WASHINGTON — This summer, arrests of immigrants in the United States soared to the highest levels since President Donald Trump returned to office.

An unprecedented increase in cooperation between local and state law enforcement and federal immigration officers through collaborations known as 287(g) agreements helped drive numbers up. 

The agreements allow state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce parts of federal immigration law and have become an arm of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Republicans in Congress have provided billions in federal funding for local departments that accept the agreements, creating a deluge of new partners.

Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said the billions in new funding has helped the program grow. 

“Mostly, 287(g) agreements were voluntary, and the costs were borne by the state and local government to train their own people,” she said. “Now, the federal government has money to pay them, and so that’s encouraging more states and localities to do it because it’s a budget plus-up.”

In June, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recorded roughly 43,000 immigration arrests, followed by 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August. ICE does not distinguish between arrests initially made by local law enforcement or federal officials.

Those three months also saw the most new 287(g) agreements signed since Trump took office, according to a States Newsroom analysis of government data.

“ICE has increased efforts with state and local law enforcement to assist federal immigration officers in our efforts to make America safe again,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement to States Newsroom.

But those efforts have generated protests in some of the communities where they’ve appeared.

Democrats in Maryland and Maine passed laws restricting cooperation between local police and ICE. The Maryland measure’s supporters said it would reduce distrust of police.

Skyrocketing growth

The president’s signature 2025 domestic policy bill, the “One, Big Beautiful” Act, set aside about $4 billion for state and local governments to conduct immigration enforcement, including 287(g) programs. The Secure America Act passed in June allocated more than $31 billion to implement those agreements as well. 

Both packages were passed by Republicans through a legislative maneuver known as reconciliation that did not need Democratic votes. 

The funds incentivized massive growth. 

Before Trump took office in January 2025, the federal government had agreements with 135 state and local police departments. As of Oct. 1, those agreements skyrocketed to 2,608, according to DHS data. 

Local departments or state agencies in 38 states have 287(g) agreements, with the highest numbers in Texas and Florida, where there are state laws requiring local law enforcement to partake in the program. 

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the Florida Highway Patrol was eligible for $26 million in reimbursements from the federal government for arrests from April through June.

“My educated guess would be that a large number of the arrests and detentions that we’ve seen increasing in recent months in the summer were because there was an increase in 287(g) agreements in Texas and Florida, but other parts of the country as well,” said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies global migration.

ICE does not always specify when an immigration arrest is made through the partnership program, but the Deportation Data Project, a project of the University of California schools in Berkeley and Los Angeles that analyzes government immigration enforcement data, has attributed at least 6,150 arrests in July, about 12.5% of all arrests for that month.

Only 12 states have no such agreements. They are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state.

Three models

The partnership program was created in a 1996 law, but not actively used until the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It first received federal appropriations in 2006.

Three types of partnerships operate within the program.

The loosest type of agreement is the jail enforcement model, where deputized officers can inquire about the immigration status of people arrested on state or local charges, as well as hold a noncitizen for ICE to pick up for up to 48 hours. 

In another model, the warrants service officer model, ICE trains, certifies and allows state and local law enforcement to issue administrative warrants, which are not signed by a judge, but by an ICE official requesting the arrest of a noncitizen. Local law enforcement officers under this model do not inquire about immigration status. 

The task force model, which involves the greatest immigration enforcement by local officers, allows for immigration officials to deputize local officers to partake in immigration duties such as asking about immigration status or even detaining people and transferring them to ICE.

As part of its immigration crackdown, the second Trump administration revived the task force model after the Obama administration discontinued it in 2012 over concerns of racial profiling. 

It has seen the largest increase under Trump, Ruiz Soto said.

More than 71% of 287(g) agreements now use the task force model, according to Titus Consulting, a firm that tracks the agreements. About 7% use the jail enforcement model and more than 21% use the warrant model. 

The task force model is “hands down,” the most effective method in arresting noncitizens, said Todd Bensmen, a senior research fellow for the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. 

“If they’re not deputized under that, they just come into contact with people that are fully … deportable, and then just leave them be,” he said of local law enforcement. “They can just arrest them on the spot and call ICE, and that way you have a really dramatic force multiplier and ICE doesn’t have to do anything but come and pick them up.” 

Program changes

In 2006, the Bush administration took an interest in exploring 287(g) programs, specifically the jail enforcement model because it was easy for ICE to identify people who are subject to an immigration arrest, said Brown.

“If your job is to find people, wow, that’s the easiest thing to do,” she said of the jail model. 

