United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement

ICE operations

One of the major themes of Trump’s 2024 campaign for a second presidential term was his promise to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the United States (some 11 million people) by conducting raids on immigrant communities and employers and sending immigrants to military-controlled deportation camps. Although the number of daily ICE arrests in the last week of January 2025 exceeded the average daily figure for all of fiscal year 2024 (759), the numbers for February and March 2025 did not. The exact numbers of daily ICE arrests during this period were unclear, however, in part because the Trump administration stopped publishing daily figures in February.

The start of Trump’s second term was also marked by highly publicized ICE raids in Democratic-run sanctuary cities, which limit the enforcement of federal immigration laws and generally decline to cooperate with federal authorities in the arrest and deportation of undocumented immigrants. In Los Angeles, for example, ICE raids drew large crowds of protesters in early June 2025. After demonstrators were seen vandalizing federal buildings and throwing rocks and other objects at police officers, Trump ordered the deployment of about 2,000 soldiers of the National Guard of California and 700 active-duty Marines to protect federal buildings and personnel in the city; he then increased the number of National Guard troops to nearly 5,000. The deployment marked the first time in 60 years that a state National Guard was federalized without the permission of the state’s governor, who is the Guard’s commander in chief. (Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson did so in 1965, when he sent troops to Alabama to protect a peaceful civil rights march.) Anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles were thereafter mostly peaceful, and in July more than 3,000 National Guard troops were withdrawn.

ICE raids in sanctuary cities and other areas were frequently conducted in sensitive locations that had been off-limits for immigrant arrests—including churches, schools, and hospitals. Even immigrants attending legally required hearings at immigration courts to avoid deportation were subject to arrest in or near the courthouses where their hearings took place. The increased number of arrests and detentions of immigrants throughout the country, as well as the violence and cruelty of many ICE officers, led to greater public sympathy for immigrants and inspired many Americans to consider themselves pro-immigration. Trump’s crackdown became a major theme of the anti-Trump rallies held across the country on Trump’s birthday in mid-June 2025 and again in October 2025 and March 2026. The “No Kings” protests, as they were called, were among the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history.

In early December of 2025, Trump’s DHS began deploying ICE officers and border protection agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. “Operation Metro Surge,” as it was called by the DHS, was immediately condemned by state and local political leaders and residents of the Twin Cities. Local ICE raids and arrests soon became the focus of national attention through individual videos effectively documenting cruel and violent arrests of immigrants and similarly violent attacks on protesters and others attempting to protect immigrants.

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In January 2026, the deployment of 2,000 additional ICE officers in Minnesota—described by ICE itself as the largest federal immigration enforcement operation—further enraged state political leaders and residents, who viewed the deployment as a military occupation intended by Trump to punish and intimidate his Democratic opponents. In the same month, ICE shooters killed two U.S. citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—amid protesting crowds, despite the fact that neither seemed to pose a serious threat to ICE officers. Soon after Good’s death, Minnesota and the Twin Cities filed suit against the DHS in federal district court, arguing that the deployment and operations of ICE in the state were both unconstitutional (because they violated the state’s “sovereign authority” under the Tenth Amendment) and illegal (because they involved “unlawful seizures, excessive force and retaliation”).

In July 2026 ICE officers shot and killed two more people: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican-born business owner in Houston, Texas who had lived in the United States for 35 years, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian native working in Biddeford, Maine. Both of them were shot in their vehicles. Their killings followed a significant but unannounced increase in ICE arrests and detentions throughout the country starting in the month of June, apparently conducted in an effort to meet Trump’s campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants, in part by surprising ICE targets while not provoking further large-scale public protests. Following Guerrero’s shooting in Maine, the DHS issued an order temporarily pausing most vehicle stops by ICE officers. The order was quickly reversed, however, after Trump criticized the pause on social media.

ICE funding

In July 2025 the U.S. Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a Republican budget bill, officially titled the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). The act included an unprecedented increase in funding for immigration enforcement, detention, and deportation networks over four years, including approximately $75 billion for ICE.

Following ICE’s killing of American citizens in Minneapolis, Congressional Democrats refused to endorse a new budget for the remainder of the 2025–26 in the wake of a stopgap measure passed in mid-November 2025. Upon the stopgap’s expiration on January 30, 2026, Senate Democrats and Republicans passed a compromise budget that withheld funding for the DHS for two weeks while negotiations over its operations continued. Although the House of Representatives passed the Senate bill four days later and Trump signed it into law, the time-limited DHS negotiations did not reach an agreement, and a partial government shutdown began on February 14. On March 27, in response to very long lines at airport security checkpoints—resulting from the loss of personnel at the Transportation Security Administration, a division of the DHS—the Senate passed another compromise bill that would resume funding for most of the DHS but not for ICE and the United States Border Patrol. Later on the same day, House Republicans publicly denounced the compromise bill, declaring that they would never let it pass.

Concerned with the continued financing of the DHS, House Republicans eventually agreed to the limited funding bill passed by the Senate, and Trump signed the measure into law on April 30. Still faced with Democratic opposition, however, Senate Republicans undertook a complex process to pass a budget bill on the basis of a simple majority (at least 51 votes) rather the 60 votes needed to block a Democratic filibuster. After dropping a controversial provision that would have provided $1 billion to finance Trump’s construction of a ballroom on the east wing of the White House—and rejecting a $1.8 billion “settlement fund” that would have compensated Trump supporters for past prosecutions—Senate Republicans were able to pass a bill to finance ICE and the United States Border Patrol for the remaining two and a half years of Trump’s second term. As approved by House Republicans, the measure provided $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to the Border Patrol, and $5 billion for other expenses. Trump signed the bill into law on June 10, 2026.