Florida’s Miami-Dade Sheriff’s office arrested 7 undocumented migrants between April and June of this year and will be paid $14.5 million in reimbursements from U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. These payments are made by the DHS nationwide task force, formerly known as the 287(g) program, which is simply the name for the relevant section added in 1996 to the Immigration and Nationality Act. Since January, 2025, DHS has distributed at least $200 million in this program and there is a total of $4 billion in allocated funding. A stated goal of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is to make federal agents “as invisible as possible,” and this program has local police take a more high-profile role.
To qualify, a state or local law enforcement agency merely needs to participate in the task force, and enroll its police or sheriff’s deputies. After the local agency delivers a single migrant to federal authorities, the DHS will pay $60,000 per year for each officer enrolled in the program. These payments continue regardless of any additional arrests, so long as the local agency continues to participate in the national task force. The bigger the agency, the bigger the payout. Consider that the smallest of police departments find that the federal reimbursements for a single arrest could equal one-third or one-fourth of their entire annual budget.
One requirement in the program is that state and local agencies never reveal the number of arrests that they make, nor the amount of DHS funding that they receive without having prior permission from the DHS. According to the Journal, the DHS has refused to disclose the amount of money it has distributed under this program. The formula, however, that DHS uses to calculate its reimbursements is published on its website. The Journal includes an audio clip, which it identifies as from a Florida Highway Patrol officer joking, during an immigration arrest, that the officer could “smell” the “$30,000 bonus” that he will receive from this arrest.
