Doddridge County Sheriff Clinton Boring committed his department to work on behalf of President Trump’s deportation campaign in February, though he didn’t expect to see many immigrants, legal or not. He had his sights on new squad cars.
“I honestly don’t think there are any Hispanics that live in Doddridge,” said Boring, whose West Virginia jurisdiction has about 7,600 residents. Even so, he added, “When you get an opportunity to get possibly $100,000 for equipment or vehicles, that’s a no-brainer.”
Within six months, he said, the Doddridge County Sheriff’s Office detained two people living in the U.S. illegally and received more than $137,000 in federal funds.
Even if Boring’s deputies don’t take any others into custody, his department is eligible for a payment equal to more than a quarter of its annual budget. Those are the terms of a Department of Homeland Security task force program that enlists local police as paid partners in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Jurisdictions similar to Doddridge County—sparsely populated with few immigrants—make up the majority of new recruits to the DHS task force program, which has become a cash cow for state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide. After turning over a single deportable immigrant, departments qualify to receive $60,000 a year for each deputized officer, regardless of additional arrests.
The Venice Police Department in Venice, Fla., tallied one federal immigration detention in September 2025 and has since requested a total of $895,000. The department can continue collecting funds every quarter as long as it remains on the task force.
The program is most profitable for large departments. The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office in Florida signed up more than 970 deputies, making it eligible for roughly $14.5 million in DHS funds from April to June, state records show. That pencils out to more than $2 million for each of its seven immigration arrests in that quarter.
DHS has distributed more than $200 million to its law enforcement partners from January 2025 to Aug. 1, according to a Trump administration official. There is plenty more where that came from: The Trump administration has earmarked $1 billion from Congress. In addition, the Justice Department this summer announced $3 billion in grants to state and local governments that cooperate on immigration enforcement.
More than 1,800 law enforcement agencies signed up for the task force since Trump revived the program in his second term. Those agencies include state police, county sheriff and local police departments, state wildlife agencies and even state auditors.
DHS requires local and state agencies to get its permission to disclose the number of arrests they make or how much federal money they are eligible to receive. DHS declined to release those figures for any of the participating agencies. The Journal used DHS’s published funding formula to calculate eligible reimbursement amounts; 14 agencies in five states confirmed those findings.
Under the Trump administration, the DHS program has yielded fewer than one in ten immigration arrests nationwide, about 46,500 of around 576,000 from January 2025 through July 2026, according to an analysis of government data by The Wall Street Journal.
Law enforcement agencies serving communities with few immigrants are eligible for the same per-officer pay as those with many immigrants. In West Virginia, where 14 agencies have joined the task force since February, only about 1% of the workforce is immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
California and New York, among the states with the largest immigrant populations, bar local police from joining the DHS program.
A DHS spokesperson said agencies become eligible for reimbursement only after an ICE-directed enforcement action, such as an apprehension or serving a warrant, and they must show “continued performance” to receive quarterly funding.
Agencies in the program aren’t obligated to request the federal money.
Boring said he won’t ask for any more funds until his deputies deliver another arrest. “I’m an old country boy,” he said. “If you sign up to do a job, then you do that job. If you don’t do that job, you don’t get paid.”
Billion-dollar bonanza
Boring would have normally shied away from the red tape of joining a federal program, he said, but the DHS task force program was too good to pass up. Passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill by Congress last summer set aside $1 billion for the partnership programs, making it more enticing. DHS set limited requirements to enroll officers: They must have two years of law enforcement experience and complete an online training course.
A stretch of U.S. 50 that bisects Doddridge County proved invaluable for Boring’s budget. He said the federally funded highway, which runs from West Sacramento, Calif., to Ocean City, Md., yielded two immigration arrests after traffic stops by his deputies.
The sheriff, now awaiting the delivery of two new squad cars that will be paid for with DHS funds, couldn’t be happier.
The partnership arrangement was created in 1996 and became known as 287(g), named for its section in the Immigration and Nationality Act. The law offers state and local jurisdictions three paid roles in immigration enforcement: serving federal warrants, holding people in jails for immigration violations and detaining people eligible for deportation through the task force program.
The Obama administration shelved the task force program in 2012 after Justice Department investigations found that local sheriff’s deputies in Arizona’s Maricopa County and North Carolina’s Alamance County disproportionately detained and arrested Latino drivers, including U.S. citizens, for minor violations or without cause.
The Trump administration reversed course in January 2025, and now about 80% of the local agencies participating in DHS partnerships are in the task force program.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was among the first governors to require state and county law enforcement to join the DHS task force program. Texas and Georgia passed similar mandates for their county sheriffs. DeSantis sweetened the deal with $250 million in state funding for participating agencies, including those outside state control.
Deciding how to spend the federal funds is left largely to each department. The sheriff’s office in Lee County, Fla., spent $181,784 on Axon Tasers and $103,215 for 26 laptops. The department also bought a new transport van.
Traffic stops are a central tool for immigration arrests in the three most productive task force states—Florida, Texas and Oklahoma. Highway patrol troopers make the bulk of the stops in those states, either for apparent infractions or based on a tip from DHS.
Participating officers contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement to determine whether someone is in the U.S. illegally before taking them into custody, an ICE spokesperson said.
The Florida Highway Patrol took more than 8,300 immigrants into custody since August 2025, the largest number of any single agency in the U.S., according to a Journal analysis of state records and federal immigration data. The agency was eligible for nearly $26 million from April through June.
‘As invisible as possible’
Violence during traffic stops drew national attention this year after the fatal shooting of Renee Good in January and videos showing federal agents breaking car windows and yanking drivers out of vehicles.
Days after the Good shooting, a Journal investigation identified 13 instances of immigration agents firing at or into civilian vehicles, leaving at least eight people injured and two shot dead during the first year of Trump’s second term. At least five of those victims were U.S. citizens.
In June, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin urged sheriffs to join the DHS task force program so federal agents could “be as invisible as possible” during their patrols, he said at a National Sheriffs Association conference.
With more police and sheriff’s deputies joining immigration enforcement, “we’re not in the streets arresting these individuals,” Mullin said. “You guys are simply picking them up for a traffic stop.”
In July, after two fatal shootings by federal officers in Houston and Biddeford, Maine, Mullin suspended traffic stops by ICE. President Trump overruled the decision a day later. Last month, an ICE officer shot and wounded a Venezuelan DoorDash delivery driver in Texas.
A Journal review of bystander videos from Florida showed state and local officers deployed tactics similar to their federal counterparts during traffic stops, using Tasers and chokeholds and breaking vehicle windows.
Florida Highway Patrol officers pulled over Kenny Laynez, a U.S. citizen who was en route to a landscaping job with his mother and two co-workers. Officers called Customs and Border Protection agents for backup. Laynez recorded a CBP officer firing a Taser at a co-worker as officers pinned the man to the ground.
“Just remember you can smell that too, with a $30,000 bonus,” an unidentified officer said moments later.
Laynez and the two other passengers were taken into custody by federal immigration agents. Laynez was later released.
Neither DHS nor the Florida Highway Patrol responded to questions about the arrest or the comment by an officer about a “$30,000 bonus.”
METHODOLOGY
Write to Brenna T. Smith at brenna.smith@wsj.com, Marianne LeVine at marianne.levine@wsj.com, Jack Gillum at jack.gillum@wsj.com, Ashley Cai at ashley.cai@wsj.com and Annie Ng at annie.ng@wsj.com