From Sheriff's Deputies to Immigration Officers: Screening Immigrant Status in a Tennessee Jail

This article contributes to emerging literature documenting the devolution of immigration enforcement authority by focusing on the implementation of the 287(g) program in Davidson County, Tennessee. It outlines how deputized immigration officers do their work as well as the ways they come to think about their roles in the larger immigration bureaucracy. Immigration officers see themselves as objective administrators whose primary responsibilities are to identify and process immigrants for removal, but who are not responsible for their subsequent deportation. While immigration officers never waiver about their obligation to uphold the rule of law, alternate narratives emerge depending on how they feel about the immigrants they encounter. These frames range from pride at identifying “criminal aliens” to guilt for processing immigrants who had been arrested for very minor violations. Ultimately, this work shows deputized immigration officers act as extensions of the federal government rather than as independent agents.


I. INTRODUCTION
This article seeks to shed light on the local implementation of a 287(g) program, a federal policy that permits state, county, or city officers and employees to perform the functions of federal immigration officers in Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee. 1 The 287(g) program is a primary example of the devolution of immigration authority from the federal bureaucracy to county and municipal agencies. Thus, the implementation of 287(g) represents a massive effort, not just on the part of federal bureaucrats who have traditionally controlled immigration, but also by localities across the country where federally deputized officers screen immigration status.
The 287(g) program provides a rich case with which to study policy implementation and contributes to two important areas of research and theory. First, it draws from existing research about how or if administrative discretion is deployed by frontline immigration personnel (Ellermann 2005(Ellermann , 2009Fuglerud 2004;Wells 2004;van der Leun 2003;Calavita 2000Calavita , 1992Gilboy 1991). Second, it contributes to the growing body of literature focusing on the rescaling of immigration enforcement away from the federal government and the nation's borders to subnational authorities and the nation's interior (Varsanyi 2008a;Coleman 2007). By focusing on the frontline officers to whom enforcement is delegated, we can understand how nonfederal bureaucrats produce and reproduce the authority of the state (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2001). Specifically, how do county employees interpret their roles as deputized immigration officers?
Data come from a variety of sources, including interviews, observations of meetings at the sheriff's office, and news articles. I rely heavily on in-depth interviews with deputized immigration officers in the Davidson County Sheriff's Office (DCSO) and their supervisors.
The article is organized as follows. First, I provide an overview of policy changes that allowed for increased local authority in immigration enforcement as well as the specific local context in which my study takes place. Next, I examine how deputized immigration officers explain their work and how they link their roles as local deputies to the goals of the 287(g) program and the larger societal context. I show that immigration officers see themselves as objective administrators whose primary responsibilities are to process and identify immigrants for status but who are not implicated in the deportation process. While immigration officers never waiver about their obligation to uphold the rule of law, alternate frames emerge depending on how they feel about the immigrants they encounter. These frames range from pride at identifying "criminal aliens" to guilt for processing immigrants who were arrested for very minor violations. Ultimately, this work shows that despite the great deal of concern about localities creating de facto policies and implementing laws as they please, the 287(g) program in Davidson County is tightly controlled by the federal government, and immigration officers act as extensions of the state rather than as autonomous actors.

A. CHANGES IN THE POLICY AND ENFORCEMENT LANDSCAPE
Many scholars identify 1996 as a watershed year when the "criminalization" of immigration law began (Stumpf 2006;Miller 2002). That year, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996) made noncitizens who had previously committed misdemeanor crimes eligible for deportation. Changes to immigration law also allowed for greater cooperation between federal immigration enforcement and local and state law enforcement through the 287(g) provision. Although not immediately implemented, 287(g) represented a blurring of immigration enforcement boundaries. Historically, local enforcement agencies enforced only criminal violations of immigration law, while federal agencies enforced both civil and criminal violations. 2 In 2002, reversing their previous position, a Department of Justice memo (U.S. Office of the Assistant Attorney General 2002) announced that states have the "inherent authority" to enforce civil provisions of immigration law. That year, the state of Florida signed the country's first 287(g) agreement after officials learned several 9/11 hijackers had lived in the state.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) created three types of 287(g) programs that state and local law enforcement agencies could adopt: a jail model, a task force model, and a hybrid model. The jail model, which is the focus of this article, allows trained officers to check whether foreignborn arrestees are in the United States legally. While the jail model only involves checking the immigration status of people who have been arrested on state or local charges and taken to jail, the task force model allows trained officers to check the legal presence of anyone they encounter during the course of their duties. Lastly, the hybrid model allows participating agencies to do both jail and task force immigration enforcement.
