Senators Introduce Bill Offering Financial Incentives for States That Cooperate with ICE

In April 2026, the U.S. Senate voted 50-48 along party lines to advance a budget resolution directing up to $70 billion in new funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection over the next three and a half years [1]. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham called it an overdue investment in border security. But buried within this broader spending push — and in companion legislation from Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee — is a more targeted strategy: using federal dollars to lure reluctant state and local governments into active partnerships with ICE.

The approach marks a shift from the Trump administration's earlier confrontational tactics toward sanctuary jurisdictions. Instead of only punishing noncompliance, congressional Republicans are now pairing financial carrots with legal sticks — raising questions about constitutionality, cost-effectiveness, and whether the strategy actually makes communities safer.

The Money on the Table

The financial incentive structure for state and local ICE cooperation has grown rapidly. In September 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced a revamped reimbursement program for agencies joining ICE's 287(g) program — a framework under which local officers are trained and deputized to perform certain immigration enforcement functions [2].

Starting October 1, 2025, participating agencies became eligible for:

• Full reimbursement of annual salary and benefits for each trained 287(g) officer
• Overtime coverage up to 25% of an officer's annual salary
• Equipment stipends of $7,500 per officer for laptops, phones, and cellular service
• Up to $100,000 per agency for vehicle purchases
• Quarterly performance bonuses of up to $1,000 per officer, tied to how effectively they assist ICE in locating undocumented immigrants [3]

The "One Big Beautiful Bill" reconciliation package, signed into law in July 2025, allocated $75 billion to ICE over four years — making it the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history [4]. Of that, approximately $14 billion was earmarked for financial incentives to state and local agencies entering 287(g) agreements [5].

Senator Graham has said he is working on additional grant legislation to "further incentivize states to participate in the 287(g) program in a meaningful way" [2]. Senator Blackburn, meanwhile, has introduced separate legislation — the State Accountability for Federal Deployment Costs Act — that takes a punitive approach: states whose refusal to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement leads to civil unrest requiring military deployment would be required to reimburse the federal government for those costs, with a 180-day payment window before the president could rescind discretionary grants [6].

Together, Graham's incentive-based approach and Blackburn's penalty-based framework represent a two-track congressional strategy aimed at the same target: jurisdictions that limit cooperation with ICE.

How Big Is the Target?

The Center for Immigration Studies identifies 13 states with statewide sanctuary policies as of early 2025, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington [7]. Approximately 56% of the nation's estimated undocumented population — close to 8 million people — lives in sanctuary jurisdictions, with California alone accounting for roughly 22% of the national total [8].

These jurisdictions are the primary targets of both the incentive and penalty approaches. But the 287(g) expansion has primarily grown in states already sympathetic to federal enforcement. As of April 2026, ICE has signed 1,744 memoranda of agreement for 287(g) programs covering 39 states and two U.S. territories — a more than 900% increase since January 2025, when only about 160 agreements existed [3].

Source: DHS / Fwd.us

Data as of Apr 27, 2026CSV

The rapid growth has occurred almost entirely in red and purple jurisdictions. Florida has ICE partnerships in every county. Georgia's uptake has been slower — only about a third of sheriffs have signed on. Tennessee, where Blackburn's legislative agenda originates, created $5 million in state-level incentives for local agencies partnering with ICE and has seen participation skyrocket [9].

The question is whether the new federal money can move the needle in states like California, New York, and Illinois, where state law explicitly prohibits or restricts the cooperation the 287(g) program requires.

The Constitutional Guardrails

The legal framework governing Congress's ability to condition federal funds on state cooperation with immigration enforcement runs through two lines of Supreme Court precedent that pull in opposite directions.

On one side is South Dakota v. Dole (1987), which upheld Congress's authority to withhold a percentage of federal highway funds from states that did not raise their minimum drinking age to 21. The Court established a five-part test: the spending must serve the general welfare, conditions must be unambiguous, they must relate to a valid national interest, they cannot induce unconstitutional state action, and they cannot cross the line from encouragement to coercion [10].

