What are ice agents doing?
Executive summary
ICE is conducting a rapid, high-intensity nationwide enforcement campaign that pairs a large recruitment-driven manpower surge with aggressive field operations — arrests, workplace and street-level raids, and expanded surveillance — producing clashes, shootings, and widespread community pushback in cities such as Minneapolis [1] [2] [3]. Reporting shows the agency has rapidly increased personnel and deployed them to immigrant-heavy neighborhoods and workplaces while also expanding high-tech monitoring, even as critics warn of excessive force, poor oversight and civil-rights harms [1] [4] [5] [6].
1. A manpower boom and fast deployments
The Department of Homeland Security says ICE hired more than 12,000 officers and agents in under a year — a roughly 120% increase — and that thousands of the new hires are already deployed in enforcement operations nationwide, a recruitment push designed to rapidly expand arrests, investigations and removals [1] [7]. Those added forces have been used in concentrated surges: the administration deployed as many as 2,000 federal agents to the Minneapolis area in a so‑called operation that ICE said would last about 30 days, and similar large-scale activities have been reported in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago and other cities [2] [8] [6].
2. Field tactics: raids, checkpoints, and workplace actions
On the ground ICE has been carrying out full-scale raids — including factory and workplace operations — and officers have been observed conducting door‑to‑door checks, stopping vehicles, and arresting individuals in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, often using unmarked cars and plainclothes officers to obscure identities, according to local reporting and longstanding descriptions of the agency’s approach [4] [2] [9]. ICE’s own statements emphasize arrests, investigations and removals as core outcomes of these deployments, framing the activity as law‑enforcement operations targeted at alleged fraud and criminal cases [1] [10].
3. A spike in deadly encounters and use-of-force controversies
Multiple outlets document a recent rise in shootings and deaths connected to federal immigration agents amid the crackdown; reporting cites at least a dozen shootings and dozens of deaths in custody during 2025, and the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an ICE officer on January 7, 2026 has become an immediate flashpoint with conflicting accounts about whether the agent acted in self‑defense [6] [11] [3]. Local officials, advocates and members of Congress contest ICE’s version of that incident even as federal officials defend the shooting, underscoring acute tension over when and how agents resort to deadly force [3] [2] [8].
4. Expanding surveillance, data use and recruitment messaging
ICE is investing in higher‑tech tools — including broader social-media scraping and new data‑sharing approaches that some observers say loosen previous privacy guardrails — and internal documents show plans to target recruitment through influencers and geo‑targeted advertising aimed at gun‑show and military audiences, indicating a dual strategy of tech-enabled enforcement and large-scale personnel expansion [5] [12]. Critics argue those moves broaden ICE’s remit beyond locating undocumented immigrants to tracking critics and monitoring perceived threats to agents, an expansion that DHS officials have at times framed in terms of agent safety [5].
5. Community response, observers and political polarization
Communities have mobilized to document operations: trained “constitutional observers” and neighborhood networks track agents’ movements, report sightings, and record encounters, while city and state leaders have publicly criticized federal tactics and called for transparency or restraint; simultaneously, federal officials and the White House portray the effort as an aggressive response to fraud and criminality, exposing a deep partisan divide over the mission and methods of ICE [2] [13] [8] [9].
6. What reporting does not yet show (limitations and open questions)
Available sources document deployments, staffing numbers, tactics, surveillance plans and a rise in violent incidents, but many operational details remain contested or unverified in public record: precise rules of engagement, internal oversight steps for new recruits, case-by-case justifications for use of force, and independent forensic findings about recent shootings are not fully available in these reports, meaning accountability and legal determinations will depend on forthcoming investigations and disclosures [1] [6] [3].