How many ICE agents are nationally assigned to each state and where can official rosters be obtained?
Executive summary
ICE publicly says its staffing more than doubled in 2025 after a recruitment surge that added roughly 12,000 officers and agents, swelling the force from about 10,000 to more than 22,000 nationwide [1] [2] [3]. The reporting and agency materials collected here do not provide a vetted, itemized count of ICE agents “assigned to each state,” but they do point to where authoritative rosters and manpower records can — and cannot — be obtained [4] [5].
1. What the agency has acknowledged: national totals and rapid expansion
ICE and DHS publicly announced a historic hiring campaign that produced more than 12,000 new officers and agents in under a year, a reported 120% manpower increase that the agency says brought its total to roughly 22,000 personnel nationwide [1] [3] [2]. Coverage of the recruitment drive highlights the scale — and the political framing around it — including a large advertising buy and plans to rapidly deploy new hires into enforcement operations [6] [3].
2. The missing piece: state-by-state assignments are not published in the cited reporting
None of the provided sources contains an official, verifiable table that lists the number of ICE agents assigned to each U.S. state; reporting instead gives aggregate workforce figures and descriptions of field office footprints [2] [5]. Journalistic and watchdog pieces note that ICE has not publicly disclosed how many new hires were placed into enforcement versus investigative roles, or provided fine-grained geographic allocations of personnel, leaving the requested per‑state breakdown absent from the record cited here [4].
3. Where official rosters and staffing data can be sought — and their limits
The primary official portal for agency organization and public statements is ICE’s website, which publishes mission descriptions, office locations and career FAQs that describe ICE directorates and field-office structures [7] [5]; these pages can confirm field office presences but do not function as a state-by-state roster of personnel counts. Where reporting and public projects have compiled names and assignments, they have relied on a mix of public records and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-linked documents — for example, community-compiled resources and wikis that say they use FOIA and open-source reporting to identify individual officers [8] — but those compilations are not official, raise privacy and safety concerns, and have been the subject of controversy [9] [10].
4. Unofficial lists, leaks, and the credibility problem
Several outlets and online projects have published lists or databases claiming to identify ICE and Border Patrol personnel by state; these include doxxing sites and community-run “ICE List” projects indexed by state that compile photos and names drawn from social media, reporting and user contributions [9] [8] [10]. Such compilations have sparked legal and ethical disputes and are explicitly not equivalent to an official roster, meaning they cannot substitute for agency-published staffing data and carry risks of inaccuracy and harm [9] [10].
5. How to obtain authoritative breakdowns: transparent requests and oversight channels
For an authoritative, state-level breakdown the documented paths are (a) formal requests to ICE/DHS through FOIA or direct data requests to DHS components that maintain workforce and field-office staffing records (reporting shows FOIA-linked records have been used by researchers and wikis) [8]; and (b) scrutiny of DHS and ICE budget, appropriations, and congressional testimony where agency officials sometimes report staffing by component and office in oversight settings — though the sources here show those public statements so far provide totals and field-office presence rather than a neat per-state table [5] [2]. The agency’s own public career pages and FAQs can verify field-office coverage and aggregate counts but do not serve as detailed state assignment rosters [5] [7].
6. Competing narratives and why the gap matters
The lack of a published state-by-state roster leaves space for competing narratives: the administration touts rapid expansion and deployment as a policy success [1] [3], while critics and oversight reporters point to abbreviated training, unclear role assignments, and the opacity of where and how new staff are being deployed [4] [6]. That gap — documented in the sources reviewed — is the central reason precise per‑state agent counts cannot be stated here from the provided reporting [4].