ICE’s Secret Weapon Is in Your Community
Last summer, we often watched ICE raids unfold live, captured by news helicopters and eyewitness video as—almost exactly one year ago—agents descended on day laborers, street vendors, garment workers, and farmworkers in southern California. Frequently, the raids were preceded by warnings vetted by community-based groups and passed around on Instagram Reels, and followed by reports from local outlets, such as L.A. TACO’s accounting of daily arrests. For weeks, for months, we watched as people turned out across cities and surrounding communities. The kinds of resistance now synonymous with cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—residents putting themselves between immigration agents and their neighbors, chasing agents from the hotels where they tried to sleep and from the gas stations where they stocked up for their sick road trips—defined the administration’s first year of what it called “mass deportations.” In truth, what we witnessed were just some of the thousands and thousands of violent abductions carried out by federal agents, all in service of a white nationalist agenda eagerly articulated by regime leaders like the White House’s Stephen Miller and lackeys like Border Patrol’s Gregory Bovino.Compared to the open battle the agency engaged in last year, ICE appears now to be attempting to maintain a lower profile. And yet the agency has also arrested and detained more people in recent months than at any time since Trump returned to office. Recent data released by ICE shows that in June, it hit a high—1,300 arrests on average each day. That record was then topped in July, which saw 1,474 average daily arrests over just the first 11 days of the month. “This reverses a trend we saw since the early fall where overall arrest numbers had actually remained fairly consistent or declined,” observed Austin Kocher, assistant research professor at Syracuse University. “The purported shift in ICE tactics—from the manic Kristi Noem months that cost the lives of two U.S. citizens to the less spectacular tactics under Markwayne Mullin—has effectively led to more arrests without as much popular backlash.” There is a difference between a change in ICE tactics and a change in the number of people whom ICE has detained and deported, and understanding the reason for the latter requires us to look beyond ICE for answers. ICE’s purported shift was remarked upon over the winter, when Bovino was benched after immigration agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. More recently, when immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine within days of each other, ICE was briefly suspended from traffic stops. But immigration agents themselves have long known—or at least, some of those whose words have made it into the legal record have known—that despite public outcry over ICE operations, not much beyond appearances has really changed. “They just changed the name,” one agent said in a deposition, when questioned about “Operation At Large,” the high-profile nationwide operation last year. “We’re doing the same thing just with a different name.” In addition to proceeding as usual under a slightly altered brand, ICE is now working in even closer collaboration with other federal agencies in order to increase arrests: arresting people who allegedly overstayed visas at airports, with the help of TSA data; and arresting people whose children were previously in migrant shelters, based on tips shared by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. But ICE has been able to arrest and detain more people not only through these kinds of agreements with other federal agencies and offices. Its reach has also been broadened by local, county, and state law enforcement, a network of collaboration that goes back to the agency’s founding, and which has become only more sprawling since ICE was formed. Today, ICE’s partnership with the criminal legal system is fully activated in service of the mass deportations agenda. The sight of singular terrifying raids can sometimes conceal the more fearsome routine violence of anti-immigration law enforcement. This winter, at the height of ICE’s operations in the Twin Cities, about 3,000 immigration agents were on the streets. “At the same time, the number of arrests in Minnesota during that operation was less than half the number made through the Miami field office over the same period,” said Silky Shah of Detention Watch Network, in an interview this month with Kelly Hayes of Truthout. The Miami ICE field office continues to make the most arrests in the country, averaging about 120 each day. “There is so much collaboration happening between ICE and local law enforcement,” Shah explained, in Florida but also Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas, where local police, county sheriffs, and state troopers have explicit agreements with ICE, part of what’s known as the 287(g) program, in essence allowing “local law enforcement to act as de facto ICE agents with minimal training,” as journalist Jessica Pishko has reported. In those places with 287(g) agreements, Shah said, “the scale of enforcement is much greater, without the same level of spectacle.”Former ICE officials acknowledge how working with state and local law enforcement can boost arrests. “What you’re seeing in Miami is a by-product of a substantial immigrant presence,” former ICE acting Director John Sandweg told CBS News. “You’re also seeing higher levels of cooperation between state and local agencies and ICE.” At the same time, state and local opposition to ICE has been critical in slowing the expansion of detention camps, in demanding new protective policies, and pushing local and state agencies to sever 287(g) agreements—even