US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is pursuing a quota of 3,000 arrests per day — roughly triple the January 2025 rate — after receiving $75 billion in additional funding over four years through the July 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which also set ICE's base budget at $10 billion a year.

The quota, reportedly demanded in May 2025 by then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, has redirected enforcement toward immigrants without criminal records. The administration reassigned agents who had been investigating immigrants with serious criminal backgrounds.

The shift is measurable. In January 2025, ICE held 858 people with no previous criminal charges. By February 2026, that number reached 24,495. Fewer than 14% of people ICE arrested in the first year of Trump's second term had violent criminal histories.

Who does the enforcement push affect?

Two days into the new administration, DHS removed protections at sensitive locations. ICE has since arrested people at hospitals, schools, churches, synagogues and courthouses, including at immigration hearings themselves.

The agency's tactics claimed at least 33 lives in 2025. American Oversight records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show a 353% increase in reported use-of-force incidents by officers in the first two months of the term. Internal emails counted 67 use-of-force incidents between January 19 and March 20, 2025, against 28 assaults on agents.

How has ICE doubled its workforce?

ICE spent $30 billion on hiring, offering police officers $50,000 sign-on bonuses and $60,000 in student loan forgiveness. DHS said in January 2026 it had signed 12,000 new recruits in the second half of 2025, more than doubling the force. Another $45 billion is going toward mass detention facilities.

In August 2025, ICE removed age requirements, lowered fitness standards and cut more than 40% of instruction — roughly 240 hours — from basic training, including half of firearms training time.

What about surveillance and data access?

ICE has purchased warrantless phone-tracking tools Penlink and Webloc, uses the facial recognition app Mobile Fortify, and pays $5 million for Thomson Reuters license-plate-reader data. Data-sharing agreements gave ICE access to:

• Medicaid records from HHS, including names, birth dates and home addresses
• TSA flight data
• Voter registration data obtained by the DOJ
• IRS data on about 47,000 people

A federal judge ruled in March that the IRS broke federal tax law by disclosing addresses to ICE, and barred the practice. Palantir is reportedly developing an AI app, ELITE, that aggregates addresses to plan raids.

How far have police and military partnerships gone?

287(g) agreements, which deputize local officers as immigration agents, grew from 135 contracts in December 2024 to at least 1,888 across 40 states and territories by June 2026. The Pentagon sent 200 Marines to Florida in July 2025, and 20 states had authorized National Guard assistance by August 2025. Trump's January 2025 executive order called for holding 30,000 people at Guantánamo Bay, and a planned "deportation hub" at Fort Bliss, Texas, is intended to hold up to 10,000.

ICE owned only 10 of the 220 facilities it used for detention in February 2025. Under its Detention Reengineering Initiative, it has purchased 9 of 24 planned warehouse conversions as of February 2026, while local protests blocked 12 other purchases.

Why does transparency matter here?

ICE concealed its role in the March 2025 death of Ruben Ray Martinez, shot by a federal agent in South Padre Island, Texas, for nearly a year until FOIA records surfaced it. American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said in February 2026: "Behind every statistic is a person, a family, and a community forced to live with the consequences of ICE's aggressive and inhumane enforcement tactics."

The group has filed dozens of FOIA requests and multiple lawsuits against ICE, TSA and DOJ over sensitive-location arrests, training materials, data-sharing and 287(g) agreements. Litigation and official DHS and ICE channels remain the authoritative sources for ongoing changes.