ICE detained nearly 50,000 people in July, a record monthly high since President Trump returned to office, driven increasingly by a partnership most coverage of the number treats as a footnote: local and state police making immigration arrests during routine traffic stops. [1]

That mechanism has a name and a scale. The federal 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers to question, detain and process people for immigration purposes during ordinary police work, has grown from roughly 135 active agreements at the start of 2025 to 2,315 across 40 states as of mid-August, according to Department of Homeland Security figures. [2] The expansion is federally subsidized: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act set aside $12 billion to reimburse local jurisdictions for assisting with enforcement, on top of funding to more than double the number of federal immigration agents, from 10,000 to 22,000. [2]

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pitched the arrangement to local law enforcement directly as a budget line as much as a policy. "If you partner with us with the 287(g) program, we can pay some of your deputies' salaries. We can pay for equipment. We can even pay for vehicles, too," he told the National Sheriffs' Convention in June. [2]

The result is a record detention number that owes less to expanded federal manpower alone than to a network of local police departments now doing immigration enforcement during stops that, before this year, had nothing to do with immigration status at all -- a federalism shift the raw monthly total doesn't capture on its own.

-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington