The Brief

The use of a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that deputizes local police for immigration enforcement has dramatically expanded under President Donald Trump's second term in office.

The rapid expansion of the 287(g) program marks one of the most visible shifts in President Trump's second-term immigration strategy.

On Trump's first day he signed the executive order, "Protecting the American People from Invasion," which called on the DHS secretary to maximize the use of 287(g) agreements and to structure them "in the manner that provides the most effective model for enforcing Federal immigration laws."

The results have been swift.

In 2019, during Trump's first term, just 45 of these 287(g) agreements were signed, available data shows. As of Feb. 13, ICE reported 1,412 active agreements across 40 states and territories — more than 1,130 of them signed in 2025 alone.

(DHS did not provide data prior to 2019 or between 2020 and 2025. NPR has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for this information).

Gauging the effectiveness of 287(g) programs

The program, established in 1996, allows state and local law enforcement officers to act as immigration enforcement agents. That means questioning, investigating, and in some cases arresting people for civil immigration violations – authority traditionally reserved for federal officers.

The program existed under previous Democratic and Republican administrations, but never to the extent that the Trump administration is using it now, immigration experts and people who worked during previous presidential administrations tell NPR.

The White House is using 287(g) agreements as "a tailor-made tool" for the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda, said Doris Meissner, who led the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the agency that predated DHS, ICE and Customs and Border Patrol) under President Bill Clinton.

"There has never been the kind of whole-government mobilizing around immigration that we're currently seeing," Meissner said. Trump's approach is "putting 287(g) agreements on steroids," she added.

How effective it's been is another question.

In a response to NPR's questions, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said that these partnerships serve as critical resources to "arrest criminal illegal aliens across the country" and make the U.S. safer.

However, available data is hard to parse and it's unclear what arrests, detentions or deportations can be credited to this program.

DHS said there were more than 675,000 deportations as of January 2026 in Trump's first year back in office because of the administration's crackdown on immigration.

The Trump administration believes these partnerships are fruitful, with DHS pointing to operations in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has effectively required local law enforcement to sign 287(g) agreements with ICE, which netted 40,000 arrests. And in West Virginia, more than 650 "illegal aliens" were arrested over a two-week operation, according to McLaughlin.

How does the program work?

There are three main 287(g) models:

• The jail enforcement model: Every person that comes into a local jail, with criminal convictions or pending charges, will be checked for whether or not they have legal status in the United States. If they are found to be in the country illegally, ICE will be notified and they will be held in jail, pending ICE removal. 
• The warrant service officer model: Similar to the jail enforcement model, where local police are trained to serve and execute administrative warrants on migrants in their local jails. 
• The task force model: Officers can stop, question and make arrests for immigration violations. DHS says an officer, "with approval from an ICE supervisor, conducts an ICE arrest for immigration violations and transfers the alien to an approved location."
  

(There's a fourth model: The tribal task force, but there is no recorded agreement signed and recorded in available ICE data.)

Task force models make up the majority of 287(g) agreements in place, according to ICE data. DHS describes it as giving officers "limited authority to enforce immigration laws during their routine police duties throughout their local communities in a non-custodial environment with ICE supervision."

Local police agencies sign a memorandum of agreement with ICE and nominate officers to participate in the program who then get training by ICE.

DHS told NPR that training for the task force model consists of 40 hours of education on topics that include immigration law, ICE's Use of Force policy, civil rights law, alien detention and public outreach. In the past, it took about a month of training for local cops to be certified.

Critics have long warned that these deals drain local resources and heighten the risk of racial profiling and civil rights violations by pulling ill-equipped local police into complex immigration law.

Annie Lai, an immigration law professor at University of California Irvine says, "The potential for civil rights violations is acute," including for racial profiling. It also leaves cities and towns exposed to costly legal battles.

Lai was involved in a major civil rights lawsuit against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio filed in 2007, while Bush was still president, over a pattern of unlawful practices by the sheriff and his agency during immigration sweeps and traffic stops, which occurred while the agency was involved in a 287(g) partnership with ICE. Litigation against Arpaio has cost local taxpayers millions. 

