The number of state and local police officers deputized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out immigration arrests has doubled in the past eight months, and now far exceeds the agency’s own corps of deportation officers, according to a new report from the immigration advocacy group FWD.us.
The report found that ICE deputized more than 29,000 local officers between January 2025 and October 2026, well above the roughly 11,600 deportation officers ICE directly employs. The analysis, shared with NPR, drew on ICE’s public records and data from the Deportation Data Project, a research effort based at the University of California, Berkeley, and UCLA that compiles immigration enforcement figures.
The mechanism is a federal program known as 287(g), which allows ICE to deputize local police and sheriff’s deputies to enforce federal immigration law. Created in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton, it was little used for decades, until President Trump returned to office and made it central to his enforcement push.
Researchers say the growth marks a change in how immigration enforcement is being carried out. Rather than the high-profile operations that drew cameras and protests to cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, the work is increasingly being done by local officers during ordinary traffic stops.
“These state and local officers are a key lever in the administration’s quieter approach to enforcement,” Felicity Rose, vice president of research and policy at FWD.us, told NPR ahead of the report’s release. “They’re trading what used to be splashy urban surges, which we saw in Chicago and Minneapolis, for just routine highway stops now under the 287(g) program.”
The most aggressive version of the arrangement, the Task Force Model, lets police and sheriff’s departments make immigration arrests directly. In exchange, agencies that remain in what their agreements with ICE call “active and ongoing participation” in enforcement receive federal money to spend on patrol cars, equipment, and other resources.
For immigrant communities, the practical effect is a changed daily life. Oklahoma offers one example: its Highway Patrol enrolled all of its troopers in 287(g), giving any trooper the authority to pull a driver over and potentially make an immigration arrest on a state highway.
Gabriela Ramirez-Perez, an immigration and economic security policy analyst at the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a think tank that studies state policy, said the reach of the program has rippled through immigrant households even in a state that rarely makes national news. “Even though Oklahoma may not be in the headlines, it’s definitely a hotspot for immigration enforcement,” she said. “We can say that it’s definitely resulting in a lot of fear in immigrant communities. People are changing their day-to-day routines to try to avoid getting on the highway, to try to avoid driving as much as possible.” That kind of apprehension is familiar to immigrant and diaspora communities far beyond Oklahoma, including the Haitian and Caribbean families CTN serves, many of whom live in states where these partnerships have expanded fastest.
The enforcement is heavily geographic. Agencies in Florida and Texas together accounted for about half of the more than 47,000 immigration arrests made nationwide through 287(g) between January 2025 and August 2026, FWD.us found — a concentration that tracks with decisions by the governors of both states to require local police to sign the agreements.
But the report also documented sharp increases in states not usually associated with aggressive immigration enforcement. In Wyoming, deputized officers made 77 percent of all immigration arrests in the state in April 2026, and more than 60 percent in every month since November 2025. In New Hampshire, the program accounted for 60 percent of immigration arrests in June. In Oklahoma, close to half of the state’s immigration arrests that month were made by state or local police.
The surge appears to be driven in large part by federal dollars.
Earlier this summer, the Justice Department offered $3 billion in funding for state and local agencies that join the program, money that can go toward staffing and equipment in the years ahead. Florida has separately steered hundreds of millions of dollars to law enforcement agencies in the state in return for their participation.
Rose said that financial pull looks like the main force behind the program’s rapid expansion, and she expects it to produce still more partnerships. The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, has defended 287(g) as a critical tool for reducing crime and curbing unlawful immigration.
With the money committed to run for years and tens of thousands of officers already deputized, the FWD.us findings describe an enforcement apparatus that has grown well beyond ICE’s own ranks — one that, by design, operates less in the glare of city raids and more on the shoulder of a state highway.
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Source: NPR
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