Does ICE work with border patrol to find immigrants?

1. Distinct missions, common chain of command

ICE and Border Patrol answer to the same parent department (DHS) but have distinct statutory missions: CBP/Border Patrol secures ports of entry and the border zone while ICE enforces immigration and customs laws in the interior and runs investigations and removals; that formal separation is described on both ICE and news explainers ^{[1] [3] [4]}.

2. Operational handoffs and shared duties

Operationally the agencies intersect: Border Patrol apprehends people at or near the border and then ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) often receives, detains and processes those individuals for removal proceedings — a concrete handoff role identified in reporting and agency descriptions ^{[5] [3]}. News coverage and legal explainers also document instances where Border Patrol agents are deployed inland to assist ICE or to carry out interior stops based on shared immigration authorities ^{[6] [7]}.

3. Legal authorities that create overlap

Federal law and DHS policy create overlapping authorities: both ICE and Border Patrol officers are “immigration officers” under the Immigration and Nationality Act and have some nationwide enforcement powers, and CBP’s reach (including the so-called “100‑mile zone”) means Border Patrol can lawfully act well inside the country — a statutory and operational overlap cited in policy analyses and reporting ^{[7] [3]}. Agency training and personnel moves further blur lines: ICE and Border Patrol personnel receive overlapping law‑enforcement training as noted in agency career materials ^[8].

4. Joint deployments, controversy and competing narratives

Coordination has become politically charged: administrations have moved Border Patrol into interior operations to boost enforcement capacity, prompting lawsuits, protests and criticism from advocacy groups who argue the shift expands an agency with a history of abuse into cities and interior enforcement ^{[7] [9] [10]}. Mainstream reporting highlights that while the agencies coordinate, the optics of joint operations — and cases of violence by individual agents from either agency — shape public debate and legal challenges ^{[6] [11] [12]}.

5. Formal partnerships with state and local law enforcement

ICE also partners with state and local police through programs such as 287(g), which delegates certain federal immigration authorities to local agencies under ICE supervision; that program is another vector through which federal border and interior enforcement intersect with municipal policing, and it is described on ICE’s own site ^[13]. Civil‑rights groups and legal advocates frequently point to these partnerships as expanding immigration enforcement into community policing, an explicit critique found in advocacy reporting ^{[9] [10]}.

6. Where reporting is clear — and where it isn’t

The documents and reporting furnished establish that ICE and Border Patrol coordinate operationally, legally overlap in authorities, and sometimes perform joint or sequential roles in apprehension and detention ^{[5] [7] [3]}. Sources converge on the fact of cooperation but differ on the extent and propriety of recent deployments: government materials frame coordination as mission‑driven, while civil‑liberty organizations and some news analyses frame it as politically driven expansion with accountability concerns ^{[4] [9] [10]}. If readers seek granular statistics on how often agents of one agency directly assist or lead interior arrests for the other agency, or current deployment orders for specific cities, those precise operational details are not fully captured in the available sources and require agency records or contemporaneous reporting for confirmation.