To make sense of Trump’s law enforcement operations, it is useful to see the police less as a simple instrument of state power than as a political body in its own right, with different factions vying for leadership. Under Trump, the fortunes of CBP and ICE—together the country’s largest police force, though still far too small to cover this vast land—have risen, as have those of sheriffs, who have widely embraced far-right ideas on crime, immigration, and guns, buttressed by the idiosyncratic assumption that they themselves ought to be the Constitution’s chief enforcers. Meanwhile risk-averse police chiefs, particularly the reformers on whom Barack Obama relied after the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, have fallen into disfavor.
Police unions, which largely represent rank-and-file patrol officers, have incubated reactionary politics for decades. Although they initially coalesced, amid a wave of public-sector unionization in the 1960s, to fight for better working conditions—including protections from overbearing and erratic commanding officers—they immediately married labor militancy with a push for freer rein, rejecting civilian review and affirmative action inside the station house and hitting back against civil rights and black liberation on the streets. They have long seen progressive elected officials as an obstacle, if not an enemy, and have sought to outflank and overpower them, whether by forging alliances with conservative state legislators and lobbying for police-friendly legislation, or by more directly defying leaders with mass absenteeism (“the blue flu”) or other unlawful slowdowns and wildcat strikes. These unions have also commonly rejected reforms; after the first crescendo of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014–2015, they challenged new oversight and disciplinary measures across the country.
Although generally powerful locally, police unions held diminished sway in Washington during the Obama and Biden eras. National organizations retained a seat at the table, but they often had to share space with civil rights advocates. Joseph Biden had been a close supporter of police unions when he was the most powerful tough-on-crime Democrat in the Senate—but by the time he entered the White House the tide of law-and-order policies was receding as the crime rate ebbed and demonstrations against police killings of civilians continued. Like Obama before him, Biden focused on technocratic reforms, emphasizing “action to enhance accountability and repair trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve,” as the White House put it after a 2022 meeting with law enforcement groups.