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No North Carolina law enforcement official has cheered President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda as much as Rockingham County’s cowboy hat-wearing sheriff, Sam Page.
Behind closed doors, on social media, and in front of news cameras, he has helped to popularize a once-taboo but now ascendant conception of migrants as nearly synonymous with criminals, even terrorists. For at least half of the 26 years he’s been sheriff, Page has energetically promoted some of the most controversial enforcement ideas that the incoming president and his allies have floated.
As early as 2011, Page urged federal officials to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, clearing the way for the use of “military assets.” At the time, the proposal was a political nonstarter—Page later recalled then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano telling him, “Sheriff, we are not at war with Mexico”—but Trump and his advisers have been reportedly debating a “soft invasion.” And in his inaugural address, Trump confirmed that he planned to move ahead with the terrorist designations.
Page has cast himself as chief spokesman for the idea that “every sheriff is a border sheriff now” because of the drugs that come across the southern border. He has appeared on Fox News in tactical-style desert drab alongside Arizona sheriffs pushing for more federal immigration enforcement. He has also testified repeatedly before lawmakers in both Raleigh and Washington with the message that deporting more immigrants would make communities like his—which is a two-day drive from the U.S.-Mexico border—safer.
All the while, Page has become enmeshed in the political networks helping to shape the second Trump administration’s agenda. He’s a longtime member of a subgroup of the National Sheriffs’ Association focused on the border and immigration and involved with a constellation of organizations founded by the late Dr. John Tanton, a prime architect of the anti-immigration movement.
In 2016, Page led the group Sheriffs for Trump. In 2020, he was Trump’s North Carolina campaign chair. And Tom Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and Trump’s new “border czar,” endorsed Page’s unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor last year. At a rally in Greensboro last March, Trump himself shouted out Page as a “fantastic guy.”
But as the new administration readies its plans for “the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” with sheriffs described as essential partners, Page has been uncharacteristically quiet. In early January, he encouraged his Facebook followers to listen to an interview Homan gave to right-wing media personality Dr. Phil about the role of sheriffs but said no more. Through a spokesman, he declined to speak with The Assembly before Inauguration Day.
It’s possible Page thinks he has said enough. The Republican Party seems to have fully embraced his vision. A bill he pushed in the General Assembly to force every North Carolina sheriff into cooperation with ICE, House Bill 10, finally passed into law in November, five years after the first version was introduced. His candidate won the presidency. Even some Democrats have signed onto the idea that immigrants charged with low-level misdemeanors such as shoplifting should be swiftly deported in the name of public safety.
In many respects, we now live in the world Page set out to make. Need he say more?
A ‘Double Whammy’
This is an anxious time for immigrant rights advocates.
“Here in North Carolina, we kind of had the double whammy of Trump got elected and then HB10 passed,” said Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of Siembra NC, a group that does “know your rights” training in immigrant communities.
The new law went into effect in December, stripping the state’s sheriffs of discretion on whether to comply with immigration detainers, which are requests to hold certain inmates in jail for up to two business days beyond when they would normally be released so that ICE can pick them up.
ICE has discretion on whether to issue a detainer, and immigrants suspected of crimes and held on detainers are expected to be a key target for Trump officials hoping to boost deportations to record highs. Advocates predict Trump’s ICE will issue far more detainers than the agency did during the Biden administration and will expand the categories of people considered enforcement priorities.
Most North Carolina sheriffs were already complying with detainers prior to HB10’s passage. But not all; the outliers were concentrated in the state’s most populous, Democratic-leaning counties, including Mecklenburg and Wake.
Both counties elected sheriffs in 2018 who promised to stop honoring detainers and end participation in a program called 287(g) that trained jail deputies to perform some tasks normally reserved for immigration officers. Shortly after the partnerships ended, ICE sent its agents into the newly noncompliant counties to round up more than 200 immigrants, many of whom faced no pending criminal charges. A regional ICE executive declared that type of operation the “new normal.”
“Here in North Carolina, we kind of had the double whammy of Trump got elected and then HB10 passed.”
Nikki Marín Baena, co-director of Siembra NC
“This [roundup] is the direct result of some of the dangerous policies some of our county sheriffs have put into place,” Sean Gallagher, an ICE supervisor in Atlanta, told The Charlotte Observer at the time. “It really forces my officers to go out onto the street to conduct more enforcement operations out in the community.”
