ICE Doubled in Size in One Year. Here’s the Legal Framework That Allowed It.

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The immediate questions were obvious: How did this happen? Who authorized it? But there was another question, less dramatic but more structurally important: How did ICE suddenly have 2,000 officers to deploy to a single city?

ICE more than doubled its workforce in less than a year—from roughly 10,000 officers to over 22,000—through a combination of massive appropriations, executive orders, compressed training timelines, and a single internal memo that reversed decades of constitutional interpretation.

Congress appropriated the money. The administration issued the orders. ICE hired the officers and deployed them. The legal mechanisms that made it possible—the specific laws, budget language, and policy changes—have received far less attention than the operations themselves.

Congress faces a February 17 deadline to pass a full Department of Homeland Security funding bill after passing a two-week stopgap measure. Lawmakers are debating whether to impose new constraints on ICE operations or let the current authorities continue.

Appropriations: $170.7 Billion for Border Security

In 2025, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which provided $170.7 billion for border security. The ICE funding package totals $76.5 billion to be spent over five years, with approximately $8 billion specifically allocated for hiring new personnel.

The bill carved out $45 billion for detention expansion—increasing capacity from about 34,000 beds to at least 116,000 beds by September 2029. More beds meant the ability to detain more people pending removal, which required more officers to conduct arrests and oversee the process.

Unlike typical appropriations that specify “X amount for salaries, Y amount for training, Z amount for equipment,” this gave ICE a single pool of money to spend on hiring as they saw fit, enabling the agency to move fast.

Executive Orders: Redefining the Mission

The Biden administration had established limited priorities focused on national security threats, recent border crossers, and people with serious criminal convictions. ICE officers were supposed to exercise the power to choose not to prosecute certain cases and decline action against long-time residents without criminal histories.

Trump’s executive orders eliminated that constraint and directed ICE to prioritize action against people without legal status to be in the country. Suddenly the agency could argue it needed more officers because its lawful responsibility now extended to every person in the country without legal status.

The orders also explicitly redirected ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division—which had focused on trafficking, smuggling, and other transnational crimes—toward enforcement of immigration laws related to illegal entry and unlawful presence. By redefining the mission through executive order, Trump created the legal predicate for the hiring surge.

Accelerated Hiring: Bypassing Standard Procedures

ICE faced a practical problem: it couldn’t hire thousands of officers in a short time using standard federal hiring procedures. Federal hiring normally takes months—you post a job, people apply, and you interview candidates. Background investigations alone can take months.

ICE received special permission from the Office of Personnel Management to skip the normal hiring process when claiming urgent need for workers. With this authority, ICE could hire without the usual competitive process, dramatically accelerating recruitment.

Administrative Warrants and Home Entry

ICE uses internal documents called “Warrants of Removal,” which are signed by ICE supervisory officers without any judicial review or approval.

The Fourth Amendment requires that warrants be approved by a judge based on evidence, and that warrants must be issued by a judicial officer. The Supreme Court has consistently held that this requirement is at its strongest in the home context—the legal principle that your home has the strongest protection against government searches.

An ICE internal warrant is written and approved by the same ICE officers who will do the search, with no judge reviewing whether it’s justified. Courts are now deciding whether ICE’s internal warrants are legal under the Fourth Amendment. Civil rights organizations have filed lawsuits challenging their use. House Judiciary Democrats have demanded DHS and ICE address concerns about warrantless home raids.

The use of administrative warrants transformed what operations ICE officers could conduct. Without the ability to enter homes without judicial warrants, ICE would be substantially constrained—officers would need to obtain judicial warrants (which requires showing probable cause to a judge and waiting for approval) or conduct arrests at workplaces or in public spaces. Within months, there were documented cases of ICE agents conducting forced home entries in Minnesota and elsewhere, including cases where they entered wrong homes and detained U.S. citizens without legal authority.

The 287(g) Program: Deputizing Local Police

The 287(g) program lets ICE deputize local police to make immigration arrests on ICE’s behalf. The program is authorized by statute (8 USC 1357(g)) and allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to authorize state and local officers to identify, arrest, and detain people for violations.

The 287(g) program has existed since 1996, but its scale changed dramatically under the Trump administration. In early 2025, 135 local agencies participated. By June, ICE had recruited 649—nearly five times as many.

This expansion happened not through new legislation but through administrative recruitment. ICE began aggressively recruiting state and local agencies to participate in the program and, according to civil rights organizations, paid local police to find and report immigrants.

By deputizing local police, ICE could conduct operations that were technically carried out by local officers working under ICE supervision. ICE gets help from roughly 17,000 other officers—federal agents and local police, including approximately 14,500 federal criminal-law-enforcement officers—FBI, DEA, ATF, and other federal agents temporarily assigned to work with ICE, plus state and local officers participating in 287(g) and other collaboration programs.

