The sheriff who oversees Texas’ largest city severed a controversial partnership with federal immigration authorities on the same day the Trump administration unveiled its plans to ramp up the program nationwide.

Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, whose jurisdiction includes Houston, said on Tuesday that county jailers would no longer work to identify undocumented inmates and detain them for possible deportation. Instead, the 10 deputies trained under an Immigration and Customs Enforcement program known as 287(g) will focus on other priorities within Gonzalez’s cash-strapped and overcrowded jail, he said.

The announcement made by Gonzalez, a Democrat, arrived just hours after the White House formalized plans to aggressively expand the ICE program as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown. It also comes as Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, a Republican and Trump ally, has punished local governments in his state that enact policies that appear to be lenient toward illegal immigrants.

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Gonzalez insisted that his decision to cut ties with the ICE partnership, which is voluntary, was motivated by finances, not politics. He told the Houston Chronicle that staff shortages at his jail had recently hiked overtime costs to $1 million every two weeks. Meanwhile, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office spent nearly $700,000 a year in salaries alone to participate in the 287(g) program.

“Ending this voluntary agreement will free up at least $675,000 in the [sheriff’s office] budget, allowing our department to more effectively direct resources to address local public safety issues,” Gonzalez wrote in a letter notifying ICE of his decision to discontinue the partnership.

Speaking to the Chronicle on Tuesday he added: “We’ll still be cooperating with local, state and federal authorities as we always have, we just won’t have our manpower resources inside the jail doing that.”

But it is precisely the manpower of local law enforcement that the Trump administration hopes to harness as it looks to dramatically increase the number of undocumented immigrants that are detained and deported from the U.S. In addition to authorizing plans to hire an additional 10,000 immigration and customs agents, a memo published by the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday shows it also wants to enlist more sheriffs’ deputies and police officers as enforcers through the 287(g) program.

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“[It is] a highly successful force multiplier that allows a qualified state or local law enforcement officer to be designated as an ‘immigration officer,’” the memo reads. “Such officers have the authority to perform all law enforcement functions… including the authority to investigate, identify, apprehend, arrest, detain, and conduct searchers.”

Though created in 1996, the ICE program is not widely used by law enforcement around the country. The ICE website currently lists just 38 partnerships with local or county agencies in 16 states, including Harris County. An estimated 575,000 undocumented immigrants live in the Houston metro area, far more than any other jurisdiction that’s now participating in the 287(g) program.

Other sheriffs, however, may soon be joining the partnership with ICE. Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, a regular fixture on Fox News and other conservative media, announced that he would soon enroll. Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, whose Texas jurisdiction includes Fort Worth and is the 16th most populous county in the U.S., announced earlier this month that his department is also applying for the 287(g) program.