Far From Any Border
Immigration checkpoints have reached interior state highways — run by local police Washington can't command, so it pays them. Whether it reaches your road is your state's call.
On Florida highways a thousand miles from the southern border, drivers now meet immigration checkpoints — and the officers working them are not federal agents. At two dozen agricultural inspection stations, the roadside stops where trucks and farm vehicles have always been required to pull in, every one of the state’s agricultural-enforcement officers was federally deputized last summer to enforce immigration law. They inspect the cargo and check immigration status in the same stop. A civil-liberties report this winter found the practice spreading — at least seventeen state highway agencies across the country now signed into the federal program, many setting up checkpoints of their own, including one on the only road into the Florida Keys that turned more than three hundred people over to federal agents.
Last week David Bier named what this has become. Bier studies immigration at the libertarian Cato Institute. The federal government, he said in a short video, is now paying state and local police to carry out immigration enforcement far from any border. He called it an assault on Americans’ freedom, and he did not mean only the people being stopped.
How the interior filled up
It is a new thing built on an old limit. Washington may set immigration policy, but it cannot draft your state’s police into enforcing it; the Supreme Court said so plainly in Printz v. United States, and has said so since. It can ask for help. It cannot command it.
So instead of commanding, it pays. Since last October the federal immigration agency has covered the cost of the cooperation it cannot compel — full salaries, part of the overtime, and quarterly bonuses that grow with the number of immigration arrests an officer makes. The deputizing agreements that allow it, known by their section number, 287(g), were a niche arrangement a year ago: about a hundred and thirty-five at the start of 2025, and more than two thousand by this June. Over eight thousand local officers are now trained to make immigration arrests for the federal government, some eighteen hundred of them Florida troopers. The checkpoints on Florida’s highways are what that expansion looks like on the ground.
None of this breaks the rule, and that is the point. An officer who signs up has not been conscripted; a county that takes the money has not been seized. They chose it. The limit still makes it impossible to force a state in against its will — but it does nothing to slow the ones willing to be paid. It protects whoever picks it up; everywhere else, the checkbook is open and the interior fills in.
Where you live decides
So whether a checkpoint appears on your road is not, in the end, a federal decision. It is a state one — and the only check that works without waiting on a federal lawsuit, because a program of paid volunteers gives a court nothing to strike down. Ten states have barred these agreements outright in law: Oregon, California, Illinois, New Jersey, and New Mexico among them. Twenty-one have gone the other way, passing laws that compel their localities to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement; Texas goes furthest, ordering the sheriffs who run its jails to sign these agreements outright, paying its counties to do it, and letting the attorney general sue any who refuse. Where one state keeps the checkpoint off its highways, another all but guarantees it.
At the checkpoint itself, the paper used to hold someone is often not a judge’s warrant but a form signed inside the federal agency — which a state can refuse to honor, and a few do, by demanding a real judicial warrant first.
None of this is hidden: the checkpoints are described by the officials who built them, the agreements counted, the laws on the books. A limit on federal power is not self-executing. It holds only where a state wrote it down before the pressure arrived, and is willing to defend it after.
What you can do
Look up your own state. See whether the law where you live keeps your police out of federal immigration work — or signs them into it — and whether anyone needs a judge’s warrant before your neighbors can be held. Then tell the people who represent you which line you want drawn.
Check your state: www.FederalLimits.org/federal
Reach your representatives in a minute:
https://FederalLimits.org/#take-action
A checkpoint on an interior highway is not a force of nature. It is a choice some state made — and one yours can still unmake, in advance and in writing.
— Federal Limits
Federal Limits is a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) nonprofit tracking the legal limits on federal authority — the due-process protections that apply to every American — across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. Our methodology, our sources, and every state’s full scorecard are public. This work is funded by people who believe those limits are worth defending. If that’s you, help keep it going at www.FederalLimits.org/support