nearly all sheriffs signing cooperation agreements and only a handful of detainers declined during key periods—created a reliable pipeline for ICE pickups that produced sharp increases in transfers and detainers compared with national trends, and media and policy analyses rank Florida among the states with the steepest upticks in ICE arrests since 2020 [6] [1] [8].
5. California’s counterpoint: fewer jail-origin arrests, more at‑large operations
California’s statutory and local restrictions on transfers and cooperation have reduced ICE’s access to detention populations, which has kept jail-origin arrest counts comparatively low and pushed ICE toward episodic street operations and at-large arrests; multiple analyses report that California experienced far fewer transfers from local jails and a different arrest profile than Texas or Florida, even while California still registered substantial absolute arrest totals due to its large population [2] [4] [9].
6. What the numbers mean, and what they don’t prove
The correlation between mandated cooperation and higher ICE arrest volumes is robust across multiple datasets and expert accounts—cooperation creates a convenient, high-throughput pathway for federal arrests—but causation is complex: ICE also concentrates resources where immigrant populations are dense and where the agency prioritizes operations, and national surges in agent staffing and federal policy changes since 2021 amplify the effect of state-level rules [10] [11] [3]. Available reporting documents clear state-to-state divergences but does not fully disentangle how much of the increase is driven by federal resource allocation versus state legal mandates alone, a limitation in current public analyses [1] [5].