Exclusive: ICE's Bounty Hunters
Leaked database shows how ICE pays off local cops to do their bidding
While ICE agents are temporarily confusing things even more at airports, behind the scenes the Trump administration is paying a posse of local police to carry out its immigration war.
An internal ICE financial ledger I obtained shows how the agency is turning local police departments across the county into a vast, decentralized immigration army. This includes payments if cops sign up to be deputized, reimbursements for transportation, salary supplements for cops who process migrant children, and per-arrest-style incentive payments.
All of this is taking place under an ICE program called 287(g), part of a 1996 law that granted the Attorney General (and later the Secretary of Homeland Security) the authority to enter into written agreements with state and local governments on immigration. The first agreement under the law was signed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after 9/11; as of last year, the number of agreements has swelled past 1,000.
Today, the program employs a “task force model” under which local police are deputized as ICE agents with the authority to carry out federal immigration law. So despite the broad public backlash against ICE, the agency has a way to carry out its mission without drawing attention to itself.
An internal ICE diagram I obtained shows that local officers only become eligible for stipends and salary reimbursements after making their first arrest. The document labels that first arrest as the moment a participant becomes “OPERATIONAL.”
The ledger lists over 400 police departments where ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations is currently negotiating new or expanded cooperation agreements with local police departments, including the amount of money currently allocated to buy their cooperation.
The largest payouts are to Florida law enforcement. In addition to earlier awards, ICE has set aside an extra $89 million in incentive funding for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles’ Division of Highway Patrol, which already has 1,803 “task force officers” credentialed under the program. Then there’s roughly $5 million for the 719 task force officers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’, and nearly $4 million for the 503 task force officers of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
In addition to Florida, other red states (and they are mostly red states) are taking ICE’s money to become bounty hunters to arrest supposed immigration law violators. Arkansas State Police is receiving a base award of $4,225,025 covering 550 task force officers, with an estimated $8,250,000 more in incentive funding to come. Oklahoma’s Department of Public Safety is getting a $5,380,025 base award covering 704 officers, a $1,650,000 salary modification on top of that, and a staggering $38,220,000 TBD line item still pending. Louisiana State Police is receiving a base award of $880,025 for 104 officers, plus an additional $45,000 salary modification.
The money flows well beyond large state agencies, to small and obscure agencies most people (including myself) have never heard of. The Point Comfort Police Department in Texas — a town of fewer than 700 people — has a base agreement of $167,525 to supply nine task force officers, plus an additional $5,000 salary modification. The Key Colony Beach Police Department in Florida is getting $119,000 for a single officer once you add its $107,500 base award to an $11,500 salary supplement. The Coward Police Department in South Carolina, also serving a town of roughly 700, has a base award of $107,520 for one officer, with another $15,000 modification layered on top.
Then there are the departments whose payouts have exploded between their initial agreements with the federal government and the later Trump modifications in 2025 and 2026. Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina started with a base award of $542,525; now it has a pending modification that tacks on nearly $3 million more in incentive payments. Lee County Sheriff’s Office in Florida received $385,015 upfront, and is now slated to receive an additional $2,835,000 in a later modification. Most jarring is Bradley County Constable District 7 in Tennessee: a single officer received a base award of $107,525, followed by a $11,500 salary bump — and now a further modification appears to add $1,820,550 in new funding for that one cop.
An ICE source provided me with a screenshot of some of the disbursement categories, which included salaries and benefits for task force officers “conducting enforcement activities” and incentive payments for those “conducting immigration enforcement activities related to the locations of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Child].”
The ICE source told me that the program had grown so large that simply administering it is taking up a significant amount of the agency’s time.
Absent from the list of bounty payments to states and localities are new payments to California, New Mexico, Illinois, Vermont, and Massachusetts as well as other “blue” states. The reason? The money is being doled out to cooperative pro-Trump states and departments, affirming that these are political payoffs and hardly a pure national program.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Who are the demon bureaucrats writing these policies?
It seems pretty sly. Who is going to question a police officer that, by all appearances, is just making another arrest?