Homeland Security watchdogs who were forced out of their jobs warn that the Trump administration’s “alarming” rush to deputize hundreds of local police departments to enforce federal immigration law – while gutting independent oversight – risks “a threat to civil rights nationwide.”

When the experienced civil rights watchdogs had their jobs cut last year by the Trump administration, they were in the process of scrutinizing the controversial federal program allowing local police to conduct federal immigration enforcement work, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

The vexed program gives local, county and state law enforcement officials unusual powers to detain, arrest and interrogate immigrants and turn them over to federal immigration authorities – a system critics say is open to abuse and risks alienating communities from local police.

The program is known by its technical name, 287(g), after a section in the Immigration and Nationality Act, and has been expanding fast since Donald Trump returned to the White House.

The watchdogs had compiled a report, mandated by Congress in 2024, that would have revealed red flags about suspected civil rights violations by some local police and sheriff agencies partnering with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sources familiar with its contents have disclosed to the Guardian.

But the report has still not been published and its status is unclear, leading some former officials to express fears that it is being suppressed by Trump administration officials to thwart unfavorable news and further scrutiny of the program.

The former officials who spoke to the Guardian previously worked at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), the watchdog office for the department. They were speaking up to warn that the Trump administration’s slashing of guardrails while expanding the 287(g) program dramatically risks turbocharging civil rights violations.

“The [CRCL] office doesn’t exist now – at least not in its previous form. How could there be meaningful oversight of the 287(g) program?” Peter Mina, the former deputy officer for CRCL, said in a telephone interview with the Guardian. Mina was among the officials ousted from the CRCL last spring by the new administration, when they were told their jobs were going to be eliminated. He ultimately resigned. Mina is now a civil rights lawyer in Washington DC.

ICE, which has DHS as its parent agency, has been signing more and more agreements to give local agencies the power to interrogate and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants, which is traditionally the jurisdiction of the federal government. Local police departments or sheriff’s offices, for example, become designated under the program as ICE “task forces” – a significant escalation in deputizing immigration enforcement not seen in over a decade. Those new task forces are aggressively boosting the US president’s anti-immigration crackdown.

“ I understand the premise behind 287(g). But the execution is severely lacking,” Mina added. “In addition to execution, training is severely lacking, increasing the risks of civil rights violations, such as racial profiling.”

From January to mid-October 2025, 7,000 people were arrested via the expanded 287(g) program, according to ICE data gathered by the Deportation Data Project. This is a sharp increase from 2024, where the “apprehension method” for 287(g) lists just over 3,000 arrests. However, the publicly available data is unclear. According to DHS, in a statement to the Guardian, the agency said it has had “tremendous success when local law enforcement work with us, including 40,000 arrests in Florida [alone]”. The department did not respond to requests to explain that figure.

“Taking a problematic enforcement program, that reintroduces models of enforcement that were discontinued because of demonstrable civil rights violations and super-sizing it while removing all internal guardrails, is more than alarming,” said Katerina Herodotou, one of the former CRCL officials who was ousted last year. “It is a threat to civil rights nationwide.”

The Guardian previously reported that the Trump administration’s gutting of the watchdog office within DHS has stoked experts’ fears that ICE lacks effective safeguards and could “abuse people with impunity”.

According to a series of interviews with five former civil rights officials from the watchdog office, similar fears extend to 287(g) partnerships, and CRCL was examining various aspects of the program before they were ousted. The ex-watchdogs said that:

• Before Trump returned to office, civil rights officials completed a congressionally-mandated report on the program, finding some jurisdictions, particularly in Florida, were suspected of violating civil rights in 2023. Despite Congress requiring the report be published, it appeared to go “into limbo” after Trump took office again.

• An internal DHS advisory board tasked with reviewing new 287(g) applications was dissolved days after Trump’s second term began. CRCL had played a key role on the board, investigating local agencies applying to the program, looking for civil rights concerns. It is now unknown how much oversight exists when signing new agreements.

• Officials planned a trip in February 2025 to conduct oversight of some 287(g) jurisdictions in the US South, where the program has since dramatically expanded. It was canceled at the last minute.

• One DHS official learned early in the new administration that decisions surrounding the program were suddenly coming from top DHS leadership. ICE officials normally in charge of 287(g) at the agency’s Washington DC headquarters “did not have any control over the expansion of the program,” the former official said, suggesting the expansion has been mandated by political appointees.

