Jan. 8 · Law Enforcement
The ICE Expansion Is Much Worse Than We Thought. How Much Worse Will It Get?
Where are we and where are we headed?
W. Lawrence wrote a companion piece on the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis yesterday. Her work is incredibly complementary to mine and you should subscribe to her Substack.
You have heard most of this before. A budget figure in one headline, a detention expansion in another, a training scandal somewhere else. Each one arrives, gets processed, and disappears into the scroll. This is what it looks like when you put it together.
In January 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had roughly 10,000 officers and approximately 40,000 detention beds.¹ Twelve months later, ICE has over 22,000 officers and 66,000 detention beds, with contracts in place for 107,000 by the end of this month.² Internal documents project 116,000 beds by spring.³ For context, the entire federal prison system holds approximately 155,000 people.⁴ ICE alone is building detention capacity that approaches three-quarters of every federal prison in the country, constructed in under a year, for a single agency.
Congress gave them $75 billion over four years.⁵ The FBI, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, runs on approximately $10.7 billion annually.⁶ Congress handed ICE enough money to fund the FBI for seven years. This is how seriously the administration is taking what it is building.
They cut training from five months to 47 days.⁷ FBI agents train for 20 weeks at Quantico.⁸ ICE agents now receive roughly one-third of that training while claiming equivalent federal authority. They eliminated the maximum age requirement.⁹ They are offering $50,000 signing bonuses.¹⁰ They received 220,000 applications and hired 12,000 officers in under a year.¹ John Sandweg, who served as Acting ICE Director from August 2013 to February 2014, called the consequences potentially “catastrophic.”¹¹ He pointed to a previous hiring surge under Bush that produced agents who “resorted to force too quickly, force that was unreasonable.”¹²
Some recruits arrived at training without completed fingerprints or drug tests.¹³ Over 200 were dismissed during training for failing basic law exams or for criminal histories that included domestic violence.¹³ John Tobon, who retired as Special Agent in Charge for HSI Honolulu in January 2025 after 31 years, noted that the academy’s capacity to properly train agents is far below what the administration’s hiring goals require.¹⁴ The administration’s hiring goals are logistically unachievable without compromising quality. They are achieving them anyway.
At Fort Bliss in Texas, the Army built a $1.2 billion tent facility that opened in August.¹⁵ An internal ICE inspection found over 60 federal detention standards violations in its first 50 days.¹⁶ Reports include physical abuse, insufficient food, and meaningful legal access limited to ten attorney visits per day for 3,000 detainees.¹⁷ One man has died there.¹⁸ The facility sits on land previously used for Japanese internment during World War II.¹⁹ The ACLU called it “the Trump administration’s test case to see whether it can quietly convert military resources into tools for mass detention.”²⁰
The 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration agents, has grown from 135 agreements to over 1,300 agreements across 40 states.²¹ Financial incentives now provide full salary reimbursement and performance bonuses of $500 to $1,000 per officer based on locate rates.²² Local police departments now have a direct fiscal incentive to support immigration enforcement. In nine months, the program expanded by 641 percent.²¹
They rescinded the sensitive locations policy on January 21, 2025.²³ For the first time since 2011, ICE can conduct enforcement operations at schools, churches, hospitals, and courthouses. Professor Nadia Anguiano of University of Minnesota Law School explained what this means in practice: “President Trump rescinded that memo and basically put everything on the table, saying ICE will conduct enforcement anywhere it essentially wants.”²⁴ The Laken Riley Act, signed January 29, requires mandatory detention for noncitizens merely arrested for burglary, theft, or assault on law enforcement officers.²⁵ Not convicted. Arrested. Professor John Gross of University of Wisconsin Law School noted that under this framework, “the very fact that there was an accusation could trigger removal proceedings.”²⁶