The 287(g) program is just one of the many initiatives operated through ICE's Office of State and Local Coordination. ICE also cooperates with local law enforcement agencies through the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) and Secure Communities, both resulting in immigration screenings at state, county, and municipal jails. Post-9/11, the nation's interior has emerged as a new space to police immigrants, increasingly by local and state actors who previously had no power to enforce immigration law (Coleman 2007).
The numerous programs through which immigrants are deported stems from the expansion of the immigration detention infrastructure throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Thus, in addition to for-profit private detention facilities, and their own federal detention facilities, ICE pays municipalities to house detainees in local jails and transport detainees between detention centers through intergovernmental service agreements. By 2009, an estimated 300,000 deportable immigrants were housed in detention facilities nationwide, and over 60 percent of them arrived in immigrant detention after local arrests resulted in immigration checks at federal, state, or county jails (Schriro 2009). Detainees remain in custody until they are released, bonded and paroled, or deported from the United States (Hernandez 2008).
Concurrent with the devolution of immigration authority from federal to local agencies, we have also seen the emergence of immigration policymaking at multiple levels of government, called immigration federalism (Motomura 1999). Convinced that the federal government is not doing enough to curtail unauthorized migration, attempts to regulate immigration have trickled down to state, county, and municipal governments (Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010;Chavez andProvine 2009). Hopkins (2010) finds that local anti-immigrant policies are most likely to emerge in communities that experienced a sudden growth in the immigrant population and when national rhetoric about immigration is most salient and threatening. In Pennsylvania, a town of 22,000 people grabbed national headlines for its Illegal Immigration Relief Act (2006), which sought to punish employers who hire undocumented immigrants and landlords who rent to them. Arizona's Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (2010), more commonly known as SB 1070, sought to require Arizona police officers to check an individual's immigration status if officers suspected the person might be in the country without status. Courts struck down these local immigration policies because of federal preemption, holding that the federal government has the exclusive authority to control immigration. However, states have continued to pass restrictive immigration laws. In June 2011, Alabama passed a state law that makes it a crime to give unauthorized immigrants a ride, requires police to detain people they suspect are unlawfully present in the United States, and requires public schools to determine the status of students.

B. FRONTLINE WORKERS, BUREUACRACY, AND IMMIGRANTS
Understanding how officials in bureaucratic agencies make decisions has been a topic of import for socio-legal scholars for decades. Rather than focus on the government elites who create policy, Lipsky (1980) famously argued that street-level bureaucrats, although regarded as low-level workers, should also be considered policymakers. According to Lipsky (1980), understanding street-level bureaucrats is important because they are most peoples' point of contact with the government and they "make policy" through their "relatively high degrees of discretion and relative autonomy from organizational authority" (13).
Scholars have examined how front-line workers execute their administrative duties in varied settings, including how police officers patrol the streets (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003) or how welfare workers provide services to clients after welfare reform (Meyers, Glaser, and MacDonald 1998). Recently, scholars have turned their attention to how bureaucrats respond to the presence of immigrants (see Marrow 2009;Jones-Correa 2007;Lewis and Ramakrishnan 2007;van der Leun 2003), especially in light of increased local pressure to deny services to the unauthorized. In the Netherlands, van der Leun (2003) describes variability in how employees in different sectors implement national policies toward unauthorized migrants. For example, police officers who worked in immigration enforcement were selective and pragmatic about whom to detain and deport. Moreover, workers in education and health sectors found loopholes in the law and provided services to undocumented immigrants, contradicting policy directives.
Others have turned their attention more specifically to the immigration enforcement bureaucracy by examining how administrative discretion is deployed by officials implementing the Chinese Exclusion Act (Calavita 2000), airport inspectors regulating entry (Gilboy 1991), and deportation officers making decisions about whom to return to their countries of origin (Ellermann 2005(Ellermann , 2009. While often immigration enforcement is imagined as being executed by some monolithic state, these studies illustrate how frontline workers apply regulations on entry and exit. Research suggests that employees in the federal immigration bureaucracy are constrained in their ability to enforce immigration policies. For example, although U.S. immigration investigators are motivated to do their job because of their strong orientation as law enforcement officers (Weissinger 1996), employees in the immigration bureaucracy are sometimes ineffective because they are given conflicting and unclear policy directives (Magaña 2003). Wells (2004) shows how informal agreements between city officials and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) employees 3 resulted in practices that were less restrictive than mandated federal policies. Specifically, after immigration raids outraged the local community, city officials and INS officers made informal agreements after which INS narrowed its enforcement efforts to those with felony convictions (ibid.). Ellermann (2009) documents variation in the capacity of bureaucrats to deport migrants and argues that lack of implementation is a result of incapacity rather than unwillingness. For instance, in Germany, where immigration bureaucrats are more insulated from external pressures than in the United States, deportation officers face fewer hurdles when implementing deportation policy (ibid.).