An increasing number of local law enforcement agencies throughout the country have signed 287(g) agreements in the past year to actively cooperate with ICE. In January 2025, fewer than 200 jurisdictions were involved. Now, more than 1,400 local, county and state agencies have signed on to aid DHS in its immigration enforcement work.

“ We used to do oversight, and monitor, to make sure that those jurisdictions did not have a record or concerns about violating people’s civil rights, like racial profiling or just pulling people over because they’re Latin,” said one former civil rights official, who asked the Guardian to withhold their name for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. But added that now: “I don’t think anybody’s doing any of the 287(g) oversight work.”

In the first weeks of 2026 alone, almost 150 more local agencies have signed onto the program, according to a review by the Guardian.

DHS defended its current civil rights-related work.

“The DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) receives, reviews, and investigates complaints against 287(g) task force officers,” DHS said in a statement sent to the Guardian. “DHS CRCL is performing all legally required functions, but in an efficient and cost-effective manner and without hindering the department’s mission of securing the homeland.”

DHS added that the watchdogs who left had “obstructed immigration enforcement … rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often functioned as internal adversaries that slowed down operations”.

Prior to the second Trump administration, the 287(g) program almost exclusively focused on local immigration enforcement inside jails. Under those agreements, local officials may identify immigrants already in jail as undocumented and place them in immigration proceedings, or serve ICE arrest warrants to them. But Trump has now escalated the program by reintroducing the more aggressive and powerful task force model, which had been disbanded in 2012 after concerns of civil rights abuses.

Now deputized local officials can interrogate anyone they believe is in the US unlawfully about their immigration status in the course of their regular police work. And they can detain people and turn them over to ICE without the pretext of a criminal arrest, purely on suspicion of violating immigration law despite that being a federal, civil offense.

The reintroduction and rapid expansion of the task force model “just fits in with the larger picture of targeting Black and brown people, or people with accents, detaining them and deporting them if possible, just to meet numbers and not with any actual public safety goals in mind”, said Herodotou.

“They just want to detain and deport immigrants – it doesn’t matter if they’re a danger, or safety, if they have status or not. They just want to get rid of everyone,” she added.

The Guardian reported last April that the program grew after Trump’s return, despite past concerns of civil rights violations.

But since then, critics say the situation has become more treacherous because:

• Former CRCL officials submitted a whistleblower complaint about the gutting of the watchdog team.

• ICE has radically increased partnerships with local law enforcement.

• Some states have established detention centers for people picked up on immigration concerns by local agencies in the 287(g) program, including “Alligator Alcatraz” and the “Deportation Depot” in Florida, the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana, and the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska, drawing protest and legal challenges.

• The Big Beautiful Bill legislation drenched the program with funds.

• DHS began offering financial incentives, criticized as a “bounty hunter system” by a former CRCL official who spoke to the Guardian, for local officials to arrest more immigrants.

The Guardian also discovered that ICE is attempting to establish regional “command” or “call centers” to better coordinate with local officials, according to a current DHS source and news reports.

The DHS source, who still works in the department and requested anonymity to speak freely about internal agency matters, revealed that in Georgia, ICE established a “command center” within its Atlanta office especially to coordinate with local partners in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, where many 287(g) agreements exist.

“It’s really just a call center,” the DHS source said, adding that the local agencies “don’t have access to all the databases” that ICE has, so they call the command center to “run checks” on the people they encounter and suspect of being undocumented.

ICE did not comment on the existence of this command center, despite multiple requests from the Guardian.

Overall, the 287(g) push and the Trump crackdown in general has highlighted an enforcement patchwork across the country. Some places facilitate ICE activity while others legislate to ban cooperation, such as sanctuary cities, with critics of partnering often saying it weakens trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement, while sanctuary status strengthens it.

But the issue has become much more sharply political in 2025 and 2026, and those areas signing up becoming much more proactive in assisting ICE.

The 287(g) program was established in 1996, but no local law enforcement agencies were signed until 2002. The program exponentially grew in the years that followed, including with the increasing use of task forces.

