Smith said the recruitment efforts haven’t occurred in Utah County — though he thinks they would have if he provided ICE with his officers’ information — but said the agency “for sure” has sent recruitment letters to deputies in Washington County.

“It’s just foul play to conduct business that way,” Smith told the Daily Herald. “You’re coming to us, in one instance, demanding help, and then in another instance, you’re asking for help, and it’s going back and forth. And when we say, ‘We’ll help you do these things,’ and we find that medium we’re comfortable with, now you’re going to target my employees? It’s not a good look.”

The recruitment appears to be a result of a ‘Defend the Homeland’ campaign ICE announced Tuesday, which is a push to recruit people to join the federal law enforcement agency. The campaign offers several benefits, including a maximum $50,000 signing bonus and student loan repayment and forgiveness options.

Smith said ICE is targeting officer crime detectives who are working high-level cases and investigating cartel members.

“If one of my employees wants to go work for ICE, great, if you feel like that’s where you need to be, I’ll help you get there,” Smith said. “But to target them in this fashion, that’s not how we do business on an executive-administrative level. We show each other a little more respect than that.”

The Sheriff believes the recruiting efforts are coming because ICE is short staffed. He said on almost a weekly basis in the county someone is arrested and placed in the Utah County Jail but is not found in the department’s database. When ICE is unavailable to assist, they’re subsequently released.

“I don’t have any way to verify who we’re dealing with, other than we know that they’re not citizens because they’re not coming up on any of our databases,” Smith said. “And then they get released because we can’t hold them anymore. And we’ll send a ping to ICE saying, ‘Hey, we got this person, we don’t know who it is.’ And they’re so swamped that we’re not getting any help before this person gets released back out into our community.”

Utah County Commission approved an 287(G) agreement last month with ICE to allow the Utah County Sheriff’s Office to enforce aspects of immigration.

The program, which other sheriff offices throughout the state are also choosing to opt-in to, gives county deputies an ability to access ICE databases to identify people they’ve arrested, Smith said.

“Last week, somebody got released back into the community that actually had an aggravated hold out of ICE that we weren’t able to verify,” Smith said. “I’m taking a lot of heat from a lot of people for these agreements, but the reality is the agreement keeps our community safe because ICE is understaffed and they’re not able to do their job. My intent getting into it is to help keep violent criminals off our streets.”

If the county is working with ICE while it attempts to hire away deputies in a way Smith views is bad faith, the question becomes how will the Utah County Sheriff’s Office navigate that relationship?

“We’re working on it,” Smith said. “I can tell you, from my understanding, this campaign of recruitment came from the leadership in Washington D.C. Our local (ICE) leadership, I don’t want to speak for him but I know they weren’t aware of it. They didn’t know this campaign was going to roll out.

“So we will still have good relations with them. We’re still working with them, but this needs to be fixed. I know they’re getting pressure from across the nation, because no one’s happy with this.”