Weber County immigrant arrest case provides insight into cooperative efforts with feds

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Weber County sheriff's officials detained four suspects last week under the department's 287(g) accord with federal immigration officials.
Two suspects were Immigration and Customs Enforcement fugitives, and two had been deported previously for illegal reentry.
The turn of events offers insights into how 287(g) accords are supposed to work.

OGDEN — The cooperative agreement between the Weber County Sheriff's Office and federal immigration officials has led to results — the arrests of two suspects sought by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and two others who had previously been deported.

Officials provided limited details about the four males, though the Salt Lake City field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement posted their pictures on social media and lauded the cooperative effort.

"The fantastic 287(g) collaboration with the @WeberCoSheriff resulted in 4 arrests in the last week! 2 were ICE fugitives & 2 were previously removed from the U.S. and are pending possible prosecution for illegal reentry. Keep 'em coming, team!" reads the agency's post from Monday on X.

ICE reps didn't immediately respond to a KSL.com query seeking additional details.

Weber County Sheriff Ryan Arbon, though, provided a rough accounting of what transpired, offering insight into how cooperative efforts between local law enforcement agencies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement under 287(g) accords are supposed to work. Weber County officials approved a 287(g) agreement with federal officials in late June, and eight other sheriff's offices in Utah and the Utah Department of Corrections have their own accords as well.

"Here's an example of the training and the partnership that we highly value with ICE," Arbon said. The cooperative arrangements are meant to augment communication and the exchange of information between local law enforcement agencies and immigration officials, streamlining efforts to detain immigrants in the country illegally.

The four males, traveling in a car, were stopped somewhere in Weber County after a deputy witnessed an apparent traffic infraction of some sort, Arbon said. Based on the training from immigration officials that's part of the 287(g) program, the deputy became suspicious of their immigration status in interacting with them and reached out to immigration officials for additional information on them.

"They checked them, and it was determined that two are fugitives. ... There's criminal reentry," Arbon said. "They (had) already gone through due process ... through the judge, and the judge has determined that they should be removed from the country. This is exactly why we're doing this."

He didn't have additional details about the four — where they're from originally, where they live in the United States, where they are now. But he emphasized that the four people hadn't been previously singled out by Weber County officials for scrutiny.

"No one is targeted. This is just routine police work, saw a traffic violation, pulled over, and this was the result from it," he said.

Indeed, he doesn't envision aggressive efforts by his deputies per the 287(g) accord, just reactive action when they encounter suspected immigrants in the country illegally in the normal course of their duties.

"There's no raids; we're not doing any sweeps — nothing like that's in our plans. But as we go through normal business with law enforcement, we will come across more of these in the future. I don't know how many. There's no targeted amount; there's no quota," he said.

While some have clamored against 287(g) agreements, worried they could sow fear in the immigrant community and undermine public safety, Arbon says the cooperative effort is about maintaining law and order.

"This is exactly what the public expects. We are meeting public expectation. We're focused on public safety," Arbon said. "We don't want criminals here. They need to be held accountable."

The sheriff's offices in Weber, Wasatch, Utah, Tooele, Sanpete, Kane, Cache, Washington and Beaver counties have inked 287(g) accords with Immigration and Customs Enforcement as has the Utah Department of Corrections.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.