Jessica Pishko, author: ‘Stephen Miller and Tom Homan really rely on tapping into right wing sheriffs to enforce their agenda’

The image of the sheriff in the popular consciousness is from another time. A lone man on a horse in the Wild West chasing down bandits with his star-shaped badge shining on his chest; or a man, always a man, with his cowboy hat in a rundown police station, who represents the only law of the land and who drinks too much, but protects the most vulnerable. It is a well-cultivated image and one that current sheriffs, still overwhelmingly men, also believe they represent. In the United States they are a myth in themselves and that is what attracted Jessica Pishko, lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-author, to research them in depth and write a book about them that was published last September: The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy. Pishko’s work comes at a time when the so-called “constitutional sheriffs,” a group of far-right sheriffs who consider themselves guardians of the founding values of the United Sates, have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump’s movement. As a consequence, and as a feature of the archaic particularities of the post, they can end up becoming key players in the implementation of his ambitious migratory plans, in particular the mass deportation of millions of people.

Question. What differentiates a sheriff from city police or other local law enforcement?

Answer. Sheriffs are different because there’s one elected sheriff in every county, whether the population is two million or two hundred. So there’s a little over 3,000 sheriffs in the United States, out of 18,000 different law enforcement agencies. And I think around three-fourths of sheriffs went to high school in the same county where they’re elected. So they’re really local. They pride themselves in being kind of community-oriented police. That’s the biggest difference with police chiefs in most places: those are usually appointed by a city council or the mayor. So they can fire them pretty easily. It’s very hard to remove a sheriff once they’re elected.

Q. There’s a myth surrounding the figure of the sheriff. How does that hold up against reality?

A. They have a really big role in American myths like manifest destiny [the idea that the westward expansion of the United States was fated]. Sheriffs were really instrumental as the only kind of law enforcement that was out there. As a result, the impression of a sheriff is a lot more individualistic and has a lot of traits that I think we associate with the United States. They’re individualistic, they don’t like to follow rules, they don’t like to do paperwork or follow procedure, right? They believe they’re doing something more like justice. It’s all largely myth, and I think they do all believe in it, so it’s really powerful, which has made it hard to implement a lot of rules surrounding what sheriffs can and can’t do.

Q. And within a certain reading of that tradition, what is a constitutional sheriff?

A. So the constitutional sheriff movement, as a definition, is a name that a group of sheriffs has given themselves and what they largely believe is that the U.S. Constitution is their only governing document and not state or federal law. And they have a very specific definition of the U.S. Constitution, which is namely just the first 10 amendments. I argue that the constitutional sheriff movement is sort of an outgrowth of how American sheriffs see themselves and what the job has always been. Now, that said, the movement gained more popularity after Barack Obama became president, as part of the far-right pushback. This is where it grew into what I think it is today, which is a much larger mainstream movement. Donald Trump’s coalition has really embraced a lot of aspects of this movement, so I would say now it’s become part of the dominant philosophy of most right-leaning sheriffs. So even if about 10% of sheriffs say specifically that they’re in the constitutional sheriff movement, the impact of that movement is a lot broader; three-fourths of sheriffs are pretty much aligned with Trump and current Republican values.

Q. Basically, they claim to a certain extent to be above the law, how much of that actually holds true? And is there a way for them to be held accountable?

A. So, legally, this is just not true. Every elected official in the United States swears an oath to the Constitution. There is nothing special about the oath sheriffs make. But they have been able to successfully argue it politically and [that has] made holding them accountable very difficult. Their argument is, “well if you don’t like what I’m doing you can just vote for someone else.” And they also use that to successfully argue that they shouldn’t have the same regulations as other law enforcement; so they have generally found themselves exempt from new rules on chokeholds, for example, or they get to allocate resources as they will; they receive funding to do what they want.

Q. Some of these sheriffs are becoming more well-known, has that been done on purpose? And if so, why?

A. Yes, they are all looking to draw attention to themselves on purpose, and the main reason is that they’re elected politicians. But the biggest change has largely been that a lot of sheriffs have really aligned themselves with Trump in the last 10 years. And that’s changed local politics. It didn’t use to be that your local sheriff would endorse a presidential candidate, but with Trump we got this surge of energy. Some of this was just the people Trump brought into office. People like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, who really rely on tapping into right wing sheriffs as a way to enforce their agenda. And it’s also helped the sheriffs get elected by saying: “I support Donald Trump.” And for Trump, when he does a rally with like eight sheriffs and their uniforms behind him, that gives him a legitimacy of authority.

Q. So what role might they play in the new administration’s plans?

A. Jails are really interesting spaces because they’re controlled by sheriffs, and they get to decide whether or not they cooperate with ICE and to what degree. Jails are usually places where people go after arrest and before they’re convicted. They hold a lot of people basically waiting for trial, who have just been accused of a crime and are typically waiting either to pay bail or get probation. That is a big database, so law enforcement can have access to information about who’s in every single jail, about 3,000 jails. ICE doesn’t have a lot of employees in many places, so what they do is use this information. Generally the way it goes is that if people who are potentially deportable get arrested, sheriffs will notify ICE, and this really kind of got ramped up during Trump’s first term.

And it’s probably going to ramp up again. They have these agreements where basically sheriffs who agree can act as immigration authorities, and can transfer people to immigration detention without having to call ICE. During Trump 1.0 many sheriffs said that they did not want to cooperate with ICE, because, as people can understand, asking individuals about their immigration status makes them unlikely to call the police. Now, Homan and Miller dealt with this before and are already prepared. In the first wave of orders, they withhold money from those who don’t want to cooperate and so-called sanctuary jurisdictions. And also some states, like Texas or Florida, have passed laws mandating local law enforcement to collaborate. Still, before, people could only get deported for serious crimes, and those were quite rare, not a lot of folks. Now, the federal government, with what they call the Laken Riley Act, will expand that and many people might just get swept up into the deportation system as they eliminate criminal priorities, so anyone that an officer thinks is undocumented can be picked up just in case. It creates a lot of chaos and confusion.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition