A protester holds up a sign opposing collaboration between local police and federal immigration officials at the state Capitol in Phoenix on Feb. 10, 2025. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror

OAKLEY, MI — Oakley, a village in Saginaw County with a population just under 300 people, signed a cooperation agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as a 287(g) agreement, on March 24.

These agreements are formal cooperation agreements with ICE, which according to the agency’s website, “delegate state and local law enforcement officers the authority to perform specified immigration officer functions under ICE’s direction and oversight.”

There are four types of 287(g) agreements — Oakley’s is the Task Force Model, which an ICE fact sheet says “Allows your officers to identify and report suspected aliens not charged with crimes (under ICE oversight) and exercise limited immigration authority on ICE-led task forces.”

With the signing of Oakley’s agreement, eight jurisdictions in Michigan — five counties and three municipalities — have such agreements, though it is the smallest jurisdiction by far to have signed one.

It’s also the first in the state to be signed since the large-scale ICE deployment in Minneapolis that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal immigration agents in January. Prior to Oakley, the most recent agreement signed in Michigan was West Branch, a small city in Ogemaw County.

“It is disappointing to see another jurisdiction join the 287(g) program, especially an agency as beleaguered as the Oakley Police Department, which has seen past corruption by leadership and where local residents are calling for the department to be unfunded,” Christine Sauvé, the policy, engagement and communications manager for the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, wrote in a statement. “It is unwise and unfair to local residents for a town of fewer than 300 people to commit its limited local resources to an agreement with ICE that brings costly legal liability and reduces public safety. This decision will of course also harm immigrant families who live, work, or travel through Oakley.”

Such agreements have been heavily criticized, including by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who has emphasized the liability that local law enforcement agencies take on by cooperating with ICE in the case that federal agents do not follow proper procedures.

Oakley’s police department has faced a number of controversies — most notably, in 2014, the police department was completely disbanded for a matter of months after it was revealed that nearly 150 people, many of whom did not live in Oakley, were police reservists, including many who held positions of power or had donated to the police department.

After that, Marc Ferguson — who was fired from a position as an investigator at the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office after lying on the witness stand in a drug case — was named chief of the department, a position which he still holds, according to the city’s website. That background has caused distrust within Oakley, according to an ABC News 12 article from April 2025.

According to that article, the village has three other part-time officers in addition to Ferguson.