The devolution of immigration authority from the federal bureaucracy to nonfederal law enforcement agencies necessitates examining immigration enforcement from the bottom up to understand the behavior of new actors and their roles in the enforcement regime. Decker et al. (2009) found that police departments reported substantial variation when surveyed about the circumstances under which they would inquire about individual's immigration status. Variation was largest in places where neither the police department nor the city had an official immigration policy for officers to follow (ibid.). A study of three cities in the Phoenix area described how antisolicitation ordinances (ordinances that prohibit day laborers from seeking employment) resulted in immigration policing "through the back door" (Varsanyi 2008b, 29). Thus, not only are more local law enforcement agencies involved in immigration enforcement through federally authorized programs like 287(g), but the evolving immigration enforcement landscape has also led to de facto immigration policing.

C. BACKGROUND AND METHODS
This article focuses on the politics and policy implementation of the 287(g) program in Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee. Over the last twenty years, Latino population growth in the South has exploded, with most Latinos in the South concentrated in metropolitan areas (Neal and Bohon 2003). Between 2000 and 2010, Davidson County's Latino population grew from 4.5 percent of the population to 9.8 percent (Haas and Echegaray 2011).
The origins of 287(g) in Nashville stem from several high-profile cases with unauthorized immigrant assailants. The most infamous occurred in July 2006, when an undocumented drunk driver with fourteen previous arrests killed a Nashville couple after crashing into their vehicle. Months later, in September of 2006, the Davidson County Sheriff announced his intent to participate in the 287(g) program. Flanked by the district attorney, the police chief, and other local politicians, he announced, "During 2006, several very serious cases involving criminal illegal immigrants in Nashville prompted us to begin formulating plans to better protect the citizens of Davidson County . . . It is important for us to emphasize that this program will affect only those illegal immigrants who have a blatant disregard for laws in Davidson County. If you are in this country illegally and commit a crime, we will process you under the federal authority given to us through 287(g)" (Crocker 2006).
At the time of the announcement, the DCSO had applied for 287(g), but ICE had not approved it to participate in the program. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent the sheriff's office a questionnaire with questions about the number of employees and beds at the jail. Knowing the sheriff was scheduled to be in Washington, DC, in January 2007 for a meeting, Tennessee's congressional delegation pressed ICE for a meeting to explain why Davidson County had not been approved for the program. Soon thereafter, the DCSO received a letter from DHS saying it had been approved for 287(g).
Over two hundred DCSO employees applied to receive federal immigration training and become deputized immigration officers. Only U.S. citizens and those who had worked at the DCSO for at least two years were eligible to be chosen. Those ultimately selected included men and women who had between five and nineteen years of experience, and who held different positions in the jail-including guards, booking officers, and one employee from the maintenance department. These fifteen officers participated in a federal training program conducted by ICE instructors at the DCSO training facility between February and March of 2006.
The primary arresting agency in Davidson County is the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, whose officers arrest people for alleged violations of state or local laws. For each arrest, police officers fill out an arrest report that indicates the arrestee's place of birth. If this information indicates the person is foreign born, when that person is booked in to the DCSO jail, a red stamp saying "ICE" is placed on that person's paperwork, and that person is placed on an "ICE Hold." Next, deputized immigration officers conduct an administrative interview to determine the arrestee's legal authorization to be in the United States. If 287(g) officers determine the person has legal status in the United States, the individual's ICE Hold is removed. If the immigration officer determines the arrestee is illegally present in the United States, the officer prepares and serves the immigrant with a charging document that outlines his or her removability.
When someone is on an ICE Hold and subject to deportation, he or she may be released from jail on his or her own recognizance or after paying an immigration bond. That person will still go through deportation proceedings but will not be detained during the process. If the person is not released, he or she is transferred to ICE custody after serving the local time for the crime for which he or she was arrested or convicted. The DCSO has an interservice government agreement to hold individuals for ICE, so although technically in ICE custody, the individual is still housed in the Davidson County jail. DCSO is reimbursed US$63 a day by the federal government for housing ICE detainees. Twice a week, federal employees from ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations pick up those in ICE custody to take them to the local ICE office, after which they are transported to another ICE detention facility.
Data for this article comes from in-depth interviews and observations with administrative actors from the DCSO. While DCSO employs over five hundred people, only a small number of its employees are directly involved in the 287(g) program. I conducted interviews with the sheriff, DCSO's immigration officers, and the federal ICE agent-in-charge. Interviews were conducted inside offices at the sheriff's office or in the jail during work hours. Each interview lasted approximately one hour and was audio recorded and subsequently transcribed. I coded these interviews for analytic themes that came up repeatedly in the interviews. Observations include two years of attendance at Sheriff's Advisory Council meetings, which are held quarterly at the sheriff's office. Sheriff's Advisory Council meetings are meant to serve as a conduit of information between the sheriff's office and interested parties (police officials, the public defender, and immigrant advocates) with respect to the operations of the 287(g) program.