There have been a number of lawsuits over the years filed by people detained in local jails under this program – some for longer than they should have been incarcerated while awaiting ICE agents, NPR has previously reported.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, rejected these criticisms: "Allegations that 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement encourage 'racial profiling' are disgusting and categorically FALSE. Our 287(g) partners work with us to enforce federal immigration law without fear, favor, or prejudice, and they should be commended for doing so."

To incentivize cooperation, ICE is offering full reimbursements for participating agencies for the annual salary and benefits of each eligible trained 287(g) officer, including overtime coverage up to 25% of the officer's annual salary. Funding for these costs was made possible through Trump's Big Beautiful Bill.

Law enforcement agencies will also be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards "based on the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE and overall assistance to further ICE's mission," DHS said.

Performance goals for participating agencies have not been made clear– an issue the Government Accountability Office (GAO) highlighted in two separate reports from 2009 and 2021.

The GAO said the 287(g) program could use better oversight. Recommendations from the 2021 report that called on the director of ICE to create those performance metrics had yet to be met as of 2025.

How previous administrations used 287(g)

While its dramatic expansion is new, the 287(g) dates back nearly 30 years to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA).

DHS didn't respond to NPR's request for data on the number of 287(g) agreements signed with local law enforcement under the administrations of Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton.

However, those who worked under these administrations say 287(g) agreements were narrowly used and never reached the level under Trump's current administration.

The original goal of the 1996 law, enacted during the "tough on crime" era, was to help federal authorities identify and remove dangerous criminals, according to John Torres, who worked in immigration enforcement for close to 30 years – first under President Ronald Reagan, eventually moving up the ranks under subsequent administrations, including a stint as acting director of ICE during the transition from President George W. Bush to President Obama.

Meissner, who led the INS under President Clinton, said the White House initially opposed the 287(g) provision because immigration enforcement had long been considered exclusively a federal responsibility. Delegating that authority to state and local police "was not something that was in the playbook," she said.

But the administration ultimately did not block it after hearing from communities grappling with deadly human smuggling cases that local law enforcement struggled to address, Meissner explained to NPR.

Clinton left office in January 2001 and, as far as Meissner recalls, no 287(g) agreements were ever signed. She said local leaders expressed concerns over the potential cost to local taxpayers and the legal liability for small police offices.

September 11th, and the Bush administration, changed everything.

By the mid-2000s, the Bush White House prioritized jail enforcement and task force models of 287(g), Torres recalled.

"We signed a lot of agreements under President Bush," he said.

Under Obama's presidency, more people were deported than any other president in U.S. history and the jail enforcement model was an important aspect to that work, according to John Sandweg, who worked at DHS under Obama.

The Obama administration, for a time, used 287(g) to go after people convicted of serious crimes, but found these partnerships did not help all that much, according to Sandweg.

But by 2012, the Obama administration suspended all 287(g) task force models, following documented civil rights abuses like the cases involving Arpaio's Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona.

"Maybe once in a blue moon you come across someone with a serious criminal history," he explained. "But by and large, what you were getting were individuals who are just undocumented, and maybe they're pulled over for different reasons."

The program was underutilized, but left largely intact under the Biden administration, despite campaign promises to end 287(g) agreements and much to the chagrin of civil rights groups such as the ACLU.

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 21, 2025.

(

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

/

Getty Images North America

)

How President Trump is using them

Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, says concerns over civil rights violations under 287(g) are overblown.

"I honestly don't think that the lawsuits and the activism is driven by facts on the ground. It's driven by ideology," he said, referring to protests against the program and local police involvement in immigration enforcement.

"I'm not saying that there has never been an instance of an officer from DHS or law enforcement doing something they shouldn't. It happens, but it's pretty rare," he added.

The 287(g) program offers an important tool for communities deep in the U.S., away from the border, where enforcement "is much more complicated," Hankinson said. That's where "the Trump administration has been battling uphill against severe headwinds," he said.

The Trump administration touts 287(g) as a way to go after violent criminals in the U.S. illegally.

With that goal in mind, Sandweg said "expanding the 287(g) program makes tremendous sense for [the Trump administration], in that it's a force multiplier, and it increases the number of people who are legally capable of arresting undocumented immigrants dramatically."

