Immigration responsibilities in the United States are formally charged to a broad range of federal agencies, from the overseas screening of the State Department to the border patrols of the Department of Homeland Security. Yet in recent years, no department seems to have received more attention than that of the local police. For some, local police departments are frustrating our nation’s immigration laws by failing to fully participate in federal enforcement efforts. For others, it is precisely their participation that is a cause for concern. In response to these competing interests, a proliferation of competing state and federal laws have been enacted to restrict the kind of local law enforcement policies that can be established with respect to immigration enforcement.

This essay argues that as a means of defining the proper role of local police with respect to immigration, these restrictions on local policymaking is counterproductive. Rather than clarifying or standardizing local enforcement practices, these state and federal restrictions actually enhance individual police discretion at the expense of departmental supervision. By targeting local policies directly, these efforts undermine the supervisory relationship between line-level law officers and the departments they work for and the communities that they serve. As a result, the risk of police abuse is enhanced as local governments and police departments increasingly find it difficult to promulgate and enforce policies that would govern the conduct of their officers.