A statewide coalition of civil rights advocates launched a petition Tuesday opposing contracts between local police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The petition targets ICE’s 287(g) program, which authorizes state and local law enforcement officers to carry out duties of an immigration enforcement agent, according to the agency’s website.
More than 2,000 state and local police agencies across the country have agreed to partner with ICE, including 27 in New Hampshire. The police department in Carroll, N.H., which joined the 287(g) program last July, has paid the salaries of all four of its full-time police officers with funds from the Department of Homeland Security, as originally reported by WIRED.
Christine Wellington, a retired legal services attorney and a member of the petition campaign, said grassroots mobilizations against ICE have had some successes in New Hampshire, such as scrapping plans to build an immigrant processing center in Merrimack.
But the outcry against the 287(g) agreements hasn’t been as successful.
“It’s been a bit discouraging,” said Wellington, who has worked with immigrants for her entire legal career and is now part of the New Hampshire Immigrants’ Rights Network. “You can see why somebody might be tempted to join because there’s a bonus, even though there’s a big trade-off. Our bottom line is this harms communities, it breaks trust, it makes people afraid of law enforcement.”
Three models exist under the 287(g) program. The jail enforcement model allows authorities to identify and process non-citizens who have criminal charges; the warrant service model certifies officers to perform administrative immigration warrants on people already in custody; and the task force model authorizes officers to enforce immigration laws during their regular police duties.
All 27 New Hampshire police forces under the 287(g) program are enlisted in the task force model. No other police force in New England, other than the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, is under a 287(g) agreement.
Wellington said she has seen growing concern among residents of various parts of the state, and she hopes a network of advocates will coalesce around the petition.
“[People] might look and ask as to why little towns or medium-sized towns or whatever are footing the bill to train their officers to do law that is not within the scope of their duties to their communities,” she said.
Grafton County Sheriff Jill Myers decided to pull out of her department’s ICE agreement in May 2026 because of the high volume of public records requests and lack of ICE activity in the county. Now, there are no Upper Valley agencies working under the 287(g) partnership, according to ICE’s list of participating agencies.
After Myers signed the agreement to partner with ICE last spring, county residents voiced opposition, speaking up at commissioners’ meetings and collecting signatures on petitions, raising human rights and racial profiling concerns. But they received little response from Myers.
Alix Olson, a Canaan resident and retired police officer helping collect signatures against New Hampshire partnerships with ICE, said she was “extremely happy” to learn the sheriff had ended the agreement.
“I would hope that other department heads, other chiefs and other sheriffs would see what Sheriff Myers saw, which was she was inundated with Freedom of Information Act and right-to-know requests and there was no ICE activity (in Grafton County),” Olson said.
Public pressure is vital to combatting the 287(g) program, she said.
“There’s a million different ways to (get involved),” she said. “Letters to the editor, in-person protests, interviews with the heads of local police departments, lots and lots of right-to-know requests, just keeping the pressure on and standing for what is right,” she said.
The statewide petition’s goal is to keep local law enforcement local, she said.
“We are opposing ICE coming into our communities and terrorizing people,” she said. “I see it as a politically motivated, privately run and funded police-state operation based on hatred of anybody who’s different. … It’s an ethnic cleansing.”
Petition organizers plan to run their campaign through Sept. 30. The petition can be viewed at mascomaforward.com/ice-petition.
