Last week, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced that West Virginia is now participating in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program, which will allow the National Guard and local police to enforce certain immigration laws.
Fox News called this one of the most “wide-ranging agreements” a state has forged with ICE under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The 287(g) program was discontinued in 2012 after a Department of Justice investigation found widespread racial profiling and other discrimination against Latinos by an Arizona task force, Stateline reported.
Although West Virginia is nearly 1,500 miles away from the U.S. southern border, Morrisey said during a press conference that the state has “effectively become a border state.” He also blamed the people entering the country illegally for “unlimited amounts of fentanyl flooding into our state.”
The majority of fentanyl is smuggled into the country by people who can enter the U.S. legally, according to the American Immigration Council.
Fewer than half of people arrested by ICE since Trump took office are actually convicted criminals and only 5% were arrested for drug crimes nationally. So either ICE is doing a terrible job, or immigrants aren’t the problem.
The Deportation Data Project reported earlier this month that 1 in 5 ICE arrests are of Latinos with no criminal past or removal order. A substantial portion of ICE arrests this year were a result of illegal profiling. Basically, people are being arrested for having brown skin.
If your argument for ICE is that people should enter the country legally, then shouldn’t ICE be only using legal methods to arrest people?
The legal route for ICE to make an arrest would be if a suspect was arrested first by local police and found to be in the country illegally. Raiding Japanese and Mexican restaurants or hanging out at Home Depot and Lowes is not the legal way.
In July, a court in California ordered ICE to stop using these methods to arrest people in the Los Angeles area, and an appeals court upheld that order. Since then, street arrests went down by 83%.
ICE’s illegal profiling has also resulted in numerous U.S. citizens and legal immigrants being arrested.
Morrisey’s move will result in your friends, neighbors and co-workers being profiled and arrested for not passing as white. In Alabama, a man was tackled at his worksite and ICE officers said his REAL ID was fake. It wasn’t. A man in California was detained for three days, despite being a legal citizen. A woman in Los Angeles was grabbed by ICE agents moments after her family dropped her off for work — witnesses said they never even asked to see her ID.
West Virginia has a small number of immigrants — only about 2% of the population, but they also account for 18% of employees in farming, fishing and forestry occupations, and 11% in science occupations, such as microbiologists, biochemists and epidemiologists.
Immigrants contribute a lot to West Virginia. In 2023, they paid $450.3 million in taxes. And thanks to immigrants, our population loss was less severe than it would have been without them.
As of 2018, about 52% of immigrants in the Mountain State had gone through the long process to become legal U.S. citizens. And about 42% of adult immigrants had a college degree or higher that same year — compared to 19.6% of West Virginians.
There are many reasons people choose to migrate to the United States without going through the proper channels — crime, violence, war or simply to build a better life — but our immigration policy has made it harder and harder for people to immigrate here legally.
Immigrants aren’t the enemy that Trump’s administration is trying to paint them to be. Immigrants are not causing problems in West Virginia. Maybe it’s time Morrisey remembered that West Virginia was settled by immigrants and be grateful they still want to live here.