Brown said that spurred the idea for the Secure Communities program. Under the program, the FBI automatically sent fingerprints of a person booked in custody to DHS to check against its immigration database. If the person was a noncitizen who was unauthorized in the U.S., then ICE was notified.

The program was voluntary, but there was pushback from immigration advocates during the Obama administration, Brown said. 

“There was a concern that this was mixing criminal enforcement and immigration enforcement in ways they weren’t meant to, (and) it was creating fear among immigration communities of reporting crimes for fear that they would be arrested,” she said. 

The Obama administration pulled back and redirected the Secure Communities program to a federal government model.  

“They turned it from like a community-by-community rollout to just a federal-to-federal information sharing agreement that remains in place today,” she said. 

Brown said the difference now is that some communities have decided when ICE is notified, if at all, and whether or not to honor detainers, which are requests from ICE to hold an immigrant until federal immigration officers arrive. 

Local governments that have not wanted to participate in federal immigration enforcement have been dubbed sanctuary cities. 

The Trump administration has threatened to pull federal funding from those cities that don’t want to aid in immigration enforcement and has offered an influx of cash to states and local governments that have agreed to participate. 

The Republican Congress has funded the program for the next three years, Ruiz Soto noted.

“It would then come to … what a future administration or a future Congress would do to continue expanding this or not fulfill them anymore,” he said. “But clearly right now ICE has significant funding to last for 287(g) and much more other enforcement in the near future.”

Stevens Point, Winnebago County, Fond du Lac County and Sheboygan are among the Wisconsin communities that have recently moved away from Flock license plate reader cameras. On Tuesday, city staff in Stevens Point began covering the cameras while local elected leaders determine whether they can cancel their Flock contract altogether. 

Meanwhile Sheboygan broke ties with Flock after the company reportedly attempted to sell the city back traffic data it was unaware the multi-billion dollar surveillance company was even collecting. Flock cameras capture images of vehicles and their license plates on the roadways. Law enforcement officers can search the data to see where a vehicle has traveled. 

Investigative reporting has shown that the cameras can also recognize human features. Over 5,000 agencies had Flock contracts in late 2025, creating a network of tens of thousands of cameras that can be queried simultaneously. Police often say that the technology has been invaluable in solving crimes including carjackings, kidnappings, homicide, drug trafficking and gun violence. The cameras are also used for less serious reasons such as for traffic enforcement and in policing evictions. 

“Reports are surfacing all over the country about the system being misused by municipal and state employees who have access to the data,” said Stevens Point Mayor Mike Wiza in a press release late last week. 

A few of those cases have played out in Wisconsin courts, police departments and sheriff’s offices. Four officers across Wisconsin have been charged with misconduct in public office and other offenses for misusing Flock cameras. 

Josue Ayala of the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) was given a year of probation and avoided jail time earlier this year after misusing Flock. Cristian Morales of the Menasha Police Department was sentenced to six months in jail and three years probation for a similar infraction. In Kenosha County, former sheriff’s deputy Frank McGrath was charged with misconduct in public office last month for misuse of the surveillance technology. In July, Milwaukee police detective Tehrangi Chapman — who worked the internal affairs investigation into Ayala’s Flock misuse — was charged with misusing the system to track someone he had been monitoring since 2019, years before Flock came to Milwaukee. Chapman and McGrath are still going through court proceedings. 

Ayala, Morales and McGrath all used Flock to monitor their current or former romantic partners. The exact relationship Chapman has to the people he allegedly monitored is not mentioned in available court records. McGrath used Flock and a squad car tracking system called Polaris to monitor his girlfriend, who was also a Kenosha County Sheriff’s deputy. Chapman allegedly employed both Flock cameras and car-mounted GPS trackers. McGrath was caught after a supervisor noticed some suspicious Flock searches in an audit, while Ayala and Chapman were both reported to police by the victims themselves. 

Numerous other officers have been investigated or charged with misusing Flock around the country. In Racine County, the district attorney admitted that a few unnamed officers have been investigated for their use of Flock cameras. 

The rash of misuse is not the only thing motivating local communities to drop Flock. When the city of Verona decided to cover its cameras in February, Mayor Diaz said that while the community trusted its police department, it no longer trusted Flock Safety. At that time the first cases of misconduct were beginning to emerge in Wisconsin, and many people had expressed fears about how the federal government — especially immigration enforcement — could leverage local Flock networks for its own priorities. Trust was also broken in Oshkosh months later, after the police chief learned that the cameras could create heatmaps of vehicle movements, contrary to what a company representative had said. 