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, maintains that "ICE is targeting criminal illegal aliens including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, gang members and more. Nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S."

But the Trump administration has been criticized for arresting U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents and sometimes keeping them incarcerated for days. Records show that many of the people being caught in Trump's enforcement dragnet have no criminal record.

Even as the Trump administration moves to expand 287(g), some states are pushing back.

Earlier this month, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger issued an executive order terminating 287(g) agreements between ICE and state agencies, which included the Virginia Department of Corrections.

In Maryland, a bill that could end these partnerships was headed to Gov. Wes Moore's desk, as of Monday afternoon. That bill would prevent state agencies and employees from entering into 287(g) agreements and would end all existing deals by July.

Under the second Trump administration, partnerships between ICE and local law enforcement agencies that delegate immigration enforcement authority to local officers has expanded widely.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The Trump administration is renewing its push to change the way it funds homeless shelters and housing in California and other states, and several agencies say it could disrupt their services.

It tried last year to move federal homelessness funds away from permanent housing and into temporary housing that requires sobriety. That move, which goes against the existing “housing first” policy favoring a no-strings-attached approach to housing, was blocked by a federal judge.

Now, the Trump administration is trying again. Once again, it’s facing pushback.

This week, a group that includes the National Alliance to End Homelessness and Santa Clara County filed a challenge in Rhode Island’s federal court to the Trump administration’s latest funding guidelines.

The Trump administration’s callous decision to take a second bite at dismantling one of our nation’s most important homelessness prevention programs after a federal court already blocked the administration’s first attempt shows a complete disregard for the people who depend on this funding to keep a roof over their heads,” Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti said in a news release.

More than $4 billion in federal funding is at stake. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates the proposed changes could cost California nearly $238 million for permanent housing, and threaten to put nearly 15,000 Californians back on the street.

“The ‘housing first’ experiment failed Americans by warehousing the vulnerable without results. This ideology promised to end homelessness. Instead, billions of taxpayer dollars were spent while homelessness increased to record levels,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a news release earlier this month.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

More than a month after the abrupt cancellation of this year’s Long Beach Pride Festival, the nonprofit behind the enduring celebration remains in a financial bind. It has so far been unable to repay its vendors, ticketholders and sponsors as it awaits a decision on whether its insurer will cover its losses.

That decision, according to Long Beach Pride President Tonya Martin, will factor heavily into whether they take more drastic action to cover the debt, such as selling or leasing out their headquarters.

“We do want to keep the building,” Martin said. “But if we have to sell it, we have to sell it, because right now all we can think about is how we’re going to pay back all the vendors and the rest of the ticketholders.”

According to the organization’s treasurer, Wayne Manous, Long Beach Pride filed a claim with its carrier, the Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California, a few days after the festival was canceled on May 15. They expect a determination in the next week, Martin said.

“Once we receive the determination and award, we can begin refunding payments to our festival vendors which encompasses Information Booths, Seller Booths, Food Booths, Food Trucks, and others awaiting a refund,” Manous wrote in a June 10 email to vendors seeking refunds.

In an emailed statement Tuesday, the organization declined to offer the total amount it owes or elaborate more on its insurance claim, saying it will wait until “those processes are fully resolved.”

The festival was canceled last month after the city of Long Beach issued a cease-and-desist letter less than an hour before its opening event, saying Pride lacked the necessary permits to start.

Many vendors and ticketholders — some who flew in or drove from other parts of the country — say they were in transit or had already arrived at the festival grounds when they were given notice of the cancellation, either from the city or from friends on social media.

Erica Loring, who owns Shecanter, an online retailer of feminist and queer products, said she was driving up from San Diego the morning of the event when a friend texted her the news.

“I was very confused,” Loring said. “I had to try and figure out what the heck that meant, what it means for vendors, if we’ve gotten any emails to notify us. ‘Do we still go up there?’”

Kaitlyn Nguyen with Heritage 1857, a Vietnamese-style coffee brand, said she received notice not from Pride but from the city’s Health Department, telling her she no longer had permission to sell her goods there.

By that point, she said, her festival crew had already driven into town from Texas and set up a tent and driven an hour outside of town. When she tried to call Long Beach Pride’s general line to get more information, it was disconnected.