III. CASE STUDY ANALYSIS
Many DCSO employees sought to participate in the 287(g) program. Once selected to participate, sheriff's deputies shed their former positions in the jail to become federally deputized immigration officers. Instead of interacting with large segments of the inmate population, they interviewed foreign-born arrestees one by one. Immigration officers had the use of two furnished offices that contained several desks, rolling office chairs, and multiple computers with Internet access. A picture of the deputized officers hung on the wall in one of the offices, and officers frequently referred to it when I interviewed them. Below, DCSO employees explain their motivations to become deputized immigration officers: Look at the picture on the wall [points to picture with team of immigration officers]. All these individuals there were the ones who started this and no one else, whether they come to replace (us) or not, they can't say they were at ground level when it got started. (Interview Officer 3) My number one reason was I kind of felt like it was cutting edge law enforcement. You know, it was kind of what was coming. You could see it coming across the board in the entire nation. (Interview Officer 2) Deputized immigration officers in the Davidson County jail have two primary responsibilities. They conduct administrative interviews to determine if arrestees are deportable, and they prepare the charging documents ICE will use to pursue that person's deportation. Consequently, immigration officers primarily see themselves as objective implementers of immigration law, a role I characterize as the by-the-books administrator. Other narratives that immigration officers create to describe their work-roles I characterize as the public protector, the reluctant regulator, and the benevolent gatekeeper-depend on the immigrants who are being processed. For example, the immigration officer's role as a public protector emerged when the officer discussed cases where the immigrant screened for removal was arrested for a serious offense. In contrast, officers spoke about themselves as reluctant regulators when immigrants they screened could not be easily characterized as criminal aliens and were sympathetic or deserving. In a few cases, officers described themselves as people who bestowed legal immigration status, a role I've described as the benevolent gatekeeper. These narratives highlight how officers make sense of their jobs. Through the execution of these mundane bureaucratic tasks, officers produce and reproduce the authority of the nation-state by identifying those who do not belong. While these tasks are relatively circumscribed, they serve to expand the reach of the federal government, and they have enormous consequences for those who are arrested.

A. THE BY-THE-BOOKS ADMINISTRATOR
Much of the research on street-level bureaucrats focuses on the role of discretion in the implementation of policy. This research shows that bureaucrats have wide latitude when doing their jobs; for example, workers ignore or bend the rules to cope with stressful working environments (Lipsky 1980), or to help deserving clients (Maynard-Moody and Leland 2000). In contrast, immigration officers describe their job as one that requires strict implementation of immigration laws, a frame I characterize as the by-the-books administrator. Below, officers explain the extent of their authority: Well of course my powers are the power to question someone as to their admissibility or inadmissibility (for deportation) and beyond that my powers are none. I get all the guys, you can let me go, and you can let me go. And I said, "You don't understand. I'm not the man." (Interview Officer 6) We have nothing to do with them getting arrested. We get called heartless, we're cold, we're breaking up families, but they don't understand we don't go out and get these folks. They get dropped off to us. . . . All my job is, once they get brought in here, I just have to find out their legal status. So all this that we go out and we're breaking up families and we're arresting people for-I mean, we have nothing to do with that. That's not our job. (Interview Officer 9) In both statements, officers describe themselves as having the limited task of determining the foreign-born arrestee's legal status; they see their jobs in terms of categorizing status and processing paperwork. Ellermann (2009) and Wells (2004) illustrate how immigration officials avoid implementing some immigration laws, but when implementing the 287(g) program, DCSO officers do not have prosecutorial discretion. That is, officers feel they do not have the authority or discretion to ignore an immigration violation; as one officer states, "I'm not the man." In fact, officers do not even see themselves as participants in the deportation process. Indeed, although local officers prepare charging documents so that ICE can proceed with a person's removal, a supervisor from ICE's Detention and Removal Operations reviews and ultimately signs off on the document. Consequently, officers describe ICE as responsible for removal proceedings, and officers take offense to any claims that they are responsible for breaking up families.
Still, officers were proud of participating in 287(g), which they considered to be a cutting-edge law enforcement program. They had a strong sense of identity as officers of the law and emphasized that those without immigration status violated the law.
