WASHINGTON — More than 29,000 state and local police officers across the United States have been deputized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to carry out immigration enforcement between January 2025 and October 2026, according to a new report from the immigration reform advocacy group FWD.us, reported by NPR on Tuesday night. That deputized force is now more than twice the size of ICE's own deportation arm: ICE directly employs about 11,600 deportation officers, NPR reported.
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The report analyses ICE's 287(g) program, named for the section of immigration law that lets the federal agency deputize state and local officers. FWD.us built its count from ICE's own public records and from information requested by the Deportation Data Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA, which collects U.S. immigration enforcement data. The number of deputized officers has doubled in just the last eight months, the report found.
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'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 Department of Homeland Security, for its part, has said that 287(g) is a critical tool to cut down on crime and illegal immigration.
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How 287(g) works: three models, one aggressive leader
The program runs in three forms, according to States Newsroom reporting on the same system. Under the jail enforcement model, deputized officers can ask people arrested on state or local charges about immigration status and hold a noncitizen for ICE for up to 48 hours. Under the warrant service model, local officers serve ICE administrative warrants but do not ask about status. The third form — the Task Force Model — is the broadest and, NPR reported, now the most common: it lets police and sheriff's departments make immigration arrests themselves, including during traffic stops. Agencies that stay in 'active and ongoing participation' in 287(g) activity qualify for federal money for new cars, equipment and other enforcement resources, NPR reported.
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Florida and Texas account for about half of 47,000 arrests
Law enforcement agencies in Florida and Texas combined accounted for about half of the more than 47,000 immigration arrests made nationally between January 2025 and August 2026 through 287(g), FWD.us found — a concentration NPR linked to both states' governors mandating that local police sign the agreements. Aggressive enforcement by state and local police in both states has repeatedly made headlines, NPR noted.
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The sharpest shares, however, appeared in states not usually known for aggressive enforcement. In Wyoming, deputized officers made 77% of all immigration arrests in the state in April 2026, and more than 60% every month since November 2025. In New Hampshire, the program was responsible for 60% of immigration arrests in June 2026. In Oklahoma, close to 50% of immigration arrests that June were made by state or local police — after the Oklahoma Highway Patrol signed all of its troopers on to 287(g), giving them power to stop a driver and potentially make an immigration arrest on state highways.
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The enforcement shift Rose describes — from city raids to routine highway stops — puts the program directly on the routes Punjabi truckers drive every day. In states with Task Force agreements, a traffic stop by a deputized trooper can now become an immigration check. Twelve states have no 287(g) agreements at all, NPR and States Newsroom list among them California, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington — but Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and most of the Southeast and Midwest do.
'People are avoiding the highway': the chilling effect in Oklahoma
'Even though Oklahoma may not be in the headlines, it's definitely a hotspot for immigration enforcement,' Gabriela Ramirez-Perez, immigration and economic security policy analyst with the Oklahoma Policy Institute, told NPR. '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.'
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Background: a 1990s program, shelved in part in 2012, revived and funded
The 287(g) program was created in a 1996 law under President Bill Clinton and first received federal funding in 2006, according to States Newsroom. The Obama administration ended the Task Force Model in 2012 over concerns about racial profiling; the second Trump administration revived it, and it has seen the largest increase of the three models. Money is now a central driver: the Justice Department earlier this summer offered $3 billion in funding for state and local agencies that join the program, usable for staffing and equipment, NPR reported, and Florida has already directed hundreds of millions of additional dollars to law enforcement agencies in exchange for participation. Rose told NPR the promise of money appears to be driving the surge and will likely produce still more partnerships.
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What this means for diaspora readers — and what happens next
For Punjabi and other immigrant readers, the map matters more than the national total. States Newsroom lists only 12 states with no 287(g) agreements at all: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. Everywhere else — including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Ohio, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, all states with sizable Punjabi communities and trucking corridors — local officers may now be working under an ICE agreement, and drivers should understand that a routine stop can carry immigration questions in those states. FWD.us is an advocacy group that opposes the expansion, and its figures should be read as its analysis of ICE's own records, not as an ICE announcement; ICE's published agency lists are the underlying source. What happens next is more sign-ups: with $3 billion on offer and governors in large states mandating participation, Rose expects the deputized total to keep climbing, and Awaaz Punjab will track the next ICE agency list for changes in diaspora-heavy states.
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