The count grows, and now there's a number on it. A new report finds the number of state and local officers working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement has doubled over the last eight years. WUKY has the story.

For readers who haven't spent 26 years carrying a badge, here's what that means in plain terms. The main vehicle is the 287(g) program, named for the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that created it. It deputizes local officers to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, mostly processing aliens already in their jails. There's also the Warrant Service Officer program, which lets local cops execute ICE administrative warrants inside their own facilities. Neither program turns a county deputy into a federal agent. Both give ICE reach it could never buy with its own payroll.

Do the math. ICE's own deportation corps has always been small against the size of the job. Every 287(g) agreement signed is force multiplication without a single new hire, and the agreements have been piling up.

Eight years is a long time, but doubling over that stretch still says something: the trend line runs one direction. More agencies, more deputized officers, more reach. The open-borders crowd spent those same eight years insisting local police would never go along with federal immigration enforcement. The report says otherwise.

The other side's objection is always the same: local police shouldn't do federal immigration work because it scares people out of reporting crime. I heard that argument for two decades and never bought it. In my experience, the practical result of a signed agreement was that a jail stopped being a revolving door for criminal aliens. Your mileage may vary, but that's what I saw.

Most of this work happens in jail booking rooms, not at traffic stops. An alien gets arrested for burglary, fingerprints hit the system, ICE gets a lookup, and a detainer gets filed. A detainer is a request that the jail hold the person so ICE can come take custody. The bread and butter of 287(g) is paperwork catching people who were already in custody for something else.

Sanctuary jurisdictions remain the holdout, and every detainer they refuse is a bet that the guy walks straight. We all know how those bets turn out.

Eight years, double the officers. The enforcement network is wider than anything I saw at the start of my career, and I don't see it shrinking.

Scoreboard: deputized local officers, doubled in eight years. Still climbing.