Most of these people are good hardworking people, but they're violating some kind of law. Two laws. I know one's a civil immigration law but the other one is a criminal law. It might happen to be a misdemeanor but it's the law and that's an apolitical statement. That's just the law. (Interview Officer 8) While some research highlights how immigration laws create immigration status (Ngai 2004;DeGenova 2002;Calavita 1998), to immigration officers the law is unambiguous. As the quote above demonstrates, the immigrants this immigration officer screens may be "good hardworking people" but they have violated both federal immigration law and state criminal law. Similarly, another officer said, "If you're here illegal, you're illegal and that's just how it is." Research shows that street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion based on their judgments about the worth of the client rather than the written rules or procedures they are directed to follow (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003). In contrast, when describing their jobs and various cases, officers using the by-the-books administrator frame usually highlighted their lack of discretion. They would speak of the law in black and white terms, often saying, "the law is the law," or, when referring to foreign-born arrestees' immigration status, "illegal is illegal." As one officer explained, while it might feel better to process a gang member (for removal) than someone who was arrested for driving without a license, she made no distinctions because "it's not my responsibility to carry that burden." Thus, as Ellermann (2009) suggests, immigration bureaucrats are driven by mandate fulfillment and a desire to enforce the law.
In addition to taking pride at enforcing the law, the DCSO's immigration officers saw themselves as extensions of the federal government. For instance, one officer explained her job was to do what the federal government told her to do, despite the fact that its procedures seemed to change arbitrarily. She said, "We kind of do what is directed from the top. It depends on the Feds; I don't know why they change their mind on what they do. We have to go with whatever they recommend for us . . . I don't take it personal." Similarly, another officer explains how 287(g) officers assist the federal government: We're helping, I think this gets lost a little bit, we're helping the federal government with their immigration issues so we're a force multiplier so there are more ways for us to get people to immigration court. I don't know what happens to them when they go to immigration court. I don't know if they get deported, I don't know if they come back. I don't know what happens. (Interview Officer 7) When using the by-the-books administrator frame, officers emphasize their limited authority and deference to the federal government. Numerous ICE memoranda indicate that officers should use discretion by, for example, prioritizing the removal of serious felons and repeat offenders over those with only civil immigration violations. For example, a 2011 memo states, "When ICE favorably exercises prosecutorial discretion, it essentially decides not to assert the full scope of the enforcement authority available to the agency in a given case" (Morton 2011, 2). And, while this memo applies to ICE employees "who have the authority to institute immigration removal proceedings," DCSO's 287(g) officers are employed by Davidson County and do not feel they can deviate from their task of identifying unauthorized immigrants and processing them for removal. As one officer said, "We have to be consistent and the only way to be consistent is to process everyone." Processing everyone identically appeals to by-the-books administrators' interest in fairness because "the law is the law."

B. THE PUBLIC PROTECTOR
By-the-books administrators emphasize their limited discretion when applying the law and argue that although they are immigration officers, they are not responsible for an individual's deportation. In contrast, when using the public protector frame, officers speak proudly about identifying immigrants for removal and keeping the public safe. For public protectors, immigrants must be removed not only because they have violated immigration laws, but because they are a threat to the public. Officers' statements closely mirror the initial justifications for the 287(g) program because they talk about immigrants as criminals.
So what we do when we screen people, we got rid of some . . . pretty bad, pretty rough people, gang members . . . I think we're doing the community a service by having this program. (Interview Officer 5) It's a tool to help our community to try to make it safer . . . actually, it's a service for the community (to) try to document some of these individuals if they're, let's say a threat to the community, we'll deal with it. (Interview Officer 8) Unlike the by-the-books administrator who is "just enforcing the law," the public protector relishes his or her role as an immigration officer. In the statements above, officers highlight their roles in getting rid of or dealing with "bad people" who pose a threat to the community. Moreover, they describe the mundane task of identifying immigrants for removal as a form of public service. Officers are most likely to emphasize their role in the deportation process when immigrants are arrested for serious charges such as drunk driving, drug charges, and crimes against people.
When immigrants commit crimes, they are viewed as having committed multiple violations, including violating how guests should behave in the country (Sayad 2004).
Some days you're more than happy to do your job because you have a real criminal. A child rapist or all the horrible people that we get in here . . . I'm just like yes we've got to get them out of here and a lot of these ones that are criminal, an illegal criminal. (Interview Officer 2) This officer describes getting pleasure from his job, particularly when identifying "real" criminals to remove. To this officer, being an "illegal" criminal makes one even more deserving of removal. Indeed, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (1996), of which 287(g) is a part, imposed "stunningly harsh control measures" on criminal offenders because few interest groups were willing to lobby on the behalf of undocumented immigrants who committed crimes (Ellermann 2009, 67). Ellermann (2009) argues that Congress focused on tightening restrictions for criminal offenders because they were "a migrant group much different from undocumented workers" (67).
