The sheriff of Sweetwater County in southwest Wyoming is forming a task force of up to five deputies who will be authorized to enforce federal immigration laws.
Sheriff John Grossnickle on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding between his office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The federal agency has not yet finalized the agreement, but the sheriff signed the local office into an arrangement by which up to five deputies will be authorized to act as immigration agents, sheriff’s spokesman Jason Mower told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday interview.
Mower said the office hasn’t decided how many deputies to authorize yet.
The program works in phases: Task force agents will have a 40-hour training within the first two months of their selection. Then they will work with ICE supervisors until they can attend a six-week training that has not yet been scheduled, Grossnickle said.
After the mentorship phase, deputies will be able to conduct immigration investigations during the normal course of their law enforcement work in the county; and they’ll still be under the federal agency’s supervision though not directly mentored at that point, the sheriff said.
The local agents’ emphasis will be on suspects they encounter during normal criminal investigation, the sheriff said.
“We’re not knocking on peoples doors, taking kids out of school,” said Grossnickle. “This is just to assist ICE so we don’t have to have (federal) agents out here and not have local control.”
Grossnickle said this issue isn’t about politics for him, recalling a 2022 crime in which a twice-deported sex offender violently raped an 8-year-old girl.
“That’s the kind of threat we’re trying to stop,” added Grossnickle in a later statement.
He told Cowboy State Daily that his region along Interstate 80 has also seen foreign nationals operating commercial trucks without licenses, many from Eastern European countries.
And In The Jail Too
The Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office’s various agreements indicate that it has the most cooperative relationship with ICE of any Wyoming county.
The office in 2020 struck an agreement by which it could hold ICE detainees in the local jail for longer then the usual two-day window, in exchange for a daily rate of federal dollars. That rate is in the process of being renegotiated, said Grossnickle, who declined to discuss the amount until the agreement is finalized.
The local office is also preparing to send two of its jail deputies to a federal training in June, so that they may conduct immigration investigations within the jail on already-detained suspects of local crimes, said Mower.
Transporting, And Beds
The sheriff’s office is also finalizing a transportation agreement authorizing its transportation personnel to pick up ICE detainees from surrounding counties —Teton, Uinta, Lincoln and Sublette — and hold them in the Sweetwater County Detention Center.
And it recently doubled its ICE-designated jail beds from 15 to 30, Mower told Cowboy State Daily in an earlier interview.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