Mecklenburg County residents felt the brunt of ICE’s frustration, local immigrant rights organizer Stefanía Arteaga recalled in an interview. The agency put up billboard ads featuring mug shots of immigrants who were suspected of crimes and released after posting bond or under other routine conditions while their charges were pending. “WANTED BY ICE” and “RELEASED BY: MECKLENBURG COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE,” the signs read in big white letters on a red and black background.
Arteaga noticed that ICE operations seemed coordinated with the legislative effort to force sheriffs to honor detainers. “Whenever we saw the bill move, we saw some kind of ICE operation that highlighted their claim that there was a need,” she said.
Immigrant rights advocates anticipate similar tactics from the new Trump administration if Republican state lawmakers or federal officials suspect urban sheriffs aren’t complying with the new law.
Homan, Trump’s border czar, has threatened so-called sanctuary jurisdictions with lawsuits and raids that will result in more “collateral arrests,” as the earlier Charlotte operations did, sweeping up people who fall outside the administration’s priority categories. “Don’t test us,” he warned in a November press conference.
And the new N.C. House speaker, Destin Hall, promised in an op-ed last week to continue to pursue legislation like the new law, which he characterized as helping “close dangerous loopholes, ensuring violent criminals are held accountable.”
In that context, local officials who oppose the mass deportation push have little incentive to speak out. Sejal Zota, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, said advocates hope to persuade some law enforcement leaders to use the discretion they still have without making grand public declarations.
They could, for example, encourage patrol officers to opt for citations over arrests in certain circumstances, such as when they discover during a routine traffic stop that the driver lacks a driver’s license. Issuing a citation in that scenario would keep the driver from being booked into jail, where their fingerprints must, under state law, be run against both criminal justice and immigration databases.
Beckie Moriello, founder of Raleigh Immigration Law Firm, said she is encouraged that her office hasn’t been flooded with calls since HB10 took effect. But she’s not counting a win yet.
Moriello fears that a bill moving through Congress, named for Laken Riley, a young white nursing student in Georgia slain by an undocumented immigrant who had been released from jail while a shoplifting charge was pending, could motivate officers to make low-level arrests with the real intention of enforcing immigration law.
The bill expands the list of criminal charges for which federal authorities must detain immigrants.
Immigrant rights advocates also worry that the political environment could encourage Page and like-minded sheriffs to seek to further expand their role in the nation’s deportation machinery.
Fifteen North Carolina sheriffs, Page among them, currently participate in 287(g), the more intensive partnership with ICE.
Some advocates wonder whether the Trump administration, with encouragement from eager sheriffs, might try to tweak that program to delegate more responsibilities to participating local agencies, or that the General Assembly could move to make participation in 287(g) a requirement. That could prompt more sheriffs to make driver’s license checkpoints a common practice and choose to book traffic law violators into jail. It could also facilitate the workplace raids Homan has promised.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently called a special legislative session to draft policy changes that align with Trump’s immigration-related plans, which he said he got to preview. So far, North Carolina’s Republican leaders, who often look to Florida for inspiration, aren’t saying whether the transition team has been in touch.
Rockingham County Attorney Clyde Albright told The Assembly in response to a request for communications that Page and his command staff may have had with the transition team that such records could be exempt from the state’s public records law. “Records, including emails, that are personal and don’t relate to public business are not subject to general public access,” he wrote.
More than a month later, no records have been released.
‘Being Aggressive Is Not That Bad’
Page, 67, learned the value of a publicity stunt early in his political career.
After losing his 1994 bid for Rockingham County sheriff, positioned as a moderate Democrat, he switched parties and invited campaign help from North Carolina’s most colorful “tough on crime” sheriff, Gerald Hege, from nearby Davidson County.
In his successful 1998 run for sheriff of the largely rural county north of Greensboro, Page sought far more media attention. He portrayed his opponent, one of the state’s longest-serving sheriffs, as “political,” vowing to bring back deputies he said were fired for associating with him. He talked about stripping TV and smoking privileges from inmates and adopting one of Hege’s favorite tactics: traffic checkpoints.
Once elected, Page took more cues from Hege, painting two disciplinary cells pink with polka dots and inviting reporters in to take photographs. “It sends a message that if you want to act like children, you’ll be treated like children,” he told The Associated Press. He also started wearing military-style fatigues and carrying an M16 assault rifle.
“We’ve got to take chances,” Page said. “Being aggressive is not that bad.”
Then, as now, it proved good politics.
