Immigration Enforcement Is Expanding on Three Fronts at Once

This spring and summer, immigration enforcement has been expanding on three fronts at once. Each front is narrated by a different institution — courts, federal agencies, state legislatures, economists — speaking to a different audience, which is why the convergence is hard to see from any single story. Line up the record from April through July, though, and a pattern emerges: who enforcement targets, how it operates, and why it claims to act are all moving toward a scope and method the United States has not seen before. The targets have escalated from undocumented border-crossers to the most assimilated noncitizens in the country. ICE is detaining and deporting military veterans; DHS has stated that military service does not automatically confer lawful status ^[1]. In April, the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that DACA status — the protection for people brought to the U.S. as children — does not prevent deportation. Between January and November 2025, 261 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 to 174 were deported ^[2]. The Justice Department has launched the largest denaturalization campaign in U.S. history, filing 52 civil complaints to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans — more than double the 24 filed under Biden — for immigration fraud, financial crimes, or concealed criminal histories, a category once reserved for war criminals and national security threats ^[3]. The operational model has shifted from federal detention toward state and local law enforcement. DHS is funding local police to make immigration arrests through 287(g) agreements, with $2 billion in federal funds plus Florida's $250 million state pool; Texas mandates that all jail sheriffs participate, and Oklahoma has expanded its participating agencies from 30 to 77 ^[4][1]. Florida's Operation Tidal Wave produced roughly 25,000 arrests and scaled designated 287(g) officers from 5,000 to nearly 8,000, making Florida the only state where every sheriff participates in the federal program ^[5]. Mississippi enacted a law authorizing a statewide registry of undocumented immigrants — names, addresses, countries of origin — and mandating that state agencies seek 287(g) cooperation agreements with ICE, creating a state-level enforcement data infrastructure that did not previously exist ^[6]. In June, the DC Circuit Court allowed nationwide expansion of expedited removal, permitting deportation without a hearing before an immigration judge for anyone who cannot prove two years of continuous U.S. residence, regardless of location — a power previously limited to border areas ^[7]. The administration is also planning a 528-bed family holding center at a former military base in Louisiana, operated by LaSalle Corrections' nonprofit arm and framed as a 72-hour staging area to speed deportations ^[8]. ICE has doubled its workforce with 12,000 new officers to sustain this pace, though an AP investigation found the rapid hiring brought in individuals with histories of professional misconduct and incomplete training ^[9]. A parallel approach operates beyond the arrest system: stripping immigrants of access to healthcare, housing, and financial services. Stephen Miller directed federal agencies to deny airport secure-area access to TPS holders, bar noncitizens from government-backed small-business loans, restrict mixed-status families from public housing, and urge banks to scrutinize customer immigration status. The administration credits this approach with 2.2 million "self-deportations" and 116,000 voluntary departures ^[10]. At the same time, ICE detained at least 500 babies and toddlers between January 2025 and March 2026, averaging 25 children age three or younger per day, ten times the rate of Biden's final year, with at least 175 held beyond the 20-day limit set by the Flores settlement ^[11]. The public justification remains security. In June, ICE arrested 10,000 people in a five-day surge ^[12].

Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members, and terrorists. — U.S. Department of Homeland Security

But two out of three at-large arrests in that surge involved individuals with no criminal record, and as of April, 70 percent of ICE detainees had no criminal record ^[12][1]. Stephen Miller made the governing standard explicit.

Of course, if you no longer have status in this country, then you're supposed to be deported. — Stephen Miller

That is a status-based test, not a criminality-based one. Alongside the security framing, an economic justification has been advanced. Former acting ICE Director Jonathan Fahey pointed to a Dallas Fed working paper estimating that the unauthorized immigration surge from 2021 to 2024 drove 30 percent of home-price growth and 20 percent of rent growth in the average metro area ^[13].

The American people overall are the losers on [illegal migration]. — Jonathan Fahey

The economic case contradicts itself at two points. The Dallas Fed study found no measurable wage reduction from unauthorized immigration, which does not support the wage-depression claim ^[13]. More directly, economist Chloe East's working paper finds that for every six fewer undocumented workers in a local labor market, one fewer U.S.-born worker was employed ^[14].

We find that for every six fewer undocumented workers working in a local labor market, that there is one fewer U.S.-born worker working in that labor market — Chloe East

Enforcement that reduces housing supply would raise costs, the opposite of what the new justification promises ^[14]. The same linkage between cost-of-living anxiety and immigration enforcement has surfaced in Britain, where Nigel Farage has proposed making housing access itself a deportation trigger for foreign nationals ^[15]. What neither version of the argument accounts for is what the research already shows: enforcement reduces housing supply and cuts U.S.-born employment. The policy offered as relief from high housing costs would raise them instead.