EXCLUSIVE — The state of Oklahoma is undertaking a first-in-the-nation initiative emptying jails and prisons of criminal illegal immigrants by sending them directly to federal immigration authorities at the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Over the past nine months, the state has developed a plan for turning over more than 500 locked-up criminals to ICE for deportation. It sounds like a simple task, but Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-OK) has said he wants to cut through the red tape — and in some cases, sentences — to save taxpayers money and get what President Donald Trump’s administration has referred to as the “worst of the worst” out of the state and country.
“Oklahoma is a law and order state, and we were the first to implement an effort to remove criminal illegal immigrants from our jails and prisons,” Stitt said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Operation Guardian continues to be a success. We are signaling to the world that Oklahoma will not be a sanctuary for criminal activity.”
Oklahoma’s efforts coincide with Trump’s campaign promise to carry out widespread deportations.
Oklahoma’s pilot program, Operation Guardian, is led by Public Safety Commissioner Tim Tipton. Tipton said planning the deportation of illegal immigrants already in custody rather than those on the street would allow the state and federal government to nab the “low-hanging fruit.”
At Stitt’s direction, Oklahoma began planning to work with the Trump administration before President Donald Trump took office.
Since days after the November 2024 election, the state has been looking at removing people from prison. As of late 2024, when the state was drafting the plan, it had more than 500 illegal immigrants incarcerated for $36,000 per day. The effort could reduce state spending on housing illegal immigrants in prison by more than $1 million per month.
The program prioritizes inmates being released soon, inmates in prison for years to come, and inmates in jail on lesser convictions.
In the past, when an inmate was slated for release from prison, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections would notify ICE in hopes that federal police would go to the jail and take custody of that individual when they were released. That rarely happened, Tipton said.
“Now, with the new administration, nobody’s walking out the door. That’s a illegal alien there, once they finish their sentence and they’re being immediately turned over to ICE,” Tipton said. “They’ve been doing that over the past several months.”
The state has divided incarcerated illegal immigrants into violent offenders and nonviolent offenders since each faces different protocols for deportation. For nonviolent offenders, once the federal government has ordered that person to be deported, they can be made parole-eligible and quickly removed from the United States.
Roughly 50 to 60 incarcerated nonviolent offenders fall into this category. To date, all but a handful of them have agreed to waive deportation proceedings and head straight to deportation, except for a handful of Chinese and Cuban immigrants. Those few will be turned over to ICE, where they will be detained for an indefinite amount of time in a federal immigrant detention facility in nearby Texas as they go through court proceedings, according to Tipton.
The process is not about checking a box and turning people over to ICE. Inmates must go before the state’s parole board and be approved for parole for the sake of being deported.
“We’re in the process of doing that. They’ve already voted on quite a few of them,” Tipton said. “Hopefully, coming up pretty soon, we’ll have a large number of them, a couple of busloads of them to take out of Oklahoma custody and take them down to Texas [to an ICE facility].”
The state is targeting several hundred illegal immigrants convicted of misdemeanor crimes who are detained in jails across its 77 counties. Commuting sentences will require working with the district judge and the prosecutor’s office.
illegal immigrants convicted of violent offenses, roughly 250 inmates, are a top priority for the Stitt administration.
Under Oklahoma’s Constitution, victims have the right to be heard at a parole hearing. In addition, Stitt planned to review every case personally.
Naida Henao, head of engagement for a Washington-based organization that helps victims of crime recover, told the Washington Examiner when this plan was first announced that victims may be uneasy about having assailants let out of prison early, even if they were to be deported.
“The reason for that is if someone is in prison in California, for example, I, as a survivor, know where they are,” said Henao, of the Network for Victim Recovery of DC. “If someone is deported, I don’t know where they are. They could be in the country they were deported to. They could be on their way back. They could have been back in the country. They could be in my neighborhood. No one knows, and no one can then update me.”
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Since Trump took office, Tipton indicated that Stitt intends to ensure violent offenders finish their sentences.
“If there’s a victim involved or somebody who’s done some kind of violent crime — rape, murder, those types of things — I’m sure he won’t allow them to be removed from the country and be paroled back to their home country until they’ve served out their sentence and justice has been served, unless the federal administration wants to take them and transfer them into a federal facility or another facility out of the country to finish serving out their sentence,” Tipton said. “We’ve been talking to the Trump administration about that as well.”