Whether a broken taillight turns into a deportation case can now depend entirely on which side of a county line a driver gets pulled over on. That's the practical effect of a federal program that has quietly turned thousands of local police officers and sheriff's deputies into immigration agents — and, as of last week, it covers more ground than ever.
ICE's own tracker showed 2,365 signed agreements spanning 39 states and two U.S. territories as of August 21, a jump so large it's easy to lose the scale of it: the same program covered roughly 135 agreements in January 2025, right before the current administration took office. That's better than a seventeen-fold expansion in a year and a half. For families in mixed-status households across LatinTimes' core coverage areas, the number that matters isn't the national total — it's whether their own sheriff or police chief signed on, and under which version of the program.
