The use of a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that deputizes local police for immigration enforcement has dramatically expanded under President Donald Trump's second term in office.
The rapid expansion of the 287(g) program marks one of the most visible shifts in President Trump's second-term immigration strategy.
On Trump's first day he signed the executive order, "Protecting the American People from Invasion," which called on the DHS secretary to maximize the use of 287(g) agreements and to structure them "in the manner that provides the most effective model for enforcing Federal immigration laws."
The results have been swift.
In 2019, during Trump's first term, just 45 of these 287(g) agreements were signed, available data shows. As of Feb. 13, ICE reported 1,412 active agreements across 40 states and territories — more than 1,130 of them signed in 2025 alone.
(DHS did not provide data prior to 2019 or between 2020 and 2025. NPR has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for this information).
Gauging the effectiveness of 287(g) programs
The program, established in 1996, allows state and local law enforcement officers to act as immigration enforcement agents. That means questioning, investigating, and in some cases arresting people for civil immigration violations – authority traditionally reserved for federal officers.
The program existed under previous Democratic and Republican administrations, but never to the extent that the Trump administration is using it now, immigration experts and people who worked during previous presidential administrations tell NPR.
The White House is using 287(g) agreements as "a tailor-made tool" for the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda, said Doris Meissner, who led the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the agency that predated DHS, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol) under President Bill Clinton.
"There has never been the kind of whole-government mobilizing around immigration that we're currently seeing," Meissner said. Trump's approach is "putting 287(g) agreements on steroids," she added.
How effective it's been is another question.
In a response to NPR's questions, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said that these partnerships serve as critical resources to "arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country" and make the U.S. safer.
However, available data is hard to parse and it's unclear what arrests, detentions or deportations can be credited to this program.
DHS said there were more than 675,000 deportations as of January 2026 in Trump's first year back in office because of the administration's crackdown on immigration.
The Trump administration believes these partnerships are fruitful, with DHS pointing to operations in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively required local law enforcement to sign 287(g) agreements with ICE, which netted 40,000 arrests. And in West Virginia, more than 650 "illegal aliens" were arrested over a two-week operation, according to McLaughlin.
How does the program work?
There are three main 287(g) models:
- The jail enforcement model: Every person that comes into a local jail, with criminal convictions or pending charges, will be checked for whether or not they have legal status in the United States. If they are found to be in the country illegally, ICE will be notified and they will be held in jail, pending ICE removal.
- The warrant service officer model: Similar to the jail enforcement model, where local police are trained to serve and execute administrative warrants on migrants in their local jails.
- The task force model: Officers can stop, question and make arrests for immigration violations. DHS says an officer, "with approval from an ICE supervisor, conducts an ICE arrest for immigration violations and transfers the alien to an approved location."
(There's a fourth model: The tribal task force, but there is no recorded agreement signed and recorded in available ICE data.)
Task force models make up the majority of 287(g) agreements in place, according to ICE data. DHS describes it as giving officers "limited authority to enforce immigration laws during their routine police duties throughout their local communities in a non-custodial environment with ICE supervision."
Local police agencies sign a memorandum of agreement with ICE and nominate officers to participate in the program who then get training by ICE.
DHS told NPR that training for the task force model consists of 40 hours of education on topics that include immigration law, ICE's Use of Force policy, civil rights law, alien detention and public outreach. In the past, it took about a month of training for local cops to be certified.
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Critics have long warned that these deals drain local resources and heighten the risk of racial profiling and civil rights violations by pulling ill-equipped local police into complex immigration law.
Annie Lai, an immigration law professor at University of California Irvine says, "The potential for civil rights violations is acute," including for racial profiling. It also leaves cities and towns exposed to costly legal battles.
Lai was involved in a major civil rights lawsuit against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio filed in 2007, while Bush was still president, over a pattern of unlawful practices by the sheriff and his agency during immigration sweeps and traffic stops, which occurred while the agency was involved in a 287(g) partnership with ICE. Litigation against Arpaio has cost local taxpayers millions.
There have been a number of lawsuits over the years filed by people detained in local jails under this program – some for longer than they should have been incarcerated while awaiting ICE agents, NPR has previously reported.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, rejected these criticisms: "Allegations that 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement encourage 'racial profiling' are disgusting and categorically FALSE. Our 287(g) partners work with us to enforce federal immigration law without fear, favor, or prejudice, and they should be commended for doing so."
