In all likelihood, Tarrant County commissioners will vote Tuesday to extend the Sheriff’s Office’s agreement with federal immigration officials under the program known as 287(g).

That’s a mistake. The program is too divisive and produces too little benefit to continue.

Under 287(g), named for a section of federal immigration law, sheriffs can have deputies trained to perform checks with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when federal agents aren’t available. The feds pay the cost of training, but jailers must be diverted from other tasks.

It’s been controversial since the county first signed up in 2017. Many Hispanic residents and activist groups find it particularly egregious and warn that it could keep unauthorized immigrants from cooperating with police.

The court’s two Democratic commissioners, Roy Brooks of Fort Worth and Devan Allen of Arlington , are sure to vote against it, while the two Republicans, Gary Fickes of Colleyville and J.D. Johnson of northwest Tarrant County, will probably vote to keep it.

That leaves County Judge Glen Whitley, a Hurst Republican who was the swing vote when the program came up for renewal last year. He said last week that data from the last year show the program works and is carefully targeted.

“I feel like I’ll vote the same way,” he told the Star-Telegram Editorial Board. “I’m trying to keep people off the streets out of the neighborhoods that are committing serious crimes.

Opponents, he added, “are going to have to produce facts and data that would cause me to believe that our law enforcement folks are intimidating, they are arresting folks on minor offenses, or they are arresting folks who call in crimes.”

So, it may be time for 287(g) detractors to refocus their efforts toward the ballot box rather than the Commissioners Court.

The program, as we’ve said before, is a proxy fight over how seriously to crack down on illegal immigration, if at all. The numbers don’t indicate that it keeps a large number of dangerous criminals off the street or that very many innocent people are caught up in it, if any.

But without strong evidence of a net benefit, it’s too politically charged to keep in place. There’s a reason Tarrant County is the only large urban jail in Texas participating.

Commissioners didn’t help their cause by changing, as of this week, the rules for people to comment on issues. For the first time since the coronavirus pandemic started, the court will require those wishing to weigh in to come downtown rather than be on the phone.

Whitley said the timing was a coincidence based on the state’s loosening of rules on gatherings, and that several phone commenters were from outside the county. But opponents see an effort to make them choose between higher COVID-19 risk and using their voices.

For the previous year, the Sheriff’s Office says, Tarrant County deputies processed 309 ICE detainers on suspects booked into the jail. That’s about 0.5 percent of overall jail bookings. About half faced felony charges, while the rest faced a Class A or B misdemeanor. (Another 1,136 had detainers processed by ICE agents at the jail.)

These are tiny numbers among the thousands of crimes committed each year in Tarrant County. And it’s not like without 287(g), these offenders would go free. Many end up in state prison.

Plus, the program is relatively new to the county. Sheriff Bill Waybourn campaigned on these issues when he was first elected in 2016. But the county isn’t much safer than it was before he became sheriff. Under predecessor Dee Anderson, the jail ran just fine without 287(g).

Waybourn’s careless comments on illegal immigration don’t help build trust, either. At the White House last year, he noted the serious charges against some unauthorized immigrants held in the jail, adding “These drunks will run over your children, and they will run over my children.” He was unfairly accused of tagging immigrants broadly, but he should have been more cautious from such a prominent podium.

And this debate could not have resurfaced at a worse time. Law enforcement everywhere is under intense scrutiny after the George Floyd killing, and anything that smacks of unfairness to minorities should be reconsidered. Whitley agreed, but he noted that ICE agreements by design end every June 30, so the vote must be taken.

If Whitley doesn’t change his mind, opponents should turn their attention to the fall, when Waybourn and Fickes will be on the ballot. Fickes’ northeast Tarrant district is unlikely to elect a Democrat, but Waybourn runs countywide, and Tarrant is increasingly up for grabs.

And as Whitley noted, this debate is another way in which Congress has failed the country on immigration. Counties would have much less of a burden to deal with if illegal immigration were curtailed and a solution was in place for those already here, one in which law-abiding migrants could work their way to citizenship.

But until then, locally paid law enforcement has no business doing the federal government’s job on immigration.