A legal fight over Oklahoma's 2024 state law beefing up immigration enforcement for local jurisdictions could reshape policing in the state.
And it's taking up a lot of legal bandwidth.
In early September, lawyers representing a Tulsa nonprofit and several anonymous individual plaintiffs asked a federal appeals court for an extension. They needed more time to respond to the state's argument that local police should be able to arrest people violating federal immigration laws under state statute.
Those attorneys who work for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other civil rights advocacy groups are swamped with cases around the country, immigration-related and not.
In Oklahoma, the law they're fighting creates a new state crime called impermissible occupation, made illegal under House Bill 4156. It explicitly punishes violations of the already existing and identical federal crime of illegal entry and reentry into the U.S. with up to five years in state prison and a $1,000 fine.
State Attorney General Gentner Drummond is credited with jumpstarting the idea in the state legislature last year under the premise it would target human and drug trafficking syndicates. The measure passed along party lines despite heavy public pushback from immigrants and their allies.
It was instantly challenged and has been winding through the federal courts. It's part of an all-out deluge of litigation meant to fight deportation efforts across the country, said Noor Zafar, an ACLU attorney working on the case.
"But given competing obligations, we asked for and received an extension," she said.
This case related to Oklahoma's state law is currently in the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Right now, the law isn't in effect and is effectively "paused" after the Western U.S. District Court of Oklahoma ruled in favor of Padres Unidos de Tulsa, she said.Padres Unidos is a local Tulsa-area nonprofit aimed at supporting Latino families and students.
The new deadline to argue that Oklahoma's sweeping anti-immigration law is unconstitutional is at the end of October.
The week after the extension was granted, the Trump administration, 22 states, Guam and the right-leaning Federation for American Immigration Reform filed briefs in support of Oklahoma and reversing the lower district court's decision to halt the new law.
The U.S. argues that the Western U.S. District of Oklahoma Court judge who ordered the pause wrongfully applied the Constitutional Supremacy Clause, which says that federal law overrules state laws when they conflict.
Congress has not legislated so thoroughly and completely around immigration enforcement that states can't write their own laws, explains the U.S. brief, nor does Oklahoma's law directly conflict with already established federal law in that realm.
The stance is a complete 180-degree turn from its argument before Trump took office – and the U.S. Department of Justice, led by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, sided with Padres Unidos.
So, what started as a Biden administration-backed legal battle yielding court decisions that injected Oklahoma's immigrant communities with hope that they won't have to worry about local police racially profiling, arresting and ultimately helping to deport them has morphed into an uphill trudge with considerable opposition.
And such arrests and deportations are happening anyway, via a different legal means known as 287(g) agreements.
The agreements allow federal authorities to deputize local police with various levels of immigration enforcement powers. They've been essentially unused for the better part of a decade, but Trump brought back their implementation in force.
From Tulsa and Canadian counties to Vinita and Sterling, there are 21 such agreements in Oklahoma today, according to the nonprofit data newsroom The Markup. Seventeen of those were signed since Feb. 18, and one additional contract is pending.
Meanwhile, local immigration detentions across the state have increased by nearly 200% in 2025 compared to the previous two years, mostly in Tulsa and Oklahoma City.
Federal records obtained by the Deportation Data Project via a Freedom of Information Act request and analyzed by KOSU show that 1,994 people have been arrested, booked into one of 88 different local detention centers across Oklahoma, and flagged either for or by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation, as of July 28.
That includes 287 convicted criminals and 1,465 people with pending criminal charges – or no prior criminal history. It also includes a catch-all group of 242 people called "other immigration violators," which the data project indicates on its website can mean three things: an individual with at least one criminal conviction; no criminal convictions but at least one criminal charge; or no charges or convictions.
Criminal convictions of detainees range from everything like DUIs and traffic offenses – making up 70 of the total – to illegal entry and reentry, human and drug trafficking, assault, extortion and domestic violence, the data shows.
There is no 287(g) agreement between the Oklahoma County Jail and federal authorities. Instead, ICE cooperates with the county jail to detain and deport individuals under a 2007 state statute. It's a tool other local jurisdictions have used regularly for years, regardless of which administration is calling the shots in D.C.
The Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado's office is cooperating with federal authorities on their mass deportation plans with a jail enforcement agreement, as data shows 440 detentions at David L. Moss Justice Center as of late July. But one of the people who opposed House Bill 4156 in the legislature was former state Rep. and now-Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols.
Nichols promised shortly after winning his mayoral race that Tulsa Police would never cooperate with federal immigration authorities on broad deportations of non-criminals.
"Looking over the shoulder of folks and asking about their immigration status is just not something that we're ever going to be involved in," Nichols said last December.
Regardless of how cities are choosing to enforce existing agreements with ICE, Zafar said, she and the team of attorneys will fight the state to the end, come what may from the appellate court. To back down and allow the implementation of Oklahoma's new immigration law, she said, means to invite far more chaos into an already messy immigration policy environment.
At a minimum, she said, the 287(g) agreements ensure immigration enforcement is being carried out as Congress intended. Despite criticism that they enable racial profiling, they're constitutional, Zafar said.
"The problem with HB 4156 is it essentially creates state crimes that penalize conduct that is already …covered by federal law," she said. "So it puts state officers in the position of enforcing federal immigration law without having any training, without sort of having any of those protections or additional requirements that are present in 287(g) agreements."
The next court that could take up the question of House Bill 4156's constitutionality, if the 10th Circuit decision is appealed by either party, is the U.S. Supreme Court.
This story is part of a series produced in collaboration with La Semana, KOSU, The Frontier, The Oklahoma Eagle and the Tulsa Flyer.
Copyright 2025 KOSU