They keep saying they are targeting the worst of the worst. The data tells a different story. By September, immigrants with no criminal record became the largest group in ICE detention.²⁷ Among those with records, only 8.5 percent had violent offense histories.²⁸ Non-criminal arrests increased dramatically since April.²⁹ Internal directives set daily quotas of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests.³⁰ Graeme Blair, UCLA political scientist and Co-Director of the Deportation Data Project, reviewed the numbers: “You listen to Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, they’re saying things like they are going after the worst of the worst, the people who are murderers. That’s just not what the data says about the people that they are actually arresting.”³¹
The military has diverted at least $2 billion to immigration operations.³² This includes $1.3 billion for border troop deployment, $420 million for military base detention, and $258 million for troop deployment to interior operations.³² National Guard units from 20 states have been requested to support ICE detention operations.³³ Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian whose book On Tyranny became a bestseller during the first Trump administration, identified what this represents: ICE is becoming “something like a national police force, with ideological propaganda and connection to part of the armed services.”³⁴
ICE has arrested American citizens in Los Angeles for protesting. More in San Francisco. More in Chicago. More in Portland.³⁵ A woman named Dayanne Figueroa, a US citizen recovering from kidney surgery, was pulled from her SUV and detained.³⁶ A 79-year-old car wash owner was knocked to the ground by an agent, held for 12 hours despite showing his driver’s license, and confirmed as a citizen before anyone let him go.³⁷
In September, Trump signed a memo defining opposition to ICE as potential domestic terrorism.³⁸ The memo lists anti-capitalism, extremism on migration, and hostility toward traditional views on family, religion, and morality as indicators.³⁸ Attorney General Bondi instructed the DOJ to compile lists of groups engaged in domestic terrorism and specifically included people with extreme viewpoints on immigration.³⁹ The FBI has opened investigations in 23 regions targeting threats against immigration enforcement activity.⁴⁰ Mary McCord, former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, warned about the implications: “I think this causes a chilling impact, because it definitely seems to be directing enforcement toward particular points of view.”⁴¹
DHS Secretary Noem has said that revealing agent identities and videotaping operations constitutes violence.⁴² Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino instructed officers to arrest protesters who make hyperbolic comments.⁴³ Using encrypted messaging to discuss ICE has been flagged by investigators as a potential indicator of concerning activity.⁴⁰
ICE signed multimillion dollar contracts with Zignal Labs to monitor 8 billion social media posts daily.⁴⁴ They are paying millions to Penlink for tools that gather location data from multiple sources.⁴⁵ Their August 2025 privacy impact assessment says these tools will track threats to the agency.⁴⁶ The administration has designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and expanded the definition to include anyone who opposes what they describe as foundational American principles like support for law enforcement and border control.⁴⁷
Federal prosecutors have charged dozens of protesters.⁴⁸ The cases keep falling apart. Juries acquit. Judges dismiss charges after finding civil rights violations. Prosecutors drop cases when evidence contradicts agent testimony.⁴⁹ But the arrests continue, because the arrests themselves serve the purpose. The process is the punishment.
Here is what they have right now: 22,000 officers. 66,000 detention beds. 1,300 local law enforcement partnerships with financial incentives tied to enforcement outcomes. Legal authority to operate in schools, churches, and hospitals. A domestic terrorism framework that treats opposition to their operations as a federal crime. Surveillance infrastructure monitoring billions of social media posts for threats to the agency. Seventy-five billion dollars.
Here is what they will have by spring: 116,000 detention beds. More officers still in the pipeline. More 287(g) agreements. More military integration. More facilities on military bases where oversight is limited and access is controlled.
This is not next year. This is the next few months.
They are not building this for the population they claim to be targeting. The undocumented population in the United States is estimated at 14 million, and most of those people have been here for years, have families, have jobs, have lives.⁵⁰ Even if we accepted the administration’s framing, which we should not, the infrastructure they are building exceeds any plausible immigration enforcement need by an order of magnitude.
