This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters.

The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement often appeared calibrated for public attention and maximum spectacle under former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. For much of the administration’s first 14 months, operations commonly included highly-produced videos, bombastic social media rhetoric and staged photo ops. Noem became the public face of the crackdown, but that also made her a convenient scapegoat as public disapproval of the campaign ballooned, especially after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.

Noem’s successor, Markwayne Mullin, has charted a different trajectory, telling senators during confirmation hearings last month that his goal was to prevent the department from being “the lead story every single day.” Part of that posture appears to be scaling back the visible involvement of ICE agents in enforcement activity, with Mullin telling senators he’d “love to see” ICE spend more of its time doing “transport” and less time on the “front line.”

One way to do that is by paying local police to take on more of the investigations and arrests of immigrants. Last fall, DHS announced that agencies participating in the 287(g) task force program — which allows local police to conduct immigration enforcement — could be reimbursed for the salaries and benefits of officers who are trained to participate.

If DHS follows through on those promises, the program, which was funded by last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, would become the largest federal police funding effort in the country by far, according to a February report from Fwd.us, a progressive think tank. The same report estimated that between 13,800 and 15,800 local officers and deputies have been trained for taskforce work so far, more than the roughly 12,000 new ICE agents that DHS says it’s hired since Trump returned to office.

Readers may be familiar with 287(g) primarily as a program that allows local jails to hold people with active deportation orders so that ICE can process them for removal. The task force version works on similar legal authority, but rather than being limited to people already in custody for alleged crimes, the agreements allow trained local officials to investigate and arrest people for suspected immigration violations during routine patrol and to seek the arrest of people targeted by ICE.

In Vinita, in northeast Oklahoma, Police Chief Mark Johnson told The Oklahoman last week that seven of his 16 officers have completed task force training, and that it has streamlined their work. They now regularly take people directly to ICE offices and detention facilities themselves, instead of waiting for an ICE agent to show up. Johnson rejected the idea that his department's budget is shaped by the number of people his officers detain. “These folks are being picked up in the same way they always have,” Johnson said.

But an ICE financial ledger initially obtained by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that, in fact, nationwide, there are huge financial incentives for local police completing immigration arrests. A FWD.us analysis of the ledger found that ICE paid — or at least earmarked — more than $170 million in “incentives” to local law enforcement for “the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE.” The sum included nearly $6 million for “conducting immigration enforcement activities related to the locations of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Child].”

Payments per person are also flowing to some jails outside the 287(g) system. According to reporting this week from Spotlight PA, five local jails in Pennsylvania billed the federal government more than $21 million in 2024 and 2025 for using their facilities as detention space for ICE. While these agreements precede the current administration, sometimes by decades, the number of people detained this way has increased, according to the outlet. The detention population at the jail in Clinton County, in central Pennsylvania, nearly doubled from Jan. 2024 to Dec. 2025.

Local police and jails are not the only ones being paid to expand ICE’s reach. Private contractors are receiving large federal awards to help identify and locate people the government wants to detain. According to a January Scripps News investigation, late last year, DHS awarded contracts potentially worth $1.2 billion to 13 private companies to provide the government with “skip-tracing” services — “a process described as using government data, the web, and physical surveillance to confirm the location of targeted immigrants” — increasingly alongside artificial intelligence technology.

According to January reporting from The Washington Post, ICE officials have told contractors that “the overall desire is to complete cases as quickly as possible,” and the pay structure is designed to reward speed.

Critics have increasingly described that arrangement as a bounty system. In January, Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi introduced the “No Private Bounty Hunters for Immigration Enforcement Act,” aimed at barring DHS from outsourcing civil-enforcement functions like skip-tracing to private firms. “Turning immigration enforcement into a profit-seeking enterprise crosses a dangerous line,” Krishnamoorthi said in a statement.

But profit-seeking turns up at nearly every corner of the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement, especially among firms with close ties to President Trump and his allies. Last month, OpenSecrets reported that a relatively small cluster of private prison operators, charter airlines and transportation contractors dominated ICE’s largest contracts in 2025, and that several of those companies, or their executives, had also made significant contributions to Trump-affiliated political committees.

Last year, The Associated Press found many politically connected firms had been granted no-bid contracts, whereby the administration had circumvented normal competitive processes, citing vague emergency powers.

This troubles Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization. “This isn’t an example of one or two bad apples,” Hedtler-Gaudette said during congressional testimony last month. “The problems in federal acquisition are deeply rooted at all federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.”