Many immigrants processed for removal through the 287(g) program, however, have not committed serious crimes. Half of those identified for removal were arrested for misdemeanor crimes such as driving without a license or failing to appear in court (DCSO 2009). In addition, twenty-five immigrants have been processed for removal after being arrested for fishing without a license (Echegaray 2010). For officers using the public protector frame, even removing those who have committed nonviolent misdemeanor offenses contributes to public safety. An officer explains why processing everyone who is eligible for removal is important: "If I determine that that person's a good person and I'm gonna let him go and he goes out and gets a DUI and kills someone then I have to answer to that and then people say why'd you let him go?" Since even those arrested for misdemeanors could commit more serious crimes in the future, public protectors believe the best way to keep the public safe is to process all of those without status for removal. Here, the public protector narrative converges with that of the by-the-books administrator, processing all those eligible for removal appeals to officers' emphasis on public safety and objective implementation of the law.

C. THE RELUCTANT REGULATOR
Inevitably, officers encounter cases where immigrants are arrested but are not "criminals." By-the-books administrators justify their removal because they have violated the nation's civil immigration laws, and public protectors argue they may commit more dangerous crimes in the future. However, sometimes immigration officers face a moral dilemma-they must treat everyone identically, even those who they believe should not be processed for removal. In these instances, officers become reluctant regulators.
As the implementation of 287(g) demonstrates, although its purpose is to identify criminal aliens, in practice it results in removal proceedings for people who are hard to label as criminals. When asked to explain the range of crimes for which people are arrested and then processed for removal, several officers recalled, in detail, cases that bothered them months or years after they occurred. For example, an officer described a case where a young man had been arrested by mistake and was subsequently processed for removal: One of my very first ones, he was, I don't know, probably 23, had been in the country since he was 15, had never been arrested, had never been charged with anything, hadn't been caught at the border, nothing. He was here with his older brother and I think one of his cousins, they all lived together. Metro served a warrant at his house and he came and turned himself in. Like I said, the program was new, so he probably didn't know much about it. Turned himself in, ended up getting processed because he was here illegally, and then it turned out the next day they had served the warrant at the wrong house. It wasn't even for him. So I felt horrible. I mean, there was nothing I could do. But I felt so bad for that guy because he had not done anything wrong. (Interview Officer 7) In the case this officer described, the young man she processed for removal was taken into custody after the police department served an arrest warrant at the wrong house. The officer emphasized the young man had spent eight years in the country with a clean record and took the fact that he turned himself in as more evidence of his good character. While criminal charges against the young man were dropped, because immigration screening occurs upon booking, the young man was screened even though "he had not done anything wrong." Once the young man was identified as having committed a civil immigration violation, there was nothing the immigration officer could do but process him for removal. Although she subsequently processed hundreds of people for removal, she remembered this case as one she wished had never happened.
Many officers shared stories about processing sympathetic immigrants for removal. An officer told me about a Honduran man who was arrested for driving without a license. The officer described the man as a "little old farmer guy working tobacco" and he explained that the man came to the United States to pay for his daughters' college tuition in Honduras. The immigration officers' description of the immigrant as a worker is notable because it highlights the tensions between immigration control and labor, a primary dilemma in contemporary immigration enforcement (Calavita 1992). Statements from immigration officers demonstrate how "criminal immigrants" and "immigrant workers" are categories that are not always easily distinguishable from one another.
Of course, when the sheriff publicizes the 287(g) program's successes, the sheriff emphasizes that all those screened for immigration status were arrested for committing crimes in Davidson County. His statement implies that all of those subsequently identified for removal are law breakers, a rhetorical move that is easy for him to make since he does not conduct any immigration screenings himself. In contrast to the sheriff, who can gloss over the cases where deserving immigrants were processed for removal, an immigration officer explained that although he liked his job, "some days it's bad." Officers expressed reluctance at processing immigrants who were arrested by mistake or whose arrest was bad luck, such as those arrested for fishing without a license or loitering. Moreover, officers recognized that immigrants came to the United States to work, and several said that lacking other options, they might do the same thing to provide for their family. Some of the immigrants processed for removal had lived in the United States for years, had U.S.-citizen children, and owned property. One officer explained she was sometimes frustrated when immigrants signed voluntary departure orders when they might be eligible for relief-if they fought their deportation in court. She shrugged and explained that by law immigration officers were not allowed to give legal advice.
Since Davidson County's immigration officers do not have the authority to ignore a person's immigration violation, the only way they can help deserving immigrants is to recommend the immigrant be paroled on humanitarian release or given an affordable immigration bond. This does not mean the immigrant's immigration charges go away, but immigrants can go through the adjudication process from home rather than from detention facilities. Lastly, since immigration officers do not know the outcomes of individual cases in immigration court, they are able to imagine that deserving immigrants will have positive outcomes and will be able to legally remain in the country.