On the other side is the anti-commandeering doctrine, rooted in the Tenth Amendment and articulated in Printz v. United States (1997), which struck down a federal law requiring local law enforcement to conduct background checks for gun purchases. The Court held that "the Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program" [11]. Murphy v. NCAA (2018) reinforced this, holding that Congress cannot order state legislatures to enact or refrain from repealing specific laws [11].

Courts have applied these principles directly to immigration enforcement. The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits all struck down Trump-era conditions on Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants that required compliance with ICE detainer requests, finding the conditions exceeded executive authority and violated the separation of powers [11]. The Second Circuit, however, upheld certain conditions, reasoning that states could simply reject the grants [11].

The new incentive structure attempts to thread this needle. Rather than conditioning existing grants on compliance — the approach courts repeatedly rejected — it offers new, dedicated funding that agencies voluntarily accept. This puts the legislation closer to South Dakota v. Dole territory, where the funding is an inducement rather than a mandate. But critics argue the sheer scale of the incentives — potentially $2 billion to $3.4 billion annually flowing to local agencies — could constitute the kind of coercive pressure the Supreme Court warned against in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), when it struck down the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion mandate [11].

What the Research Says About Safety

The implicit premise behind incentivizing ICE cooperation is that sanctuary policies make communities less safe. The available research does not support this claim.

A 2022 study published in Social Science Research conducted a county-level investigation and found "no evidence that sanctuary policies cause an increase in any crime, and some evidence that they may lead to a decrease in property crime" [12]. A PNAS study found that sanctuary policies reduce deportations by roughly one-third but "have no measurable effect on crime," while notably not reducing deportations of individuals with violent criminal convictions [13]. A University of New Mexico study found "no correlation between sanctuary cities and crime" [14].

A review in Sociology Compass examined the cumulative research and concluded that "none of the existing studies suggest that limited cooperation policies foster crime" and that "immigrant-friendly legislation has either a null or negative association with violent crime and property crime" regardless of methodology [15].

The proposed mechanism is straightforward: when immigrants trust that local police will not turn them over to federal agents, they are more likely to report crimes, cooperate as witnesses, and engage with public safety systems. Nearly 50% of violent crime goes unreported nationally, and policing experts have noted that immigrants — including those without legal status — may be even less likely to report when local police are entangled with immigration enforcement [16].

What Law Enforcement Leaders Say

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), representing the nation's largest professional association of police executives, released guidelines in April 2026 calling for enforcement operations to "focus on violent criminals rather than civil enforcement of people simply out of status," describing "broad statistic-driven operations" as "counterproductive" because they "divert resources, undermine trust, and can result in the apprehension of individuals who pose no threat to public safety" [16].

Police chiefs in multiple cities have criticized DHS for conducting immigration operations without prior coordination with local departments, arguing it puts officers at risk [16]. The Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, a bipartisan group of law enforcement officials, has argued that immigration enforcement by local police creates "a chilling effect in immigrant communities, leading to limited cooperation with police" and that agencies "need the cooperation of immigrants, regardless of immigration status, in solving crime" [17].

These concerns are not limited to Democratic-led jurisdictions. In Idaho, a bill requiring local law enforcement to apply for 287(g) agreements was halted in the state Senate [18]. The rapid training timeline for 287(g) officers — reduced from weeks to days or hours — has drawn criticism from the Government Accountability Office for inadequately covering Fourth Amendment protections and racial discrimination safeguards [3].

The Cost Question

The financial incentive approach raises cost-effectiveness questions that deserve scrutiny.

Source: DHS Congressional Budget Justification / Brennan Center

Data as of Apr 27, 2026CSV

ICE's budget has nearly tripled, from roughly $10 billion in FY2025 to $28.7 billion in FY2026 when reconciliation funds are included [4]. The average cost per deportation is at least $17,121, factoring in arrest, detention, and removal — with detention alone averaging $152 per day over an average 44-day stay [19].