The sheriffs and police departments in Fond du Lac County recently announced they will cancel their contracts because out of state agencies had used open records requests to obtain audit data the sheriff said was confidential and in some cases linked with ongoing investigations. Journalists and other citizens nationwide had begun requesting Flock audit data from local police departments to learn how the cameras were being used. 

In 2025, a Wisconsin Examiner analysis showed that at least 221 law enforcement agencies were using Flock in Wisconsin. Many of the searches used vague search terms such as “investigation,” “suspicious,” or non-law-enforcement terms such as “cooch,” or single characters such as “.” or “s”. Some of these vague search terms have appeared in confirmed misconduct cases. Officers in other parts of the country have also  used Flock for controversial reasons, such as tracking women suspected of traveling out of state to get an abortion. 

Flock Safety has struggled to adapt to canceled contracts and misconduct investigations. Although the company has released new features including requiring case numbers when searching the database, fixed options for search terms, and the ability to flag suspicious searches, it has also worked to hide information in the audit data such as officers’ names. Flock Safety has claimed that people have used the audit data to identify undercover officers. However, the information which Flock is making harder to view is also the very information that allowed citizens and journalists to detect instances of misconduct.

Winnebago County, Neenah, Menasha, and Chetek have each canceled a Flock contract, are considering it or have covered up their cameras. In Chetek, the police chief responded to public criticism of Flock cameras by threatening to run background checks on citizens who disagreed with his use of the cameras. Other Wisconsin communities including Kaukauna, Sturgeon Bay, Appleton, Dane County, Stoughton and Manitowoc which have also canceled their Flock contracts. 

Other communities have chosen to heighten oversight of their Flock cameras In Milwaukee, County Executive David Crowley asked that all Flock operations on county property be paused until new transparency and oversight measures could be developed.

Milwaukee County Sup. Justin Bielinski, who is also chairman of the Committee on Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and General Services, has also called on the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office to disable its Flock network. “Residents should not have to wait for another disclosure before we act,” said Bielinksi. “Even if you have confidence in the Sheriff’s Department’s use of Flock, the question remains: do we trust Flock itself with this information?”

The Milwaukee Police Department has restricted its Flock network from other local agencies, limited access to the system to supervisors only, and launched a new Flock transparency portal. The portal notes that data captured by Flock cameras in Milwaukee is only retained for seven days, and that there were 983 “search sessions” over the last 30 days. It also keeps track of the number of “hot list hits” over the last 30 days. Hot lists are lists of vehicles which law enforcement have flagged in the system. When a camera sees the flagged vehicle, a notification goes out to police in the area. The Milwaukee police transparency portal  does not track the number of vehicles detected, unlike a transparency portal released by the Green Bay Police Department.

“This effort underscores the commitments MPD has made in partnership with the Mayor to establish appropriate guardrails for the use of this technology while providing greater public understanding of how Flock [Automatic License Plate Reader] technology is used to support public safety,” the Milwaukee department said in a press release. “MPD remains committed to transparency, accountability, and the responsible use of technology. Through this new resource, MPD is continuing its efforts to provide the public with meaningful information about the tools we use to support the safety of the Milwaukee community.”

People in the community continue to push back against the cameras. Last Thursday, dozens of residents filled a Fire and Police Commission meeting to capacity in Milwaukee. An overflow room was opened to accommodate all the people who showed up to testify, unanimously rejecting Flock and calling for the city to cancel its contract. Speakers argued that Flock is a form of indiscriminate mass surveillance which can and has been used in abusive ways by police. Many of the speakers expressed deep frustration with the commission, city government and police, saying that they’d called for an end to Flock for months only to see some of their fears realized. 

Napoleon Jones, 32, was one of those people. Although Jones is from Sussex, he came to the Milwaukee FPC meeting to describe his  experience of Flock surveillance. Jones, a Navy veteran, was stopped by a Waukesha County Sheriff’s deputy after filming a traffic stop. Jones was arrested and taken to jail, only to be released without charges. When he filed a complaint about the deputy’s conduct, according to a federal lawsuit, Jones became the target of a  Flock search by that deputy, who was  directed by his supervisor to conduct the searches. 

“When I first found out I was just super surprised,” Jones told the Examiner. “I never thought it would happen to me. And when I found out and I got the records and seen how many different searches there were, I was at a loss of words because it’s hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of searches and the network is so big on these Flock cameras.” Jones added that “I drive all around. If this guy really wanted to put together a timeline of where I’m at, or who I know, or whose house I’m at, he could have done it.”

He added, “I drive past these things all the time. Everyone does.”