In 2010, the year Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070, the “show me your papers” law expanding the role of local law enforcement in immigration enforcement, Page took his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border. He was president of the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association at the time and looking for a way to focus the role. The cause stuck.
He has gone back to the border year after year—sometimes to Arizona, other times to Texas—networking with sheriffs and posing for cameras, then recapping his trips in appearances on Fox News, Newsmax, and local radio, not to mention his re-election campaign websites. He’s now handily won office seven times.
Page has earned a reputation as a sheriff with sway over his peers, perhaps in part due to his eagerness to provide public testimony, said Jessica Pishko, the Asheville-based author of The Highest Law in the Land, a book about the political power of sheriffs. Page is widely credited with getting the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association to publicly back HB10, even though the law curtails their ability to use discretion—something elected law enforcement officials tend to vigorously oppose.
“If we fail to secure our borders, every Sheriff in America will become a border Sheriff.”
Sam Page, Rockingham County Sheriff
Some of Page’s early career bravado has dissipated. He now often opts for suits over fatigues, and he’s quick to point out that he supports legal immigration and that immigrants who commit crimes often target others in their own communities.
But he’s still eager to jump into hot topics. For example, as officers who refused COVID vaccines were ousted from law enforcement agencies across the country, Page launched a messaging campaign inviting them to work for him instead.
In 2023, he took on state Senate leader Phil Berger, arguably North Carolina’s most powerful elected official, speaking out forcefully against one of the senator’s top legislative priorities: expansion of casinos. The two men, who both live in Eden, have a history of friction dating to at least 2005, when Page declined to endorse Berger’s son and namesake for district attorney.
At the time of the casino debate, Page was running for lieutenant governor. But Triad residents soon began receiving calls from a mysterious pollster asking questions about a potential election matchup between Berger and Page for Berger’s Senate seat. Page came out 30 points ahead in results shown to The News & Observer, a finding Page called “very impressive,” though he ultimately opted not to enter Berger’s race.
Page has not shied away from his long association with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a hate group, citing its founder Tanton’s racist statements and associations with white nationalists and eugenicists.
In the wake of a scandal, like his office’s loss of liability insurance last summer after a wave of jail suicides, Page tends to revert back to publicizing his immigration advocacy, much of which is tied in with FAIR. (Homan, too, has links to the group, as a former senior fellow at a sister organization, the Immigration Reform Law Institute.)
Last September, Page wrote on Facebook that he was about to go to McAllen, Texas, for a FAIR training session at which he would present on HB10, newly passed in the General Assembly.
“I look forward to bringing what I learn back to my fellow N.C. Sheriffs, State and Federal, and Local officials so we can work together to protect our citizens from the threats posed by the Mexican Drug Cartels,” he wrote.
Then he quoted himself on an earlier visit to the border: “If we fail to secure our borders, every Sheriff in America will become a border Sheriff.”
Page’s internal data, however, doesn’t make a strong case that there’s a clear and present local threat.
An email he received in November from a jail deputy, obtained by The Assembly through a public records request, says that in the 10 months from January through October 2024, 59 of the 3,102 people booked into the Rockingham County Detention Center—2 percent—were undocumented.
The list of related charges makes no mention of homicide, kidnapping, or aggravated assault, let alone terrorism.
Two people were booked as fugitives from other states, one was charged with possessing a firearm after a felony conviction, and four faced drug charges. Almost half of the charges were alcohol-related.
The report also reviews detainer requests going back to 2010, when Rockingham County began participating in a data-sharing program with ICE called Secure Communities.
Detainers peaked in 2012, during the Obama administration, with 47 in the course of the year. During Trump’s first term, ICE sent about half as many. The numbers dropped into the single digits under Biden.
Though ICE had access to information on every unauthorized immigrant booked into Rockingham County jail, they picked up fewer than 4 in 10, the email shows.
Researchers have repeatedly found that undocumented immigrants commit crime at a rate lower than U.S.-born citizens.
Trump has nonetheless embraced the same policy prescriptions Page has championed.
In his inaugural address Monday, Trump promised a new “golden age” in which “our sovereignty will be reclaimed” and “our safety will be restored.”
He vowed to declare a national emergency at the southern border, deploy troops there, designate cartels as terrorist organizations, and send back “millions and millions of criminal aliens.”
He will, he said, “use the full and immense power of federal and state law enforcement to eliminate the presence of all foreign gangs and criminal networks bringing devastating crime to U.S. soil.”
A standing ovation punctuated each sentence.
Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.