To incentivize cooperation, ICE is offering full reimbursements for participating agencies for the annual salary and benefits of each eligible trained 287(g) officer, including overtime coverage up to 25% of the officer's annual salary. Funding for these costs was made possible through Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.
Law enforcement agencies will also be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards "based on the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE and overall assistance to further ICE's mission," DHS said.
Performance goals for participating agencies have not been made clear– an issue the Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighted in two separate reports from 2009 and 2021.
The GAO said the 287(g) program could use better oversight. Recommendations from the 2021 report that called on the director of ICE to create those performance metrics had yet to be met as of 2025.
How previous administrations used 287(g)
While its dramatic expansion is new, the 287(g) dates back nearly 30 years to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).
DHS didn't respond to NPR's request for data on the number of 287(g) agreements signed with local law enforcement under the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton.
However, those who worked under these administrations say 287(g) agreements were narrowly used and never reached the level under Trump's current administration.
The original goal of the 1996 law, enacted during the "tough on crime" era, was to help federal authorities identify and remove dangerous criminals, according to John Torres, who worked in immigration enforcement for close to 30 years – first under President Ronald Reagan, eventually moving up the ranks under subsequent administrations, including a stint as acting director of ICE during the transition from President George W. Bush to President Obama.
Meissner, who led the INS under President Clinton, said the White House initially opposed the 287(g) provision because immigration enforcement had long been considered exclusively a federal responsibility. Delegating that authority to state and local police "was not something that was in the playbook," she said.
But the administration ultimately did not block it after hearing from communities grappling with deadly human smuggling cases that local law enforcement struggled to address, Meissner explained to NPR.
Clinton left office in January 2001 and, as far as Meissner recalls, no 287(g) agreements were ever signed. She said local leaders expressed concerns over the potential cost to local taxpayers and the legal liability for small police offices.
September 11th, and the Bush administration, changed everything.
By the mid-2000s, the Bush White House prioritized jail enforcement and task force models of 287(g), Torres recalled.
"We signed a lot of agreements under President Bush," he said.
Under Obama's presidency, more people were deported than any other president in U.S. history and the jail enforcement model was an important aspect to that work, according to John Sandweg, who worked at DHS under Obama.
The Obama administration, for a time, used 287(g) to go after people convicted of serious crimes, but found these partnerships did not help all that much, according to Sandweg.
But by 2012, the Obama administration suspended all 287(g) task force models, following documented civil rights abuses like the cases involving Arpaio's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona.
"Maybe once in a blue moon you come across someone with a serious criminal history," he explained. "But by and large, what you were getting were individuals who are just undocumented, and maybe they're pulled over for different reasons."
The program was underutilized, but left largely intact under the Biden administration, despite campaign promises to end 287(g) agreements and much to the chagrin of civil rights groups such as the ACLU.
How President Trump is using them
Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, says concerns over civil rights violations under 287(g) are overblown.
"I honestly don't think that the lawsuits and the activism is driven by facts on the ground. It's driven by ideology," he said, referring to protests against the program and local police involvement in immigration enforcement.
"I'm not saying that there has never been an instance of an officer from DHS or law enforcement doing something they shouldn't. It happens, but it's pretty rare," he added.
The 287(g) program offers an important tool for communities deep in the U.S., away from the border, where enforcement "is much more complicated," Hankinson said. That's where "the Trump administration has been battling uphill against severe headwinds," he said.
The Trump administration touts 287(g) as a way to go after violent criminals in the U.S. illegally.
With that goal in mind, Sandweg said "expanding the 287(g) program makes tremendous sense for [the Trump administration], in that it's a force multiplier, and it increases the number of people who are legally capable of arresting undocumented immigrants dramatically."
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, maintains that "ICE is targeting criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members and more. Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S."
But the Trump administration has been criticized for arresting U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents and sometimes keeping them incarcerated for days. Records show that many of the people being caught in Trump's enforcement dragnet have no criminal record.
Even as the Trump administration moves to expand 287(g), some states are pushing back.
Earlier this month, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger issued an executive order terminating 287(g) agreements between ICE and state agencies, which included the Virginia Department of Corrections.
In Maryland, a bill that could end these partnerships was headed to Gov. Wes Moore's desk, as of Monday afternoon. That bill would prevent state agencies and employees from entering into 287(g) agreements and would end all existing deals by July.
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Under the second Trump administration, partnerships between ICE and local law enforcement agencies that delegate immigration enforcement authority to local officers has expanded widely.
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