Last November, Azael Alvarez was driving around a neighborhood in southeastern Dallas when he noticed what appeared to be a group of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers surrounding a car at a gas station. Alvarez, an organizer with the group El Movimiento DFW (Dallas–Fort Worth), had been heavily involved in the fight against ICE in the city since the start of the second Trump administration.

As soon as he saw the masked agents, Alvarez pulled into the station and began recording the interaction. He noticed that a group of Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers was also present. When Alvarez asked the officers if they could verify that the masked men were from ICE, they said, “We don’t know [who they are] either.” As the suspected ICE agents detained at least one person, Alvarez asked the agents if they had a warrant, while DPD officers stood by watching. As police were driving off, an officer shouted, “Get a job!” in his direction.

The incident came in the midst of an ongoing debate about the relationship between local Dallas law enforcement and ICE. For the better part of a year, organizers, residents, and elected officials have called on the city’s leadership for accountability, transparency, and action in the face of the Trump administration’s pervasive mass-deportation drive.

The debate reached a fever pitch less than three weeks before the gas station incident, when Eric Johnson, the Republican mayor of Dallas, ordered a special meeting of two city hall committees to discuss whether the DPD should enter into an official agreement with ICE, under a federal program known as 287(g). (Johnson, whose lax approach to his job led the The Dallas Morning News to dub him “the mayor of Somewhere Else,” didn’t show up to the meeting.)

The 287(g) program can act as what ICE calls a “force multiplier” by delegating federal immigration enforcement responsibilities to local agencies. In other words, your local cop can effectively become your local ICE agent. There are various forms this delegation can take; the model favored by Johnson is known as the “task force model,” which gives local officers the “power and authority” to interrogate and detain immigrants or people they “believed” to be undocumented. Sarah Cruz, policy strategist with the ACLU of Texas, told The Nation that the task force model has a documented history of producing civil rights violations and runs the “risk of racial profiling, costly potential litigation, and the diversion of local resources to federal immigration enforcement.”

In 2012, ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ended 287(g) in part due to a string of lawsuits and investigations into agencies implementing the task force model. The most infamous abuses occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, where a DOJ investigation found that the Sheriff’s Department, deputized as ICE agents under 287(g), had been racially profiling and unlawfully stopping, detaining, and arresting people they perceived to be Latino. On top of the harrowing violence the sheriff and his officers inflicted upon the community, resulting litigation and settlements are expected to cost Maricopa taxpayers nearly $314 million.

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But the second Trump administration has enthusiastically brought the 287(g) program and the task force model back from the dead—and municipalities across the country are taking part. Over 1,700 agencies across almost 40 states have signed 287(g) agreements, mostly under the task force model. Including diverted federal agents and existing forces, local cops deputized by 287(g) give ICE an effective army of 50,000 to carry out mass deportations and terrorize communities. In Texas, a law that went into effect in January will force all of the state’s county sheriffs to enter into a task force agreement by the end of the year. The law, Senate Bill 8, will add sheriffs’ offices to the long list of agencies in Texas, such as the Department of Public Safety and Highway Patrol, that now have the power to separate parents from their children.

The proliferation of Trump’s deportation drive into local jurisdictions is being bolstered by the nearly $191 billion available to DHS from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. DHS has promised to fully reimburse agencies for the salary and benefits of each officer trained for immigration enforcement under 287(g). The department is also promising performance-based bonuses based on the number of deportations a partner agency conducts.

Across the country, local governments are increasingly leveraging their autonomy to curb ICE’s reach. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a directive ordering city officials to investigate and potentially prosecute federal agents. Los Angeles’s mayor barred the use of city-owned properties as “a staging area, processing location, or operations base for immigration enforcement.” But in Texas, where the state legislature is dominated by right-wing politicians who threaten lawfare against cities that decrease their police budgets or adopt “sanctuary” statutes, local governments face challenges to establish policies protecting their immigrant communities against ICE, even if they are largely symbolic. Texas’s 2017 anti-sanctuary law prevents local governments from creating policy that “prohibits or discourages the enforcement of immigration laws” and requires them to honor ICE detainers placed on immigrants in local jails.

