Lee la versión en español de este artículo. Copublished with Outlier Media.
Taylor Police Officer Ryan Jowske leaned into the window of the silver pickup on May 12. “Stopped you because of the tint on the car” windows, he said, asking driver and passenger for ID.
“It’s expired,” the driver said. The passenger didn’t have one. “Where are you from?” Jowske asked. Colombia, they said.
Jowske didn’t find their names in a database, according to his police report. He then called a U.S. Border Patrol agent, who requested to take custody of both people. Jowske handcuffed the pair, holding them in his car until the agent arrived about 10 minutes later.
For both migrants, the result was catastrophic: two months of detention, deportations and separated families.
For police across Michigan, it was a typical day on the job.
Local police officers in dozens of departments have handed migrants to the Donald Trump administration in hundreds of cases, according to an analysis of public records by Michigan Public and Outlier Media. In these communities, deportations often begin with seemingly trivial issues: a cracked windshield, jaywalking, a broken-down car, or simply an officer’s suspicion.
Police have no obligation to report migrants to federal authorities in such cases, experts say. Some Michigan police chiefs also advise against the practice, in part because it harms community-police relations and diverts local safety resources.
Some residents have protested their cities’ roles in fueling the Trump administration’s deportation machine. But in many communities, increased collaboration between police and federal agents has gone unnoticed.
“It’s still probably the most common way for someone to end up in immigration custody,” said Ramis Wadood, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. “It happens every day. And unfortunately, for a lot of agencies, it is just standard practice.”
Michigan Public and Outlier compiled hundreds of documents to build the most comprehensive available list of immigration reports by police departments in the state since 2021.
The data likely underestimates police involvement. But it provides a rare view into local collaboration with immigration authorities that could be valuable to people who need to travel across metro Detroit or are interested in police accountability.
Got tips?
Outlier Media is investigating the role of metro Detroit police departments in federal immigration enforcement. Share your story with reporter Koby Levin via Signal at koby_det.18 or email at koby@outliermedia.org.
Michigan Public is investigating immigration detention and local police collaboration across the state. Reporter Adam Yahya Rayes can be reached at rayesa.24 on Signal or rayesa@umich.edu.
Border Patrol spokesperson Youssef Fawaz said the agency “proudly partners with local law enforcement agencies, who should be celebrated for their dedication to keeping our communities safe.”
Most people in immigration detention have no criminal record, and most of the nearly 400 police encounters we cataloged began with minor violations.
Taylor is among a handful of Michigan departments with formal cooperation agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Police Chief John Blair did not respond to requests for comment about the May traffic stop or his department’s cooperation with federal immigration efforts.
The wife of one of the men deported after encountering Taylor police still struggled to understand how a tinted window upended her family’s life. We are not using the couple’s full names because they fear reprisals for their family still in the U.S.
“Most people who come (to the U.S.) do it for a better future, not to do bad things,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense. We’ve built a life here. We want to stay.”
‘Follow the law, not politics’
Detroit-area police departments have a long history of aiding Border Patrol. But the collaboration appears to have intensified after Donald Trump returned to the White House.
The 388 immigration stops and arrests we reviewed statewide show that calls from local police to immigration officials surged after Trump began his second term. Some departments made dozens of calls in 2025 and 2026, compared with few or none during the previous four years.
The shift reflects a change in federal priorities — and in federal agents’ willingness to respond to calls from local police.
Residents push back
Local police collaboration with federal law enforcement has quietly skyrocketed in many Michigan communities. But residents in some cities have protested the practice and won change. Livonia reported more immigration arrests in 2025 than almost any other department, but changed its policy to restrict officers’ role in immigration-related decisions after a public outcry.
In 2022, during President Joe Biden’s administration, a Van Buren Township officer called ICE to ask whether agents wanted to take custody of a migrant they stopped with an “improper” license plate. The agent declined, explaining that the “political administration" was focused on “violent offenders.”
In 2025, after Trump returned to office, a Van Buren officer called Border Patrol about migrants who allegedly ran a stop sign. This time, federal agents were interested. Three Van Buren officers drove to the eastside of Detroit — nearly an hour away — to deliver the migrants to Border Patrol.
“Our focus and priority is the safety and security of those who work, live and traverse through Van Buren Township, not immigration status,” Van Buren Police Chief Jason Wright said in an emailed statement. He said his officers use Border Patrol as a “resource” to check IDs.
But the evidence suggests that politics may be influencing police behavior.
The Trump administration has broad support in the metro Detroit communities that are most aggressively cooperating with immigration enforcement.
Shelby Township and Sterling Heights, two of the municipalities whose police reported some of the most immigration arrests in our dataset, strongly supported Trump in 2024. Shelby Township’s police chief welcomed Vice President JD Vance to speak at the department during the campaign. One of the state’s major police unions also endorsed Trump that year.
During a traffic stop in Fraser last winter, police officers invoked Trump, saying they wanted to “get (a migrant) out of here,” repeatedly using the dehumanizing term “illegal.”
Police advocates pushed back on the idea that officers’ behavior is politically motivated.
“The public, I think, should expect officers to follow the law, not politics,” said Ron Wiles, executive director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police.
