Earlier this month, Grafton County sheriff Jillian Myers pulled out of Grafton County’s 287(g) memorandum of understanding with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which she initially signed in March 2025. 287(g) agreements allow ICE to train local law enforcement personnel to perform the functions of federal immigration enforcement officers.
No immigration enforcement actions were taken by Grafton County law enforcement officials during the agreement, Grafton County commissioner Katie Hedberg said in an interview with The Dartmouth. Only one Grafton County officer — deputy sheriff Benjamin Adams — was trained to perform the functions of an ICE agent. Nineteen law enforcement agencies in New Hampshire, including the N.H. state police, currently have 287(g) agreements, according to ICE’s website.
Myers did not respond to multiple phone calls for comment. In January, she told The Dartmouth that she signed the 287(g) agreement so Grafton County officers who arrest individuals with ICE detainers can “help with th[eir] transport rather than having to stand by for hours on end, waiting for someone else to come up and pick them up.” Local law enforcement agencies without a 287(g) agreement cannot legally hold an individual solely based on an ICE detainer.
Hedberg said in an interview with The Dartmouth that she reached out to Myers on May 11 about the agreement after a constituent noticed that the Grafton County sheriff’s department was no longer listed on ICE’s website as an agency cooperating with ICE. Myers told Hedberg that she withdrew from the agreement in early May due to the “administrative burden” from 91A “Right to Know” requests for information from the public relating to ICE activity in Grafton County, Hedberg said.
“She [Myers] told me that she was getting a number of these [91A] requests, and they were taking a lot of her time, because she had to respond to them herself,” Hedberg said. “... Since they [Grafton County officers] were not engaging in enforcement activities, and there was an administrative burden, she decided to withdraw from the agreement.”
Hedberg said Myers did not seek approval from the Grafton County commissioners before signing the agreement last March.
Canaan, N.H. resident Alix Olson — who told The Dartmouth she worked in local law enforcement in the Midwest for 30 years — said she was “elated” by Myers’s decision to end the agreement. She spoke in opposition to it at a Grafton County commissioners’ meeting last year and organized a petition with the New Hampshire Immigrant Rights Network to encourage Myers and the commissioners to end the agreement, which she said collected over 800 signatures. She also submitted a 91A request to Myers in October 2025 to inquire about the department’s involvement in any ICE enforcement and ICE training Grafton County officers.
“I was very concerned about this [the 287(g) agreement], especially in light of what was happening more and more frequently in terms of the racial profiling,” Olson said. “Seventy or 75% of people detained have no criminal background at all.”
Olson, who said she campaigned for Myers in 2024, said Myers’ decision to sign the agreement “broke her heart.”
“I had encouraged her [to run] because I believe that women in law enforcement do a great job,” Olson said. “Imagine my surprise, as the saying goes, when I found out that she had, unbeknownst to anybody, put her signature on the memorandum of agreement with ICE.”
In an email statement to The Dartmouth, Hanover Police Department chief James Martin said he is not aware of any ICE action in Hanover in the past five years and wrote that HPD does not plan to join the 287(g) program.
Iris WeaverBell ’28 is a reporter and editor. She is from Portland, Ore., and is majoring in economics and minoring in public policy.