In spite of this, the ACLU’s Cruz said that there are other ways, aside from enforcement, that local governments can support communities through the allocation of public funding. Harris and Bexar counties (where Texas’s largest cities of Houston and San Antonio are located, respectively) have allocated millions of dollars to support immigrants with legal costs. Dallas, a city where a quarter of the population is foreign-born and is all too familiar with the brutality of immigration enforcement, has yet to follow suit.

During the Biden administration, the Dallas regional area saw the most ICE arrests across the country by far—over 50,000 from 2021 to 2025. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the Dallas area has had the third-highest number of ICE arrests in the United States, trailing only the Miami and New Orleans areas, according to data released by the Deportation Data Project. Some of those arrests have had fatal consequences. On March 16, Dallas-area resident Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, died after being detained by ICE and held at the Dallas Field Office—an administrative facility that has received numerous reports of abuse, overcrowding, and medical neglect. While his cause of death is still under investigation, Paktiawal’s family and elected officials are raising concerns given that his death marks the third death of an immigrant at the field office in the past year.

But less than two weeks before the mayor’s no-show at the special meeting, Comeaux, the Dallas police chief, told the press that he had rejected an offer of $25 million from ICE to sign a 287(g) agreement—a drop in the bucket compared to the DPD’s $758 million annual budget. In a memo sent in advance of the special November meeting, the chief wrote that the program would “reassign officers under federal oversight, which could negatively impact response times and erode the public trust that our department has worked diligently to build.”

Mayor Johnson—who switched to the Republican Party in 2023 after serving one mayoral term as a Democrat, and who declared Dallas a “sanctuary city from socialism” after Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic primary win in New York City last June—immediately waded in. He tried to go over Comeaux’s head, asking the city council to “explore the potential benefits of participating in the 287(g) program” even though the decision was the chief’s and the city manager’s alone to make. The Dallas Morning News reported that the mayor had also privately met with ICE officials to discuss the possibility of police collaboration with the agency.

Changa Higgins, a board member on the Community Police Oversight Board (CPOB), the body that has heard concerns about police collaboration with ICE, told The Nation that Mayor Johnson was “following the agenda of his handlers in the Republican Party.” Higgins said that the mayor’s attempt to “force [the DPD] to take funds [from ICE]” by calling the emergency meeting “backfired on him, and actually helped the council have a more unified voice.”

After six hours of deliberation, and in a nearly unanimous defeat for the mayor-in-absentia, the committees rejected endorsing 287(g) after hearing over 60 community members speak in opposition to the program. Nearly every district in Dallas was represented in the slate of speakers, a feat stemming from intense organizing by immigrant rights groups. Alvarez, the organizer with El Movimiento DFW, said that though deportations “aren’t stopping completely,” the decision and turnout “gave us all hope.” While the police chief and city manager could decide to enter into the program in the future, Alvarez said that their organizing “shut down 287(g) and that’s a win we got to take.”

In spite of the council affirming the chief’s original decision, organizers and members of the CPOB are still looking for answers about the relationship between the DPD and federal immigration enforcement. In addition to the public debate about 287(g), several incidents throughout the latter half of 2025 have inspired demands for accountability and transparency on how and when the DPD collaborates with ICE. Dispatch logs reviewed by The Nation confirm that the DPD provided a perimeter for a mutli-agency operation involving ICE during a raid on a nightclub in Northeast Dallas on September 26. The raid resulted in the arrest of 41 undocumented immigrants for “suspected human trafficking and unlawful employment.”

Dallas residents have also voiced concerns about the DPD’s ability to verify whether masked agents wearing bulletproof vests claiming to be federal authorities are who they say they are, in part driven by the gas station incident that Alvarez documented last November. When probed by the CPOB, assistant chief of police Israel Herrera said that Dallas police officers “do not have to” confirm the identity of ICE agents. In response, the CPOB sent a memo to the DPD on January 7, 2026, requesting data on ICE-related encounters and clarification on the training officers receive “related to immigration-related situations or arrests.”

A week later, Chief Comeaux refused to provide the board with the requested information. “We will cooperate and assist the federal government whenever they’re doing any legal actions,” Comeaux told the board. The chief justified his decision by wanting to protect the safety of his police officers given what he called the “climate” of “violence throughout the United States,” ostensibly referring to the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis the week prior.

Brandon Friedman, who was appointed to the CPOB in 2021 and has been a vocal critic of the federal government’s war on immigrants, told The Nation that the chief’s decision was “disappointing.” Friedman said “the right thing to do here is to not collaborate with a federal law enforcement agency that is masked, unidentifiable, behaving lawlessly, and has already murdered two people,” referencing the killings of Good and of Alex Pretti, who was shot by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis two weeks after Good.

Though the chief continues to skirt demands for accountability and the mayor abruptly went quiet on his enthusiastic bid for ICE, Higgins said that the debate has brought the question of policing back to the forefront in the fight against ICE. “Imagine if this country had taken seriously the demands from the Black community around policing. Imagine if those laws had been enacted around accountability for brutality and for police murders, it would have made it harder for this administration to do the kind of things that they’re doing.” With the spectacular mobilization of federal agents across the country to airports and cities on Trump’s list, Higgins said that the fight to slow the expansion of institutions of state violence like ICE or the police must be focused locally. “When you let your local police powers go unchecked,” Higgins told The Nation, “it sets the stage for ICE.”

Chief Comeaux and other city officials have pointed to state law and the threat of national guard deployment by the federal administration as reasons why Dallas shouldn’t make too much noise about ICE. “Every time we do something like this, we’re bringing more attention to Dallas,” Comeaux said at an October police oversight board meeting, referring to attempts to probe ICE’s relationship with the DPD. “We don’t need that attention. We don’t want to deal with that smoke.”

However, doing nothing—per the chief’s wishes—hasn’t stopped the proverbial smoke from coming to Dallas. On April 16, Texas Governor Greg Abbott threatened to pull around $200 million in funding from Dallas, Austin, and Houston for having policies that allegedly prohibit police cooperation with ICE. In Dallas, the governor pointed to policy that has existed since at least the first Trump administration that states that DPD officers “may, but are not required to, volunteer information about a lawfully detained or arrested person’s immigration status with ICE.” Governor Abbott threatened to pull over $87 million in public-safety funding awarded to the city.

While the mayors of Austin and Houston criticized the governor’s attack, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson has so far kept quiet (the Mayor’s Office did not respond to a request for comment). Party for Socialism and Liberation member Haley Hill said that city leaders should be “disgusted” with Abbott’s “dangerous ultimatum,” and that they “must choose which side they’re on.” Abbott gave the city a deadline of April 23 to “ensure” full compliance, and the DPD followed by excising policies that prohibited officers from arresting “an individual because he or she is undocumented” and prolonging the detention of an individual to investigate their immigration status or “hold them for federal authorities.”

In a statement posted to Instagram, the North Texas Immigration Coalition said that the amendments “put the rights of all Dallas residents at risk” who “should not have their safety and dignity held hostage to the political maneuvers of Governor Abbott.” The coalition called on city leadership to “ensure that community voices, not state coercion, shape the future of public safety.” While the coalition demanded “solutions that guarantee transparency, oversight and accountability” to strengthen the “trust between the City and its immigrant residents,” the city’s top official, Mayor Johnson, was busy ringing the Opening Bell on Wall Street in his long-standing ploy to court New York City’s corporate class to move South to Dallas—or “Y’all Street” as he pathetically calls the city. After activists have exhausted virtually every withered mechanism of municipal autonomy trying to put up guardrails against ICE and the DPD swiftly caved to the governor’s manipulation, Dallas is left wondering whether its leadership will meet the moment or be stuck, literally and figuratively, “Somewhere Else.”