‘A local decision’
Officers who choose to participate in Trump’s deportation campaign have broad latitude to do so.
“There is no standard for (immigration enforcement), it’s a local decision,” said Wiles. “Each community is different — they have different needs and different wants on how they want their policing done.”
Formal cooperation deals with ICE, like Taylor’s, are rare.
In practice, the difference between a ticket and weeks of detention or deportation can come down to whether an individual officer or supervisor decides to call Border Patrol.
Around midnight on June 9, Southgate Officer A. Zielinski stopped three people for jaywalking across a two-lane road between a convenience store and a La Quinta Inn. Body camera footage shows Zielinski asked all three for identification, which two of them quickly provided.
Zielinski repeatedly noted the two “don’t speak English.” He looked up their IDs in a state database, but was unable to find them. The third person, who spoke English and carried no identification, was let go with a citation.
Four officers surrounded the two remaining people in the hotel parking lot. After about 40 minutes, they were handcuffed and taken away by three Border Patrol agents.
From March through June of this year, Southgate logged three immigration arrests after reporting zero between 2021 and 2025. Southgate police did not respond to a request for comment.
The details vary, but many incidents follow a similar pattern. Officers encounter people in mundane moments: jumping a car battery, sleeping under a tree, driving with a broken headlight, paying a fine in court. The officer learns the person speaks little English, has a foreign ID or no ID. Then comes the call to federal immigration agencies.
Some of the stops also raise questions about why police choose to stop people in the first place. Experts who reviewed records from the stops in this story said some carry the hallmarks of “pretext” stops, where officers use a minor violation as a reason to investigate a suspicion about something else — including, potentially, someone’s legal status.
But the records don’t establish officers’ motivations in individual cases. Wiles declined to review the records, but said he assumes officers didn’t have “some ulterior motive” for these stops beyond a violation committed in their presence.
Regardless of the reason for a stop, officers don’t have to call immigration authorities. Some police chiefs have expressly forbidden their officers from doing so.
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In Southfield, an officer who encounters someone driving with a passport and no driver’s license — a common scenario in the data — might issue a ticket or make an arrest. But the encounter would not trigger a call to immigration agents, the city’s police department said.
“We will ask no questions about the immigration status at all,” said Elvin Barren, Southfield police chief.
His reasoning is practical: If Southfield police regularly asked people about their immigration status, “it would limit or prevent victims of crime from coming to us for help,” he said.
The result of these disparate approaches is that the same kind of police encounter can have radically different consequences depending on where it happens.
Uprooting a family
On that sunny morning in May, J said he had just left Home Depot when Taylor police officer Jowske’s lights flashed in his rearview mirror.
J does not speak nor understand English. He recalled trembling with fear as he tried to follow the officer’s questions and directives.
He spent the next two months separated from his wife and children, shuffled between five different federal jails and detention camps. He described constant searches and ridicule by ICE staff. Between the stress and “disgusting” food, he said he lost 34 pounds.
When ICE deported J in late June, it ended the life that he and his wife had built in the U.S. over roughly four years.
The family entered the U.S. in 2022, making an appointment with Customs and Border Protection at the southern border to start an asylum case. They moved to the westside of Detroit and enrolled their kids in school.
The family had gone hungry at times in Colombia. J, a taxi driver there, couldn’t make ends meet.
In Detroit, their lives stabilized. J found work repairing rental houses. Their older children won scholarships to play travel soccer with Detroit City FC’s youth program.
After J was deported, the family decided that his wife and children would also leave the U.S. through the Trump administration’s “self-deportation” program, which provides plane tickets and a payment to migrants who voluntarily leave the country.
On a sunny morning in July, they gathered in the backyard of a relative’s home in Detroit, preparing to catch a flight to Bogotá. Their suitcases were crammed into the trunk of a minivan out front.
The couple’s youngest son, 7, wore a Godzilla baseball cap. Asked what he thought about the trip, he seemed unsure. He was 3 when he entered the U.S., and his mother said he has little memory of Colombia.
His older sister, 9, jumped in to interpret.
“He’s made a lot of friends,” she explained. “He’s sad to leave them.”
Michigan Public’s Beenish Ahmed contributed reporting to this story.
How we reported this story
We requested police reports from dozens of agencies, reviewed court filings, and scoured Border Patrol Facebook posts to document the scale of collaboration between local police and federal immigration authorities. Read more about our reporting process.
![An editorial collage combining a black-and-white photograph of the Patrick V. McNamara Federal Building, home to the Detroit Immigration Court, with colorful torn-paper fragments of text clipped from immigration court bond hearing documents. The scraps — in pink, blue, and green — display partial phrases including "Granted" (with a checked checkbox), "Denied" (with a checked checkbox), "a flight risk," "Respondent is a flight risk," "the Immigration Judge denied Pe[titioner]," "(ICE), released Petit[ioner]," "under bond of $5,000," "bond of $15,000, with," and "Denied, because." The overlapping fragments visually contrast bond grants and denials, evoking the bureaucratic and high-stakes nature of immigration detention proceedings.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/c57a8e5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x1070+0+5/resize/560x312!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F75%2F7b%2Fa875b7d043b4b67d5862f5501af5%2Fbond-headers-5.png)