D. THE BENEVOLENT GATEKEEPER
In the previous section, immigration officers described reluctantly processing deserving immigrants for removal. In this section, using a frame I label the "benevolent gatekeeper," officers discuss how they have been able to help immigrants. Most officers described helping immigrants by being compassionate during the immigration screening process. For example, officers mentioned they sometimes told jokes in an attempt to put immigrants at ease. In addition, officers described answering questions, letting immigrants use the phone to call family, and listening to immigrants' stories during the interview process, even when these stories included much more detail than was necessary.
When using the frame of the benevolent gatekeeper, officers described admitting people who belonged in the country. Belonging in the United States was not described in terms of language or culture, but rather immigration status: I hate the fact that people feel like we're profiling. If you have somebody who comes in and they say, "I was born in Utah." Okay. And they speak Spanish. Okay, you're a Spanish-speaking person that was born in Utah. If you have a social security number and we know it's a good number, by all means, you belong here, you're an American. (Immigration Officer 1) Similarly, a DCSO immigration officer described screening two foreign-born arrestees who believed they were undocumented, only to discover both had derived citizenship: "That was a situation that when they came to us they were illegal and when they left they were legal. We cut them loose." Another officer explained that verifying people's legal status ultimately helped the individual: "What I'm trying to do is basically I'm trying to help people and inform people and make sure they are legal because if you're legal you get more benefits than if you're illegal." In another case, an officer described interviewing a Mexican woman who had been smuggled to the United States to engage in prostitution. The woman was arrested during a prostitution sting. The immigration officer who was conducting her administrative interview felt the woman had already been victimized and that incarcerating her amounted to additional punishment. After bringing her case to the attention of the ICE agent-in-charge, the ICE office declined to prosecute her civil immigration violation. The woman was released, and after providing information about the prostitution ring to federal authorities, she was approved for a "visa for victims." Thus, agents at the ICE field office in Nashville exercised prosecutorial discretion, and the officer who brought the case to the attention of the ICE agent-in-charge felt he had made a difference in the woman's life.
With over nine thousand immigrants processed for removal through July 2011, the few cases described here are the exceptions. Still, officers referred to the cases where they intervened on behalf of immigrants as proof that they do not discriminate against immigrants when doing their jobs. In addition, some officers believed that by getting unauthorized immigrants an immigration court date, they were giving immigrants the opportunity to regularize their status and stay in the country. Moreover, all officers claim to help immigrants by being kind to them during the immigration screening process. In this sense, officers see themselves as benevolent gatekeepers bestowing legal status or information.

IV. DISCUSSION
Research on federal immigration officers shows that officers exercise discretion regarding whether or not to pursue deportation, particularly when faced with public opposition (Ellermann 2009;Wells 2004). In contrast, this article shows that deputized immigration officers in Davidson County, Tennessee, have a narrow mandate and virtually no discretion. Their lack of discretion is not a result of being tightly monitored or controlled; in fact, a report issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (2009) criticized the federal government for not supervising deputized immigration officers closely enough. Thus, although immigration officers deputized through the 287(g) program technically have the authority of any federal ICE officer, in practice they do not exercise prosecutorial discretion, and they characterize discretion as above their pay grade. Indeed, immigration officers in the Davidson County jail apply federal immigration charges to everyone who is eligible for removal, and it is up to federal immigration officers to decide to intervene and decline to prosecute.
When ICE and the sheriff's office agreed to start a 287(g) program in the county jail, they implemented a program whereby deputized immigration officers have a very narrow role in immigration enforcement. Consequently, deputized immigration officers are policy implementers, but not policy makers, as Lipsky (1980) describes street-level bureaucrats. The 287(g) program is an example of devolution of federal authority in the sense that county officers have permission to process people for removal, but unlike their federal counterparts they do not exercise discretion. Thus, incorporating nonstate actors in immigration control represents a consolidation of state power, leading to a devolution of tasks but not authority (Lahav and Guiraudon 2006;Lahav 1998).
This article explains how deputized officers understand their roles in the federal immigration bureaucracy, given their very limited authority. Primarily, in what I have characterized as the by-the-books administrator frame, immigration officers in the Davidson County jail see themselves as objective implementers of federal immigration law. In this role, officers do what is directed by the federal government and express few opinions regarding the merits of the 287(g) program. To them, screening immigrants for immigration status is just a job, and their role is limited to administrative processing. Under these circumstances, processing everyone identically for immigration violations, regardless of their suspected crimes, is a way to ensure fairness. To the by-the-books administrator, the law is not interpreted, it is applied; all immigrants can be categorized as either legally present or removable. Moreover, because immigration officers lack prosecutorial discretion, they are incredibly efficient at processing immigrants for removal-between April of 2007 and 2009, county immigration officers identified 5,300 immigrants for removal (DCSO 2009).
