A new Indiana law calls for ICE-related training for officers. Whether it has been provided is unclear.

Lawmakers delayed Indiana’s sweeping immigration legislation last year for several reasons, one being it failed to provide local law enforcement with training to handle federal immigration procedures.

So this year, Fort Wayne Republican Sen. Liz Brown made sure to include a training provision. But that aspect of the legislation — which she repeatedly said law enforcement asked her to include — might not have been hugely helpful. It’s hard to tell.

Senate Enrolled Act 76, which went into effect July 1, states that the Indiana Department of Correction, in consultation with the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, would identify training opportunities for county jails performing federal immigration procedures, including how agencies should implement the section of the law requiring compliance with federal immigration detainer requests, which were previously voluntary.

During this year’s legislative session, Brown called the training piece of Senate Enrolled Act 76, known as the Indiana FAIRNESS Act, a “very, very important” part of the bill.

“Law enforcement has universally in this state said we will be happy to follow the laws, we will even be happy to help the federal law enforcement enforce their laws, but we’d need the training to do so properly,” Brown told Fort Wayne-based WPTA 21Alive earlier this year.

The Legislature’s 2026 bill addressed those concerns, she said.

But according to the Attorney General’s Office, training options had already been made available to law enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security.

“This training provision is … probably the least important provision in the bill, because it doesn’t really do anything other than kind of identify something that the state and the feds and others have been doing for a while now to try to help educate sheriffs,” said Blake Lanning, the assistant chief deputy for the Indiana Attorney General’s Office, in an interview with The Indiana Lawyer last week.

As the law went into effect earlier this week, it was unclear whether the training provision had been met.

When The Indiana Lawyer asked Lanning to provide the training materials or to talk with our reporter about what was coming, he said to stay tuned: The Attorney General’s Office and the Indiana Department of Correction were working to put something out.

“I don’t want to kind of get ahead of that before there’s actually something that satisfies Section 11, but in a nutshell, that being said, there will be something coming down the pike,” he said.

Paige Gehlhausen, press secretary for the Senate Majority Communications Office, told The Indiana Lawyer on June 26 that the Department of Correction has not made training requirements public yet but that she believed they would be available to the public on July 1 (after The Indiana Lawyer’s deadline for publication).

Brown did not want to do an interview with The Lawyer without having that information, she said.

How it was advertised

During the 2025 legislative session, state Rep. J.D. Prescott, R-Union City, presented legislation that intended to align state law with the federal government’s more active enforcement of immigration laws.

Prescott’s bill passed the House with ease, but in the Senate Judiciary Committee, it stalled. Brown, who was then the committee’s chair, did not give the bill a hearing, meaning the measure died before the full Senate could weigh in. Several Republican lawmakers and leaders condemned Brown’s decision, with Rokita one of the loudest decriers.

Rokita alleged that Brown stalled the legislation because “she’s got a family member who’s an illegal alien.” Brown has adamantly denied that claim and even filed an official grievance and disciplinary complaint against Rokita for his comments.

Brown later said she chose to hold Prescott’s legislation because she had concerns over the nature of immigration detainer requests, since they are not judicial warrants.

“There have to be certain procedures and processes followed so that the sheriffs are not held liable and the sheriffs are not held in violation of someone’s due process if they pick up the wrong person,” Brown said in a radio interview with Indianapolis’ WIBC on Oct. 15, 2025.

Immigration detainer requests are administrative warrants that ICE issues to local law enforcement agencies, asking them to hold a detainee up to 48 hours beyond their release date so federal officers can arrive and determine the next course of action.

But detainer requests are just that — requests. Unlike judicial warrants, they do not always include a judge’s signature, which is one reason why Monroe County Sheriff Ruben Marté is involved in a lawsuit with Rokita. Since April, Marté has argued that the state’s new law — which requires all government entities to comply with “all requests made” in immigration detainer requests — would encourage his officers to violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects citizens and noncitizens alike from unreasonable searches and seizures.

In a previous court filing, Marté highlighted a recent decision from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, in which a judge sided with an individual who argued that Suffolk County police detained him longer than constitutionally permitted.

On Jan. 2, 2025, Judge William Kuntz granted the plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment, finding that ICE detainers are civil, not criminal, in nature. Kuntz said detainers do not constitute probable cause unless local law enforcement has specific authorization through a 287(g) agreement — a formal, voluntary agreement between ICE and local law enforcement that essentially deputizes officers to perform the duties of ICE agents, including interrogating and detaining individuals suspected of being unauthorized immigrants.

A jury later awarded $112 million in damages to a class of plaintiffs in the case.