The 287(g) reimbursement pipeline could send between $1.4 billion and $2 billion to local agencies in 2026 alone, with projections reaching $3.4 billion by 2027 [3]. To put that in context, total federal COPS program spending in FY2024 was $665 million, and Byrne-JAG grant funding was $346 million [3]. The 287(g) program is poised to dwarf all other federal law enforcement grants combined.

Whether this represents efficient use of funds depends on outcomes. Prior research on federal police funding programs, including COPS grants, found "no or very modest impact on crime" while "significantly increasing arrests for low-level offenses" [3]. Critics at the Brennan Center have described the funding expansion as creating a "deportation-industrial complex" in which financial incentives drive enforcement decisions rather than public safety priorities [4].

Defenders of the approach argue it is precisely the scale that makes it effective — that federal enforcement capacity alone cannot cover the interior of the country, and deputizing local officers creates a necessary "force multiplier." Senator Graham has framed the 287(g) expansion as supporting law enforcement agencies that want to help but lack resources [2].

The Precedent Problem

Even some supporters of stricter immigration enforcement have raised concerns about the precedent set by conditioning large-scale federal funding on state law enforcement behavior. The mechanism cuts both ways: if a Republican Congress can offer billions to reward states that cooperate with ICE, a future Democratic majority could condition similar funds on state cooperation with, say, federal gun control enforcement or environmental regulation.

This concern animated much of the conservative legal movement's development of the anti-commandeering doctrine in the first place. Printz v. United States was a victory for gun-rights advocates who opposed the Brady Bill's requirement that local sheriffs run background checks [11]. The principle that the federal government cannot conscript state officers into federal service was, for decades, a cornerstone of conservative federalism.

The current legislation's architects would argue there is a meaningful distinction between mandating cooperation and incentivizing it. But the scale of the incentives — full salary reimbursement, equipment, vehicles, and performance bonuses — makes that distinction increasingly thin. For a small-town police department with a tight budget, the offer of full salary reimbursement for designated officers may be functionally indistinguishable from a mandate.

What Happens If States Say No

For sanctuary states that decline the incentives, the enforcement picture is mixed. The 287(g) incentive structure is purely voluntary — states that refuse simply do not receive the funds. There is no mechanism in the reimbursement program to penalize non-participation.

Blackburn's State Accountability for Federal Deployment Costs Act adds a punitive dimension, but its trigger is narrow: it applies only when a state's refusal to cooperate leads to civil unrest requiring military deployment [6]. The bill was drafted in response to the Los Angeles unrest over ICE operations, which cost approximately $130 million in National Guard and Marine deployment expenses [6].

The administration has also pursued other avenues. The DOJ maintains and updates a list of designated sanctuary jurisdictions under Executive Order 14287, and the federal government has challenged sanctuary laws in court — though with limited success, given the anti-commandeering precedent [20].

The broader reconciliation package includes an unrestricted $10 billion fund that the Secretary of Homeland Security can allocate for any border enforcement purpose — a pool that could, in theory, be directed toward rewarding cooperative jurisdictions or funding federal operations in uncooperative ones [4].

What Comes Next

The Senate's April 2026 budget vote was a procedural step, not a final law. The resolution directs the Homeland Security and Judiciary committees to draft legislation funding ICE and CBP for the next three and a half years, with the House still needing to act [1]. The specific contours of state cooperation incentives — and any penalties for non-cooperation — will be shaped in that process.

What is already clear is the trajectory: from roughly 160 local agreements with ICE at the start of 2025 to more than 1,700 by April 2026, backed by billions in federal funding that did not exist two years ago. Whether that expansion reaches into the sanctuary jurisdictions where the majority of undocumented immigrants actually live — or simply deepens enforcement in places already inclined to cooperate — remains the central unanswered question.