“ We started looking at the 287(g) agreements in the middle of Obama’s first administration,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (MIP), the Washington DC-based think tank. Chishti has been studying the program for years, observing its evolution and documenting concerns about how it is implemented.

In a 2011 MIP report, Chishti and his colleagues found both alleged and proved civil rights violations by local law enforcement officials in 287(g) arrangements carrying out immigration enforcement arrests. “We recommended that the task force model be terminated,” Chishti said.

One of the most striking examples was in Maricopa county, Arizona. Federal investigators in 2011 found Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his agency were violating constitutional civil rights by racially profiling Latinos, and illegally detaining people. After a lengthy lawsuit, Arpaio was convicted in 2017 for refusing to stop his anti-immigration patrols. Trump pardoned Arpaio soon after.

Following the Arpaio civil rights controversies, among others, the task force model was discontinued in 2012, leaving intact other 287(g) partnerships allowing local officials to hold immigrants for ICE.

The program expanded to 152 agreements under the first Trump administration. The Biden administration merely paused new enrollments. But now it is growing exponentially – with seemingly no civil rights oversight.

After Congress required CRCL to review and report back on various criteria within the program that could lead to civil rights concerns, the CRCL office was “very actively working on that” report, one of the former officials told the Guardian. They looked at every single jurisdiction with a 287(g) agreement as of 2023, the most up to date ICE data they had, which was limited at the time because the program was narrow.

“We drafted this report and it went through multiple rounds of clearance within CRCL and then with a variety of DHS components, including ICE,” said one of the former officials. “We were just awaiting the very final levels of clearance from the [DHS] secretary’s office.”

Then Trump returned to the White House and the report “just went into limbo at that point”, the former official said. The status of the report remains unclear.

When the watchdogs were forced out they lost access to the content and workings of the report. But according to Herodotou, who worked on it, ICE statistics they reviewed showed jurisdictions in various parts of the country “were using the program to target people for immigration enforcement, rather than target people for serious criminal activity that was endangering public safety”.

Another former official added that “some jurisdictions”, particularly in Florida, “may have had civil rights and civil liberties violations.” Now, Florida has become one of the states with the most 287(g) agreements, with 342 and counting.

DHS and ICE did not respond to questions about the status of the report.

Historically, CRCL was part of a “program advisory board” that decided whether to accept or reject new 287(g) agreements, and investigated whether there were civil rights concerns within local agencies applying to join.

“There were concerns, such as racial profiling, lack of access to due process, etcetera,” one of the former officials said.

But in late January, 2025, the Trump administration did away with the advisory board. In February, the CRCL oversight trip to 287(g) jurisdictions in Georgia was canceled at the last minute without a convincing explanation. DHS and ICE did not respond to questions about 287(g) oversight and whether the department checks for civil rights risks when accepting new local law enforcement applications.

Then in late March, the watchdogs were ousted without warning.

Recent court records suggest the CRCL office now has only two full-time employees, working with around 20 outside contractors, a reduction from an oversight office of around 150.

Big Beautiful Bill funding is now used for incentivizing local agencies to deputize more of their officers for ICE task forces, offering $7,500 for equipment per new task force officer, $100,000 for new vehicles per agency and full reimbursement for the salary and benefits of each task force officer.

“The supply of money creates the demand – that’s where the [arrest] targets come,” Chishti said. “Once you have the money, you have to meet the target, so that creates an incentive in itself.”

When arresting immigrants, “the infusion of cash creates motivations for going beyond [targeting only] dangerous crime,” he added.

The Trump administration in October also began offering “monetary performance awards” to local agencies based on the number of undocumented immigrants they identify, including up to $1,000 per officer, per quarter. One CRCL official was shocked to learn of this.

“They have essentially set up a bounty hunter system and are incentivizing local/state law enforcement to detain anyone who appears to be undocumented,” they told the Guardian.

In their statement, DHS said that “by joining forces with ICE, law enforcement agencies are not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities – they are becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family”.

“We would love for state and local law enforcement to sign more 287(g) agreements,” DHS added.

Some places are now pushing back. Danny Ceisler, the new Bucks county sheriff in Pennsylvania, ended his agency’s 287(g) partnership that had 16 task force officers deputized by ICE.

“The certain public safety costs of this ICE partnership are greatly outweighed by any potential public safety benefits,” said Ceisler.