As nationwide immigration tensions flare, the first city police department in Idaho signs agreement with ICE

A North Idaho city police department is the first in the state to contract with ICE to help with federal immigration enforcement as fallout over President Donald Trump’s deportation strategies intensifies.

The Post Falls Police Department this month announced it had signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more technically known as a “287(g)” program, which allows city officers to enforce federal immigration law.

The city joins the program with the Idaho State Police and 10 county sheriff’s offices, ICE data shows. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached out to Idaho law enforcement in February of last year encouraging agencies to apply to the program, email records show.

Four officers and a captain will undergo 40 hours of ICE training to learn a federal computerized system to determine someone’s status and detain them if they are in the country without permission, said Post Falls police Capt. Brian Harrison, though 15 officers volunteered for the job – some of them being children of immigrants themselves who speak English as a second language.

Harrison said there have been instances where officers pull someone over with drug paraphernalia on them, the person tells them they are in the country without permission, and the police call border patrol agents. The department did not have the ability to “run checks” and “see where they’re at in the system,” he said. 

“Typically they’re a phone call away, but sometimes (they’re) not,” Harrison said. “(This agreement) is allowing us to tap into federal resources on that side … If we run them in the system and we see that (there’s an ICE warrant), then our officers, without ICE even needing to be present, can arrest them and transport them to jail on that detainer.”

The police department will front the cost of training during normal work hours, not overtime. ICE is expected to pick up the rest of the tab. The agency will cover the costs of the computers, their system access and IT-related expenses, Harrison said. A spokesperson for ICE did not respond for comment.

“We are proud to continue our partnership with federal law enforcement to keep our city safe and we reiterate our commitment to enforcing the law. This partnership advances these goals and strengthens our community,” Post Falls Mayor Randy Westlund said in a statement.

Kootenai County already has an agreement with ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and the U.S. Marshals to house federal detainees in their jail pending their transport to an immigration detention center. Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris has been outspoken about immigration in North Idaho, at one point equating Spanish speakers to being “illegal,” The Spokesman-Review previously reported.

Records obtained by The Spokesman-Review show the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reimbursed the Kootenai County Jail around $95,000 from August 2025, when the county sheriff signed up for the ICE program, to May 1 – although the jail has housed some federal detainees since 2024 under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, records show.

There are three prongs to the ICE program: One is the “jail enforcement model,” which allows local jails to hold noncitizens and immigrants while agents assess them; another is a “warrant” model, which allows agents to train local officers to carry out federal warrants; and the third is the “task force” model, which delegates local police and deputies to perform immigration agent duties.

Kootenai County began using the jail enforcement model and the warrant model in August, according to public records. The Post Falls Police Department will be using the warrant model, Harrison said.

The agreement with ICE comes as agents have recently killed two people, spurring mass protests across the country. ICE agents have killed eight people during Trump’s second term, two in the last two weeks. One was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man from Mexico living in Texas who had been in the U.S. for over 30 years and was not the target of the intended operation. The other was 25-year-old Colombian man Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, who was killed on Monday in Maine, the Washington Post reported.

“We have had two ICE-related deaths this week … So we would urge (Post Falls) to reassess what it means to be public servants,” said the executive director of PODER Idaho, Estefania Mondragón. PODER Idaho is a local immigrant advocacy organization founded in 2016.

Immigration arrests around the Inland Northwest and beyond have also stoked fears. One man arrested in Spokane at a laundromat was let go, The Spokesman-Review reported. Two legal asylum seekers were also arrested in June, despite their status, and held in a Tacoma detention center for months. A judge later determined they were illegally detained. Other immigrants with permission to be in the country across the nation have been illegally detained and waiting in detention centers for months. The experience is not new, though it is becoming more frequent as the federal government cracks down on deportations, PBS reported.

Harrison maintains the program with ICE is “not a roundup.”

“It’s not what you see on national news,” he said. “It’s just a resource for us to be able to access the database. It’s for us to run our own checks, to be autonomous, and to have the tool in our tool belt. It’s not us going door-to-door. It’s not going after somebody for the color of their skin. It’s just that if we come across somebody in the natural course of our duties, now we have the ability to log onto a computer and check and see if they’re here legally or not.”

Immigration violations are a civil matter, as a criminal court does not have jurisdiction over such issues. Police handling those issues makes it feel like the lines are blurred and leads to people associating immigrants more with criminals, Mondragón said.

And when that happens, she says, racial profiling can become more common.

“They might not be knocking on your doors, but they’re pulling you over,” she said. “Who are they pulling over? And are they pulling them over in a predominantly white community?”

Nearly 92% of Kootenai County is white, according to Census data. Nearly 87% of the city of Post Falls is also white. Idaho also has a sizable immigrant population, though mostly located in the southern half of the state and pales in comparison to other U.S. states. The immigrants who do reside in Idaho are key players in Idaho’s agricultural economy and pay millions in taxes each year, according to a study from the University of Idaho.

“This is an exaggeration by the government and an excuse to terrorize immigrant communities as opposed to doing law enforcement’s job. This actually makes people unsafe,” Mondragón said. “Because immigrant communities, whether they’re legal or not, won’t come to you for an emergency. The immigrant community won’t want to call the police anymore, and that makes us less safe.”

In March, Idaho attempted to pass multiple bills requiring local police and sheriff agencies to enter into the 287(g) agreements with ICE and report the number of noncitizens being investigated or apprehended. The effort was met with pushback from law enforcement in Ada County, Bonner County, Coeur d’Alene and others in North Idaho over creating additional work for the officers and involving the federal government in local issues, an issue most conservatives typically push back on.

“If someone we arrest and take to jail turns out to be in the country illegally, that isn’t for us to concern ourselves with,” Rathdrum Police Chief Dan Haley told The Spokesman-Review previously. “When I first got here, I made it clear that a victim is a victim, and to keep that in mind. Politics aside.”

While Harrison doesn’t believe agencies should be forced to do it, he does believe they should have the choice.

“What’s right here may not be right in Boise, and what’s right in Boise may not be right in Post Falls,” he said.

Other agencies that have entered into these programs have faced legal issues.

Arizona was the testing ground for the program in which local officers get authorized to perform federal immigration enforcement. Maricopa County faced significant auditing and monetary setbacks following a push to federalize their local deputies, according to a report from ProPublica.

Five Maricopa County residents sued the sheriff’s office for targeting them solely based on their race nearly 18 years ago. A judge later agreed the raids and stops on the county’s Hispanic neighborhoods violated their constitutional rights, the report states. A U.S. Department of Justice investigation and court-mandated reforms followed. As of 2024, the county has spent more than $39 million on the lawsuit’s settlement, ProPublica reported.

Harrison said in the agreement Post Falls has with ICE, the department has full supervision over their officers, not the other way around.

“The officers have to abide by our agency’s policies, our agency standards so on and so forth,” Harrison said. “Us being able to log in and not play a game of telephone … and then make our own determination using our own discretion, not someone else’s discretion, it gives us more control to be smart about this and to make sure we aren’t putting handcuffs on the wrong person.”

Mondragón believes having children of immigrants working for the police department may not help. Growing up in Idaho, she didn’t see any role models who looked like her. Some people carry that with them their entire lives, she said.

“We had to assimilate to a mainstream culture that didn’t like our otherness. I think because time has passed and we have progressed, there are folks that can be seen as successful and there are role models,” Mondragón said. “But some people in power that might have an immigrant background, I think a lot of them forget where they come from. We don’t have to assimilate anymore.