Former ICE Director Sarah Saldaña, who led the agency from December 2014 to January 2017, offered the clearest assessment: “What we are seeing today under this administration is extraordinary. It has never been done in this way before.”⁵¹ She characterized the enforcement approach as “shock and awe” tactics designed not for public safety but for media consumption. “Its primary purpose does not appear to be making the community safer. It is intended to instill fear.”⁵¹
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU professor who wrote the book on how strongmen consolidate power, identified what makes this moment different from earlier authoritarian experiments: “He’s coming into power now with an amount of control and political will behind him... he has more political will and more power, also due to having been granted immunity by the Supreme Court, than many autocrats do when they first start out.”⁵²
Andrea Pitzer has spent her career studying the global history of concentration camps. She has been tracking the U.S. detention system since 2019. Her warning about trajectory is specific: “There’s usually this crisis period that a camp system either survives or doesn’t survive in the first three or four years. If it goes past that length of time, they tend to continue for a really long time.”⁵³ She documented the historical pattern of expanding criteria: “The longer they stay open, the more reasons a government finds to put people in them.”⁵³
Snyder, the Yale historian, drew the most direct comparison in late 2025: “In certain ways, the autumn of 2025 in the United States has recalled the autumn of 1938 in Nazi Germany.”³⁴ He was not being hyperbolic. He was doing historical analysis. He identified what the military integration means: “Trump is preparing American soldiers to see themselves as heroes when they undertake operations inside the United States against unarmed people, including their fellow citizens.”⁵⁴
So what is it for?
The machine answers that question through its design. It is large enough to process mass detentions. It is fast enough to overwhelm legal challenges. It is distributed enough to operate in any city in the country. It is legally shielded enough to act without normal accountability. It is ideologically aligned enough to view political opposition as terrorism.
Pitzer offered an assessment of where we stand on the path she has documented across history: “Let’s say there’s 20 hurdles that we have to get over before we get to someplace really, really, really bad. I think we’ve knocked 10 of them down.”⁵³
We are watching them build it in real time. And most people have no idea how far along they are.
Call your Governor, State Attorney General, and State Representatives. Tell them we must all call for the criminal prosecution of this unlawful and authoritarian paramilitary force.
Tell them we won’t let the GOP invade our homes.
Want to do something about it? Free resources on state-level opposition, including the Intro to Soft Secession booklet, the EARR training framework, and a printable tri-fold pamphlet, are available at buymeacoffee.com/TheER. Physical copies and merch at TheExistentialistRepublic.com.
References
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2026, January 3). ICE announces historic 120% manpower increase, thanks to recruitment campaign that brought in 12,000 officers and agents. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/01/03/ice-announces-historic-120-manpower-increase-thanks-recruitment-campaign-brought
Montoya-Galvez, C. (2025, December 18). ICE detention capacity set to reach 107,000 beds. Washington Post.
American Immigration Council. (2025, December). Analysis of One Big Beautiful Bill Act detention funding provisions.
U.S. Sentencing Commission. (2025, March). Federal prison population statistics.
Congressional Research Service. (2025). Report R48704: One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21) immigration enforcement appropriations.
U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. (2025). FBI FY2025 budget justification hearing testimony.
Kanno-Youngs, Z., & Jordan, M. (2025, October 15). ICE training cut to 47 days as hiring surge continues. The Atlantic.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (n.d.). FBI agent training program. FBI.gov. https://www.fbi.gov/careers/agent
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, August 6). Secretary Noem announces elimination of age cap for ICE law enforcement positions.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2025). Career opportunities: Signing bonuses up to $50,000. ICE.gov.
Sandweg, J. (2025, December 4). Interview on ICE hiring standards. PBS NewsHour.
Sandweg, J. (2025, September). Interview on Bush-era hiring surge consequences. The Daily Beast.
Ainsley, J. (2025, October 22). ICE dismissed more than 200 new recruits during training. NBC News.
Tobon, J. (2025, February). Interview on ICE academy training capacity. Government Executive.
U.S. Department of Defense. (2025, July). Contract announcement: Fort Bliss detention facility construction, $1.24 billion to Acquisition Logistics LLC.
Sacchetti, M. (2025, September 16). Leaked ICE inspection finds 60 violations at Fort Bliss detention facility. Washington Post.
American Civil Liberties Union. (2025, December 8). Report on conditions at Fort Bliss detention facility based on detainee interviews.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (2025, December 3). Statement on death of Francisco Gaspar-Andres at Hospitals of Providence East.
Texas Historical Commission & National Park Service. Fort Bliss WWII internment camp historical documentation.