This year, Brown filed her own version of last year’s immigration legislation, which she dubbed the Indiana FAIRNESS Act. (Fairness stands for Forging American Independence, Restoring National Exceptionalism, Safely and Securely).

Prescott also refiled his 2025 bill, which had already been promoted as the FAIRNESS Act. (In his bill, FAIRNESS stood for Fostering and Advancing Immigration Reforms Necessary to Ensure Safety and Security.)

When Brown presented her bill, she expressly said that it would give law enforcement the security they needed and wanted to best comply with state and federal laws.

“The situation in Minnesota highlights how important it is to have law enforcement well-trained on immigration and for elected leaders to have their back,” Brown wrote in a social media post on X on Jan. 27, appearing to reference the civil unrest following ICE’s aggressive crackdown on immigration in the Minneapolis area earlier this year. “Indiana law enforcement asked for training on detainer warrants and I’m proud that my immigration bill … provides them with that training among many other strong immigration enforcement measures!”

But the bill’s final language did not explain what the training would actually entail; the law simply states that the Department of Correction, in consultation with the attorney general, would identify training options for cooperation between county jails and ICE and for procedures to implement the law’s detainer compliance section.

“It’s all a red herring,” Rokita said during a press conference on Feb. 19. “It’s no special training. … There was no reason to hold up a bill last session for it.”

What does training look like?

At the time of writing, The Lawyer reached out to several Indiana sheriff’s offices, along with the Indiana Sheriff’s Association, which has been distributing training materials to local agencies, to understand what would be involved in the training.

Maj. Bryce Wolf with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office said last week that his office had received the Indiana Lawyer to the Indiana Department training materials. Messages to the IDOC asking about the training materials and requesting a copy or link went unanswered.

Wolf said the materials were “substantive in nature” and his office would implement them in accordance with the law.

Wolf did not respond to whether he believes the training materials would give his officers more confidence or a feeling of legal security in complying with state requirements regarding immigration detainer requests.

He directed questions about the nature of the materials to the Indiana Sheriff’s Association.

The sheriff’s association did not return The Lawyer’s message.

Delaware County Sheriff Tony Skinner, who had testified before the House Judiciary Committee in support of the legislation, told The Lawyer last week that his office had received a sort of rough draft of the training materials.

Skinner described the information he had received as “common sense stuff,” but he indicated that the information might be expounded on in future, final materials.

Lanning, the assistant chief deputy for the Attorney General’s Office, said to “stay tuned” as the Attorney General’s Office and the Department of Correction finalize what the specific training opportunities are.

But Lanning also noted that ICE has previously posted resources on its website and that ICE regional officials have given presentations to sheriffs across the state.

In-person training has not been ruled out, he said.

“There is just kind of an amalgamation of different sources, whether it’s online materials, in-person training courses that ICE provides, or other training opportunities that organizations like FAIR might make available as well,” Lanning said. (FAIR is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a conservative nonprofit organization that advocates for stronger immigration policies.)

For now, hopes

In a May court filing in Sheriff Marté’s federal lawsuit against Rokita, John Raven, the supervisory detention and deportation officer at ICE’s Chicago field office, said that since May 1, 2024, ICE has issued about 6,118 immigration detainer requests to sheriff’s offices in Indiana. Of those, about 6,002 were honored.

Lanning said those numbers show that Indiana law enforcement already knows what is expected.

“The vast majority of Indiana sheriffs already know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re doing it really well,” Lanning said. “They were already honoring detainers and are going to continue honoring detainers, and they do not need training to know what they’re doing because they’ve been doing it for decades.”

Sheriff Skinner said his officers did not raise concerns about needing training for complying with immigration detainers.

Even still, Skinner said he believes training is important for his officers’ peace of mind.

“Everybody’s always worried about, you know, covering your butt and worried about liability. … If I do something wrong, am I going to get in trouble?” Skinner said. “I think this helps take that part out of the equation.”

As originally passed by the Senate, SEA 76 included an affirmative defense to a civil action for officers who completed training on cooperation between county jails and ICE. But in a sweeping committee amendment brought forward by Rep. Prescott, the defense was cut.

Some immigration attorneys The Lawyer spoke with were interested in seeing how the training plays out in practice, but they remained cautious.

Sarah Burrow, a director of Lewis Kappes’s immigration practice, said whatever training comes out should be more than just outlining the state’s laws — it should promote considerate interactions between police and immigrants.

“In the end, if what they want is compliance and cooperation in situations where law enforcement is encountering immigrants, then it’s important to communicate respectfully and treat people humanely,” Burrow said. “That fosters cooperation.”•