Number of Local Officers Working With ICE Has Doubled in Eight Months, Report Says

The number of state and local officers working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement has doubled in the past eight months, according to a new report from the immigration reform advocacy group FWD.us.

The organization examined 287(g), a federal ICE program that deputizes state and local police to carry out immigration enforcement. Its analysis drew on the agency's public records and on information requested by the Deportation Data Project, which is based at UC Berkeley and UCLA and collects U.S. immigration enforcement data.

According to the report, ICE deputized more than 29,000 officers between January 2025 and October 2026. That figure far exceeds the 11,600 deportation officers the agency employs directly.

Felicity Rose, vice president of research and policy at the group, said the findings show how central these partnerships have become to the Trump administration's enforcement efforts. The program dates to the 1990s, during the Clinton administration, but saw little use until President Trump returned to office. Rose told NPR that the officers are "a key lever in the administration's quieter approach to enforcement," as routine highway stops replace the "splashy urban surges" seen in Chicago and Minneapolis.

The most common and most aggressive version of the partnership is the Task Force Model, which lets police and sheriff's departments make immigration arrests. Agencies that keep up "active and ongoing participation in 287(g) enforcement activity" under their agreements with ICE receive money for new vehicles, equipment and other enforcement resources. The Department of Homeland Security has described 287(g) as a critical tool for reducing crime and illegal immigration.

Florida and Texas together accounted for about half of the more than 47,000 immigration arrests made nationally through the program between January 2025 and August 2026. That concentration is not surprising, since the governors of both states have required local police to sign agreements.

The report also found large shares of arrests by deputized officers in states less associated with aggressive enforcement. In Wyoming, those officers made 77% of all immigration arrests in April 2026 and more than 60% every month since November 2025. In New Hampshire, the program accounted for 60% of such arrests in June 2026, and in Oklahoma close to 50% that month.

Oklahoma's Highway Patrol signed up all of its troopers, giving them power to stop drivers and potentially make immigration arrests on state highways. Gabriela Ramirez-Perez, an immigration and economic security policy analyst at the Oklahoma Policy Institute, said this has frightened immigrant communities. "People are changing their day to day routines to try to avoid getting on the highway," she said.

Money appears to be a major driver. Earlier this summer, the Justice Department offered $3 billion in funding to state and local agencies that join the program, to be used for staffing and equipment in the coming years. Florida has already given law enforcement agencies hundreds of millions of dollars more in exchange for participating. Rose said the promise of funding seems to be fueling the surge and expects it to lead to more partnerships.