With ICE arrests and detentions at their highest levels, immigration remains a key issue for voters less than two weeks before election day.
Richard Wolfe, Maine asks in a callout question: Why can’t local law enforcement be assigned to monitor ICE?
Maanvi: Across the US, local police, highway patrol, sheriffs departments, even Fish and Wildlife Services actually work directly with ICE – helping the federal government find and arrest immigrants as part of what’s called the 287(g) program. In many regions, it’s unclear whether local cops are conducting routine police work (pulling someone over for speeding, or conducting a drug operation) or engaging in immigration enforcement. Sometimes, it’s both at the same time.
I recently wrote about an operation at the El Corralón bar in Memphis on 29 August. It began as a police raid targeting illegal gambling and drugs turned into one of the largest sweeps of undocumented immigrants in Tennessee – 120 people were detained. Initially, search warrants at the bar related to drugs and gambling targeted the bar’s owner. But agents also arrested a number of patrons on immigration charges.
Sam: The federal government has said it was working to carry out the “largest denaturalization effort in history,” and there have been isolated DoJ announcements of cases to strip people of citizenship based on their criminal records or claims that they illegally procured their naturalization. Denaturalization cases have been brought under previous administrations, and it’s unclear if the scale of this administration’s efforts match its rhetoric. We do know that US immigration agents in the field have frequently detained US citizens. The Trump administration has repeatedly downplayed this problem, but ProPublica recently did great reporting documenting reports of 506 citizens detained by DHS between January 2025 and September 2026.
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