WaPo: Sheriffs ‘Enthusiastic’ About Helping Deport Illegal Immigrants

American sheriffs around the country are “enthusiastic” to work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to help deport criminal illegal aliens, according to a new report.

A Washington Post piece describes the vast majority of sheriffs across the U.S. as being aligned with President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement measures:

A week ago Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that any city that refuses to share information with the federal government about immigrants could lose federal funding. Called sanctuary cities and states, these geographic entities resisting the Trump administration’s efforts to increase immigration enforcement have gotten a great deal of news coverage.

But what about their opposites — the local governments eager to enforce the new immigration mandates? County sheriffs, who are largely elected via popular vote, play an important and often ignored role in immigration enforcement — and are more likely to support federal enforcement efforts than comparable local officials.

According to Mirya Holman with Tulane University and Emily Farris of Texas Christian University, 85 percent of sheriffs believe there should be more federal money spent on enforcing immigration and closing the U.S.-Mexico Border.

About 70 percent of sheriffs said they supported law enforcement being able to ask about a person’s immigration status.

Although American sheriffs prefer Trump’s immigration enforcement measures, the researchers found that they did not hold views that were personally directed towards immigrants, themselves.

While immigration arrests of criminal illegal aliens continue to rise under Trump thus far, the number of sheriffs signing onto federal-local agreements to cooperate with federal immigration agents has increased as well.

In sanctuary jurisdictions, like the New York City, the NYPD released nearly 180 criminal illegal aliens back onto the streets in the first four months of 2017, Breitbart Texas reported.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.