in Florida. Last year, Key West officials voted to end the city’s 287(g) agreement after pressure from local advocates. In response, Florida’s attorney general threatened to remove those officials from office. Miami’s new mayor, a Democrat, pledged to end the city’s 287(g) agreement, made in June 2025. But after seven months in office, she has so far refused to use her power to introduce a proposal to do so to the City Commission, while the commission has stalled. The fear instilled by such agreements between local law enforcement and ICE reaches not only immigrant communities but clearly their elected representatives, as well.Immigrants rights and justice groups have long drawn attention to the entanglement of immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system. Law scholars have dubbed this “crimmigration” law, “the new creature of legal imagination and policing reality,” as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernándezas characterized it in 2015. Because this overlap has been growing for so long, it tends not to grab the attention of those who aren’t themselves snared within it. Someone’s neighbors or co-workers, who might see a raid in progress, can’t so immediately observe a sheriff taking someone from a routine traffic stop to immigration detention. They won’t know when local police email an ICE field office to confirm that someone ICE is looking for is in their custody awaiting arraignment. Such routine policing has made the criminal legal system an ideal tool for a mass deportation regime seeking to more quietly entrench itself in everyday life.While that police work may not be drawing public notice, the administration has not been quiet about its plans. Homan and Miller were clear during the 2024 Trump campaign: They would turn to local police to carry out mass deportations. When that campaign was underway, I spoke with Meghan Maloney de Zaldivar, now the vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition, about how racist and xenophobic rhetoric from Trump, Miller, and Homan (among others)—rhetoric like “criminal aliens,” “invasions” at the border, and “the worst of the worst”—creates permission for police. “The people who work within those forces now feel like they don’t have to restrain themselves, and take it upon themselves to take that initiative,” Maloney de Zaldivar explained in 2024. “That message is sent to those folks that they have the power and the backing of the White House to use their authority to take out that racism and hate on immigrants in their communities.” With or without explicit 287(g) agreements, city, county, and state law enforcement still get the message: If your mayor or governor doesn’t have your back, Trump does.Whatever political and propaganda value there was in ICE storming into communities has perhaps been drained. It is as if someone advised the mass deportation crowd that if that’s what they really want, it’s better achieved without witnesses. Or, worse: It’s as if those elected Democrats who don’t oppose ICE per se but merely want it to produce better optics, got their wish—see the calls to have ICE unmask and identify themselves, without fundamentally questioning the agency’s mission. This is what is meant by “Abolish Trump’s ICE”—not “Abolish ICE”—as some Democratic candidates have campaigned. It is too soon to know just what, if anything, has changed at the top of ICE, other than that Noem’s replacement at the Department of Homeland Security hopes the press will look away. But we must not confuse what we aren’t seeing day in and day out with an institutional turn away from Trump’s signature promise: to ethnically cleanse the United States, using federal law enforcement. We must not ignore how the police around us day in and day out are marshaled in service of that campaign.This summer, I write from Brooklyn, where I live close to several immigrant communities, including one now in need of urgent defense, and where our elected leaders may soon be tested. How will they respond to the possible mass deportation of Haitians, those who have been stripped of their legal status by the Trump administration? “[Forty thousand] New Yorkers are going to be losing their protections, their work authorization and their legal protections today, and it is just gutting,” said New York Immigration Coalition CEO Murad Awawdeh in an interview with The City Reporter on Monday. New York City’s still-new Mayor Zohran Mamdani believes in abolishing ICE (and has told the president he believes so), even as Tom Homan routinely threatens to flood New York neighborhoods with immigration agents.But critically: ICE is not the only problem. The city and state’s sanctuary laws, meant to bar local police from cooperating with ICE, are only as powerful as the people holding police to account, as Spencer Ackerman wrote in his Forever Wars newsletter on Tuesday. The commissioner of the New York Police Department, Jessica Tisch, at least theoretically answers to the city’s mayor, but in practice, the police hold immense power to set their day-to-day agenda, city officials be damned. “On one level, it’s important to compel Tisch to prove herself and the NYPD capable of noncooperation,” Ackerman writes. “But on another, more human level, noncooperation can hardly be sufficient against a lawless, violent deportations force empowered by the Supreme Court to racially profile.” Are we Miami or are we New York? Is “noncooperation” even enough?As the horror of Trump’s mass deportations campaign has become part of daily life, it has only become easier for state and local Democrats to oppose ICE. One would think they have even stronger ground to contest ICE when it comes to their collaboration with state and local police. When will they?