The Deportation Machine Is Growing, and Its Targets Are Changing
The Trump administration has repeatedly framed its immigration crackdown as a public-safety campaign aimed at dangerous criminals. But newly released federal data tell a different and increasingly troubling story: as Immigration and Customs Enforcement expands its capacity to arrest and detain people, a growing share of those swept into the system have no criminal record at all.
An Aug. 27 analysis by Albert Sun and Allison McCann in The New York Times, “ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted,” found that a majority of immigrants arrested by ICE in July were people accused of civil immigration violations who had neither been charged with nor convicted of a crime. Fewer than 4 percent had a previous violent criminal conviction.
That distinction matters.
Immigration violations are often civil, not criminal, matters. Yet the infrastructure being constructed to enforce them increasingly resembles a nationwide policing and incarceration system—one supported not only by federal immigration agents, but by state and local police departments, expanding detention facilities, and substantial public spending.
For the Peace Economy Project, this is about more than immigration policy. It is about the choices the United States makes when it decides where to put its money, personnel and coercive power.
Arrests are rising faster among people without criminal records
The numbers reported by The New York Times are striking.
ICE made approximately 43,000 arrests in June and 49,000 in July, according to the newspaper’s analysis of federal data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through public-records litigation. By July, ICE was averaging roughly 1,600 arrests per day, approaching the administration’s stated goal of 2,000 daily arrests.
But the composition of those arrests is particularly important.
The Times’ analysis shows that arrests of people with no criminal charges have risen far more rapidly than arrests of people with violent convictions. The crackdown has included people married to U.S. citizens, people who entered the country legally and subsequently sought asylum, and people whose temporary legal status the administration moved to revoke.
This complicates the administration’s repeated insistence that its enforcement buildup is principally about removing dangerous criminals.
The government has every right to debate and enforce immigration law within constitutional and statutory limits. But the public should be clear about what it is paying for. An enforcement apparatus initially justified through the language of violent crime is increasingly being used against a much broader population.
Immigration enforcement is becoming local policing
Perhaps the most consequential development is taking place outside ICE itself.
The federal government has aggressively expanded the 287(g) program, which permits ICE to delegate certain immigration-enforcement functions to participating state and local law-enforcement officers. ICE describes these partnerships as a way for local agencies to identify people who may be removable, execute immigration warrants and, under some models, exercise limited immigration authority during ordinary police duties.
This expansion did not happen accidentally. A January 2025 executive order directed the federal government to maximize agreements allowing state and local officers to perform immigration functions, and ICE subsequently changed internal procedures surrounding approval of 287(g) partnerships.
By September 2025, DHS announced that the program had surpassed 1,000 state and local law-enforcement agreements across 40 states, up from 135. The department also created reimbursement opportunities for participating agencies, including reimbursement for eligible officers’ salaries and benefits and performance payments tied to assistance with ICE’s enforcement mission.
The consequences are now visible in the arrest data.
According to The New York Times, roughly 14 percent of ICE arrests are now being carried out through the 287(g) program. Florida alone has recorded at least 15,000 arrests through the program under the current administration, while Texas has recorded nearly 10,000. In Wyoming and West Virginia, local partners account for more than half of ICE arrests.
This represents a profound shift in the purpose of local policing. Police officers, sheriff’s deputies and other local personnel are increasingly being incorporated into a federal deportation system.
A militarized model of domestic policy
PEP has long argued that militarization should not be understood only in terms of tanks, missiles and Pentagon spending. Militarization also describes a governing philosophy: social and political problems are increasingly met with surveillance, enforcement, detention and coercion rather than investment in communities.
The expansion of immigration enforcement fits squarely within that pattern.
ICE’s workforce reportedly grew from roughly 21,000 employees when Trump took office to approximately 29,000 by June 2026, according to the Times. At the same time, the government has expanded partnerships with thousands of state and local officers.
Detention is expanding alongside enforcement.
The Times reports that approximately 66,000 people are currently being held in ICE detention, while the administration has set a goal of 100,000 detention beds. Federal procurement records also show ICE continuing to pursue large detention contracts. A February 2026 DHS acquisition forecast, for example, described a planned contractor-operated 1,530-bed detention facility near Denver with an estimated value exceeding $100 million.
Deportations, meanwhile, have averaged more than 1,000 people per day since last summer, according to the Times, with at least 329 deportation flights leaving the United States in July.
This is what an expanding enforcement state looks like in practice: more agents, more police partnerships, more detention capacity, more transportation infrastructure and more public money devoted to making all of it possible.
What are we choosing not to fund?
Every dollar spent expanding this system represents a political choice.
Money devoted to hiring agents, reimbursing local police departments, constructing detention centers and transporting detainees is money that cannot simultaneously be spent on affordable housing, schools, health care, violence prevention, mental-health services, public transportation or other investments that make communities safer and more stable.
That is the central peace-economy question.
The issue is not whether immigration laws should exist or whether governments may enforce them. The issue is what kind of society we build when enforcement becomes the default answer—and when an enormous apparatus created in the name of pursuing dangerous criminals increasingly arrests people who have never been charged with a crime.
There is also a cost that does not appear in federal budget tables.
When local police become immigration agents, an encounter with a police officer can acquire entirely different stakes for immigrant families. Reporting a crime, cooperating as a witness or asking authorities for help may carry the perceived risk of immigration consequences. The line separating community policing from federal immigration enforcement becomes increasingly difficult to see.
And that is precisely why the rapid growth of 287(g) deserves far more public scrutiny.
The infrastructure will outlast the political moment
Administrations change. Infrastructure remains.
Thousands of trained personnel, expanded databases, detention facilities, contractual relationships and federal-local enforcement partnerships do not simply disappear when political priorities change. Once government builds the capacity to arrest, monitor and detain people at enormous scale, future administrations inherit that capacity.
That should concern Americans regardless of their position on immigration.
The Times’ new analysis gives us an unusually clear view of what is being constructed: an immigration-enforcement system capable of approaching 2,000 arrests every day, increasingly supported by local law enforcement and increasingly directed toward people without criminal records.
We should stop describing this simply as an immigration crackdown.
It is the construction of a domestic enforcement infrastructure.
And the peace-economy question is one Americans should be asking whenever government expands its capacity for coercion:
What would our communities look like if we invested this much money, personnel and political determination in keeping people housed, healthy, educated and safe instead?
Source: Albert Sun and Allison McCann, “ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted,” The New York Times, Aug. 27, 2026. The Times analyzed federal ICE arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through a public-records lawsuit.