Gassama, H. (2025, August 18). Statement on Fort Bliss detention facility. American Civil Liberties Union. https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/new-detention-camp-at-fort-bliss-marks-dangerous-expansion-of-militarized-immigration-enforcement
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, September 17). 287(g) program expansion announcement: 641% increase from 135 to 1,001 agreements.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, October 1). 287(g) program financial incentive structure announcement.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, January 21). Rescission of October 24, 2011 Morton Memo on sensitive locations policy.
Anguiano, N. (2025). Interview on sensitive locations policy rescission. The Minnesota Daily.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, January 29). Laken Riley Act signing statement.
Gross, J. (2025). Interview on Laken Riley Act implications. WMTV-15.
Migration Policy Institute. (2025, October). U.S. immigrant detention grows to record heights under Trump administration. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/trump-immigrant-detention
Cato Institute. (2025, September). Analysis of ICE detainee criminal history data.
Cato Institute. (2025, August). Immigration enforcement trends: January-July 2025.
Sacchetti, M., & Miroff, N. (2025, January 26). ICE field offices instructed to make 75 arrests per day. Washington Post.
Blair, G. (2025, July 3). Interview on Deportation Data Project findings. NPR.
U.S. House of Representatives. (2025, December). Draining Defense: Pentagon obligations to immigration operations. Congressional Report.
Parnell, S. (2025, July 25). Pentagon confirms National Guard authorization in 20 states. Stars and Stripes.
Snyder, T. (2025, December 7). Land war or self-terrorism? Snyder.Substack.com. https://snyder.substack.com/p/self-terrorism
ProPublica. (2025, November). Investigation: U.S. citizens detained in immigration enforcement operations.
U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. (2025, December 9). Report on Dayanne Figueroa detention.
ABC News. (2025, December). 79-year-old US citizen claims ICE agents body-slammed him at his business. https://abcnews.go.com/US/79-year-us-citizen-claims-ice-agents-body/story
The White House. (2025, September 25). National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7).
Bondi, P. (2025, December 4). Memorandum to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies on domestic terrorism investigations. U.S. Department of Justice.
FBI internal documents. (2025). Domestic terrorism investigations in 23 regions. Obtained by The Intercept.
McCord, M. (2025, December). Interview on domestic terrorism memo implications. Union Leader. https://www.unionleader.com/news/national/justice-department-drafting-a-list-of-domestic-terrorists/article_49e390ff-ae55-41f6-b0d4-c081738306e1.html
Noem, K. (2025, July). DHS press briefing on agent safety and operational security.
Chicago Sun-Times. (2025, November 4). Court documents: Bovino instructed officers to arrest protesters making hyperbolic comments. https://chicago.suntimes.com/public-safety/2025/11/04/plaintiffs-lawyers-bovino-views-protesters-as-violent-rioters-tells-officers-to-go-hard-against-them
Federal contract records. (2025). ICE contract with Zignal Labs, $5.7 million for social media monitoring.
Brennan Center for Justice. (2025). Analysis of ICE surveillance contracts including Penlink.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (2025, August). Privacy impact assessment: Social media monitoring tools.
The White House. (2025, September 22). Executive order designating antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
U.S. Department of Justice, Central District of California. (2025). Federal complaints charging protesters in anti-ICE demonstrations. https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/10-arrested-federal-complaints-charging-them-committing-violence-against-officers-and
Goldstein, J. (2025, December 31). Investigation: Protest prosecutions and case outcomes. The Intercept.
Pew Research Center. (2025, August 22). How Pew Research Center estimates the U.S. unauthorized immigrant population: Q&A. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/22/qa-how-pew-research-center-estimates-the-number-of-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
Saldaña, S. (2025, October 29). Interview: Former ICE director reviews Trump’s immigration tactics. The Marshall Project. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/10/29/ice-immigration-tactics-obama-trump
Ben-Ghiat, R. (2025). Interview on rising authoritarianism. Center for American Progress Action. https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-rising-authoritarianism/
Pitzer, A. (2019, June). Interview on concentration camp history and U.S. detention. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/
Snyder, T. (2025, June). The next terrorist attack. Snyder.Substack.com. https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-next-terrorist-attack-26b
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