To the sheriff, the 287(g) program is successful because it results in the identification and eventual removal of thousands who were arrested for local criminal charges. Deputized immigration officers speak of the immigrants they process as criminals when they have been arrested for serious charges. In these instances, immigration officers talk about performing a service to the community by getting rid of bad people.
While it is easy for officers to feel proud of protecting the public when they identify a drunk driver for removal, it is more difficult to explain why removing nonviolent misdemeanor offenders serves the public's interests. Some officers justify their removal by arguing that it is preventative-misdemeanor offenders could commit more serious crimes in the future.
Sometimes, however, officers express reluctance at having to process especially deserving immigrants for removal. This is most likely to happen when immigrants are not easily categorized as criminals-people the 287(g) program was designed to remove. While research on bureaucracy shows that front-line bureaucrats go out of their way to help deserving immigrants (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003), immigration officers cannot choose to ignore immigration violations. Instead, the best officers can do is recommend humanitarian release so that immigrants can go through the removal process from home rather than from a detention center.
In addition, since immigration officers do not know the outcome of immigration cases, they imagine that deserving immigrants have the opportunity to adjust their legal status. Officers imagine that by giving immigrants an immigration court date, they are helping them by putting them on a path to legal status rather than deportation. Immigration courts, however, are reluctant to overturn the decisions of the immigration officers because administrative agencies, such as the DHS, are politically accountable to the executive branch of government, and therefore not subject to judicial oversight (Ellermann 2009).
Immigration officers could only recall one case in which an immigration officer intervened on the behalf of a removable immigrant. A woman who had been smuggled to the United States to engage in prostitution was able to get a visa after a deputized officer brought her case to the attention to federal authorities. The deputized officer who intervened was proud he helped the woman adjust her status. In addition, officers mentioned two cases where immigration officers discovered foreign-born arrestees had derived citizenship. Thus, in isolated cases, immigration officers have acted as benevolent gatekeepers, whereby a lucky few achieve legal status.

V. CONCLUSION
This article sheds light on the devolution of immigration enforcement by examining the local implementation of a 287(g) program in Davidson County, Tennessee. While 287(g) is a federal strategy designed to remove unauthorized immigrants, it is also a powerful local political tool. Locally elected officials take credit for processing criminal aliens for removal because they are instrumental in adopting local immigration enforcement programs. At the same time, they deflect criticism by arguing that they have no say in the program's implementation.
Deputized immigration officers identify incarcerated immigrants for removal and process their paperwork, work formerly performed by ICE officers. In this context then, devolution entails transferring tasks from federal to local bureaucracies. While deputized officers help ICE by identifying removable immigrants and preparing the documents to pursue their removal, deputized officers do not decide when to provide relief from prosecution.
As a result of their limited discretion, deputized immigration officers have developed overlapping and contradictory ideas about their jobs. Most often, they rely on a law enforcement ethos and think of themselves as objective implementers of the law. In their role as by-the-books administrators, they process everyone who violates civil or criminal immigration laws identically. However, depending on the particular cases that officers encounter, they also believe they protect the public by identifying criminals for deportation, and they help immigrants adjust their status by giving them an immigration court date.
Since ICE has expanded its interior immigration enforcement strategy of screening immigrants at county jails, the number of unauthorized immigrants who are deported has increased. While jail screenings are designed to deport "criminals," in practice they deport almost all unauthorized immigrants who are arrested by local police. Since immigration screenings happen in the jail to "criminals," public pressure to provide immigration relief is not particularly effective (Ellermann 2009). Moreover, once a deputized immigration officer has charged an unauthorized immigrant of committing a civil immigration violation, federal ICE officers will rarely decline to pursue charges because the removal process is already set in motion. NOTES 1. In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The law included a section, 287(g), called "Performance of Immigration Officer Functions by State Officers and Employees." This section allows subnational law enforcement agencies to enter into agreements with the DHS to enforce federal immigration laws. 2. Civil violations of immigration law include unauthorized presence or overstaying a visa. Criminal immigration violations include illegal reentry to the United States after a prior deportation or "willfully" refusing a deportation order. 3. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, formerly under the Department of Justice, was the agency in charge of enforcing immigration laws before the creation of the U.S. DHS in 2002.
amada armenta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University. Recently published in Qualitative Sociology, her current research focuses on immigration and local law enforcement.