Statutory Foundation: Section 287 of the Immigration and Nationality Act

Section 287 lets officers stop and question anyone they suspect isn’t a citizen, and to arrest without warrant any alien whom an officer has a reason to think is in the country illegally.

These statutes have existed for decades. What has changed is how these statutes are interpreted and deployed. The Trump administration’s executive orders, combined with the dramatic increase in ICE personnel, represent aggressive interpretations of existing statutory provisions. ICE argues it can arrest anyone an officer suspects is breaking immigration law. This standard lets officers make arrests based on how someone looks or sounds.

In September 2025, the Supreme Court appeared to validate this approach in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, staying a lower court order that had barred agents from stopping people based on “apparent race or ethnicity” and “speaking Spanish or English with an accent.” Civil rights groups said the decision allows racial profiling.

No new statutory authority was required for ICE to double in size and begin Operation Metro Surge. The existing statutes in the INA, combined with new appropriations, executive orders reorienting priorities, and regulatory interpretations of existing authorities, provided sufficient legal foundation for the expansion.

Congressional Intent and Oversight

Did Congress explicitly authorize ICE’s doubling? The bill gave agencies a huge pool of money with few restrictions on how to spend it. The bill didn’t specify deployment details or operational tactics. It provided the money and allowed agencies to make tactical decisions.

When Congress passed the bill in 2025, supporters emphasized it would fund a historic level of action. Congress didn’t specifically debate or approve how fast ICE would hire or what it would do.

The DHS inspector general is investigating whether ICE’s rapid hiring and training actually work, suggesting that even within government there are questions about whether the speed of deployment was appropriate.

Constitutional Vulnerabilities

Multiple aspects of the legal framework enabling ICE’s expansion are vulnerable to constitutional challenge.

The most significant involves warrantless home entry. Scholars and civil rights groups suing over this practice argue it violates the Fourth Amendment. Lower courts have suggested the government’s argument is wrong in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and elsewhere.

A second vulnerability involves racial profiling. If ICE officers are stopping and questioning people based on appearance, accent, or presence in particular neighborhoods—practices that Operation Metro Surge appears to have involved—then those stops violate the Fourth Amendment unless the officer has a real reason to suspect a crime. The Supreme Court’s September 2025 decision in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo appeared to allow officers to consider race and language when deciding to stop someone, but courts may reject this if officers are using race to decide who to stop.

A third problem involves how people are treated while detained. The Trump administration has argued that all noncitizens who entered without inspection must be jailed without bail while waiting for deportation hearings, reversing three decades of prior practice. Federal courts have rejected this, and the case is being appealed to higher courts. If the courts reject the government’s claim, that would limit how many people ICE can detain.

The February 17 Deadline: Congressional Options

After the Minneapolis shootings, Congress was unable to pass a full-year DHS appropriations bill. Democrats wanted rules requiring judges to approve home searches, body cameras on agents, and limits on neighborhood sweeps. Republicans opposed these. The result was a two-week continuing resolution that continues DHS operations at current funding levels but imposes no new legal constraints.

This funding patch expires on February 17, 2026, creating a deadline for Congress to either pass a new appropriations bill (with or without ICE reform provisions) or allow the government to enter another shutdown.

If Congress passes a bill with rules requiring judges to approve home searches, body cameras on agents, and bans on raids at hospitals and schools, those rules would become law. They would constrain ICE’s operational capacity in a way that executive action and litigation cannot.

A judicial warrant requirement would require judges to approve home searches. A ban on neighborhood sweeps would prevent the kind of raids that happened in Minneapolis. A rule preventing raids at hospitals, schools, and churches would prevent raids at those locations. Body cameras would create evidence for lawsuits and investigations.

If Congress passes another full-year appropriations bill without such constraints, Congress would be approving the current system.

How This System Was Built

The doubling of ICE from 10,000 to 22,000 officers in a single year was enabled by: substantial funding with few restrictions; executive orders expanding who ICE targets; accelerated hiring procedures; expansion of the 287(g) program deputizing local police; and court decisions that appeared to approve these tactics.

Each element is legal under existing law. But taken together, they represent a fundamental transformation in how enforcement operates in the United States.

The framework has constitutional vulnerabilities, particularly regarding warrantless home entry and racial profiling. It raises questions about whether ICE followed proper procedures in implementing these changes. It raises questions about congressional intent and whether Congress fully understood what it was authorizing when it appropriated $170.7 billion.

These rules are still in effect unless Congress changes them. As the two-week DHS funding patch expires on February 17, Congress faces a decision: whether to add new rules limiting ICE, or allow the current system to continue.

The legal architecture that put 2,000 ICE officers on those streets was built over months, through appropriations bills and executive orders and internal policies that most members of Congress never read.

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