Sheriff’s Office to enforce ‘Warrant Service Officer Model’ with ICE under Texas’ Senate Bill 8

UPDATE (May 19, 2026) -- A spokesperson with DHS sent us the following statement:

“Partnerships with law enforcement are critical to having the resources we need to arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country. We have had tremendous success when local law enforcement work with us.”

“ICE has supercharged efforts with state and local law enforcement to assist federal immigration officers in our efforts to make America safe again. Those partnerships, known as 287(g) agreements, have increased 753%--from 135 agreements to 1,152.”

Some of the public safety threats arrested by ICE in Texas include:

• Javier Barrientos, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, convicted of homicide.
• Alejandro Gonzalez-Ramirez, a criminal illegal alien from Cuba, convicted of sex offense against child-fondling.
• Reydell Oviedo Jimenez, a criminal illegal alien from Cuba, convicted of kidnapping, robbery – street gun, forgery, fraud, illegal use of credit cards, burglary.
• Maximiliano Alcala Villegas, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, convicted of robbery – street gun, possession of stolen vehicle, gang activity.
• Bartolo Gonzalez-Saenz, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, convicted of drug trafficking and cocaine possession.

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EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) - The El Paso County Commissioners Court received a presentation Monday from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office regarding Texas Senate Bill 8, a state law enforced by the Texas Attorney General's Office.

SB 8 requires sheriffs in counties with populations over 10,000 to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE; it was passed by the state legislature and signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on June 20, 2025.

Under the bill, Sheriffs can enter into three agreements with ICE; the El Paso County Sheriff's Office has chosen the 'Warrant Service Officer Model' (WSO), which allows officers to serve and execute administrative warrants on migrants in the sheriff's office's custody at county jails.

The 'Warrant Service Officer Model (WSO) is composed of a jail-based warrant service to incarcerated individuals, an 8-hour ICE training session, which the El Paso County Sheriff's Office says it has the "lowest operational burden" with immigration enforcement and a "streamlined ICE detainer process."

During the presentation to County Commissioners, the EPCSO says the other two models, the Jail Enforcement Model (JEM) and the Task Force Model (TFM), require more resources than the WSO. They say they could have an impact on jail capacity, staffing and training, plus a "potential effect on public trust and community relations."

Senate Bill 8 and the request for 287 (g) will ask the Sheriff's Office here to request and enter into the agreements while operating a jail; department officials say other necessary resources will have to be allocated.

SB 8 has a state grant program, for which applications are now open, and the County of El Paso is eligible for a $120,000 grant (population of 500,000 to 999,000) to cover costs not reimbursed by the federal government.

Eligible uses are the following:

• Personnel
• Jail housing
• Training
• Equipment

This state grant must be used within two years, with a compliance report every April of even years; something the county says these funds will unlikely cover the long-term costs of SB 8.

These are the El Paso County Sheriff's plans:

• Request WSO agreement
• Limited impact on jail capacity
• No agreement with ICE to house inmates; they could be held no longer than 48 hours
• Law already requires compliance with immigration detainers.

ABC-7 spoke with County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, who says in his eight years in office, he has "never had any state support."

"There's the word 'collaboration,' we're supposed to collaborate with ICE and it's being imposed by the state. If you look at how ridiculous that is, the state is telling us to do federal things and we're not even involved in ICE, nor do they have any communication with us," County Judge Samaniego said. "It's very clear that it has to do with deportation, the end result is that they want to deport and they want us to help out; that's an issue that they have, that we don't have and they are asking us to be participants and collaborators in deportation."

El Paso County Sheriff's Office Chief Deputy Emmanuel Soria says it is still an unknown process they need to get used to. It's also early for them to know or determine how many officers they will need for SB 8, but he says Sheriff Ugarte wanted to do the model that was "the least intrusive" in terms of immigration enforcement.

"These agreements are new in terms of being put in place and we continue to navigate as to how the program is going to run," Deputy Chief Soria said. "We continue to reach out as far as the training that these officers are going to need, the databases that they need, the certifications that they are going to need and all because these databases are not of the county, they don't belong to the sheriff's office, they belong to the federal government."

For Deputy Chief Soria, the agency knows public safety is very expensive, and they're already seeing the effects of resource and staffing constraints, among other factors, as prices have gone up because there's a need everywhere.

"At the end of the day, we want the community to know that the big takeaway is that this agreement does not put any proactive response on our part in terms of immigration; we want to continue to have that relationship with the community because it's important for us," Soria said. "This is a program that's already in place and we want the community to feel safe and we will continue to foster that; the relationship with the community of El Paso."

"I'm sure that if you had a choice of being protected and us focusing on deportation and immigration matters, I think 99% of the of our community would be more interested in having public safety," County Judge Samaniego said. "We don't get any money from state inmates; the state inmate population is zero amount of money that comes in and takes away from the federal inmate population funds; some of these laws used to be federal, so it takes away the funding that we used to get from federal inmates."

According to Samaniego, the County of El Paso already has immense funding challenges that are all based on unfunded state mandates.

The Border Network for Human Rights' Executive Director, Fernando Garcia, said they don't know what the situation with Senate Bill 8 will look like, the extent of it, the number of Sheriff's officers needed for it, or the start date.

"It seems that there's still no agreement yet with the state of Texas, but at least we know what is the direction the sheriff is going to take," Garcia said. "This is just not a benign strategy in our county jail; it is part of a massive deportation strategy that is held by, obviously, by the administration, but also by the state of Texas."

Even though there are a lot of "unknowns" for both the County and BNHR, they said they oppose SB 8 and other state of Texas immigration enforcement laws.

"How is this going to be handled? What is the impact that this is going to have on the communities, on the jails, on the officers? So I think transparency and accountability are going to be something that we're going to be demanding in the next few days, in the next few weeks and months," Garcia added.

ABC-7 reached out to DHS and ICE for comment and to learn more about their collaborations with the state of Texas and local Sheriff's Offices; we are still awaiting a response.