Nguyen said she spent around $2,500 on gas, fees, product, permitting and everything else she needed to participate. Now she’s uncertain how much, if any, she will recover. “With the communication that it is at right now, it’s just hard to tell, but I do hope that we get that amount back,” she said.

In the days following the festival’s cancellation, the city and Pride traded blame, offering dueling timelines over what caused it. Long Beach Pride argued it submitted documents and worked with the city in good faith through the final hours and was taken off guard by the city’s order to clear out.

Martin said she was stunned when officers delivered the cease-and-desist to the festival grounds. “You have two days to get everything off the site, or you’ll be arrested,” she recalled being told. “I was in shock, just floored. I was just weak at the knees.”

Tonya Martin, with an original Pride founder, Bob Crow, talks about Long Beach Pride in Long Beach, Monday, June 26, 2023.

(

Thomas R. Cordova

/

Long Beach Post

)

The city fired back in a 23-page memo, saying the nonprofit repeatedly failed to provide permitting materials and structural plans for stages, electrical systems and security. As the situation worsened, city officials offered to move guests into the Terrace Theater and open Bixby Park for a smaller event on Sunday, without alcohol sales or fenced festival grounds.

Pride declined both options, later saying the theater was too costly — more than $100,000, they said — while Bixby Park did not allow enough time to satisfy performers’ contractual requirements.

City spokesperson Laath Martin said Tuesday that Long Beach’s business licensing team has been offering refunds to vendors for city fees. But in the month since the event, vendors say they’ve heard little to no word from Pride itself on when or if they will be repaid for other expenses and fees.

Even before this year’s shock cancellation, the festival, established in 1983, had been struggling.

According to tax filings, Pride lost more than $1.8 million between 2022 and 2024 — $819,066 in 2022, $716,729 in 2023 and $306,000 in 2024. The organization has not turned a profit since 2019.

When Martin took over as president in 2023, she said she unknowingly inherited an organization already carrying $2.6 million in outstanding debt. A year after Martin took the helm, the nonprofit relinquished control of its long-running Pride parade. The city took over planning and funding for the signature event while Pride attempted to keep running the corresponding festival.

The crowds gather along Ocean Boulevard for the 41st Annual Long Beach Pride Parade in Long Beach, Sunday, May 19, 2024.

(

Thomas R. Cordova

/

Long Beach Post

)

The festival’s budget this year was $500,000, and Pride had raised less than $100,000 of it by the time the event was canceled, with only 331 tickets sold as of late April, according to Q Voice News. Pride declined to confirm the number of tickets sold or provide any detailed financial information to the Long Beach Post.

Corporate sponsorships, once a reliable source of major revenue, had largely evaporated, Martin said, naming Walmart and Coca-Cola as examples of large companies that have quietly pulled back as the Trump administration has coerced firms to forgo LGBTQ+ and diversity initiatives.

“They don’t want to upset the president,” Martin said. “Nobody will come out and say it, which I wish they would.”

Normally, Martin said, Pride hires an outside operator to put on the festival, which can run upwards of $400,000. But under financial pressure, she and the board voted to avoid the expense and handle the festival setup themselves. As Martin has repeatedly emphasized since the cancellation, they are all part-time volunteers.

This year’s event was shaping up to be small, according to Loring; only 13 retail or merchandise vendors were listed to participate. “Smaller than a tiny farmer’s market,” Loring said. Another 10 or so food vendors were signed up, Nguyen said, about half of what she’d expect at a festival this size.

“I was like, OK, was the application process a deterrent, or have bridges already been burned, and these businesses have learned not to come to Long Beach due to prior experience?” Nguyen said.

In a letter over the weekend, Pride said it wants to bring the festival back in 2027 under new leadership, with lessons learned and, it hopes, a more stable financial footing.

The board also said that Martin would step down from the presidency in August, a transition the organization said had been planned before the cancellation. Martin confirmed her exit on Monday, saying she will step away from the role and intends to help whoever succeeds her get up to speed. She said she also plans to hold a debrief with Mayor Rex Richardson to discuss what went wrong.

The organization is also working with the city to hold a free Teen Pride event in September.

“I don’t think Pride will ever go away, no matter what they do, even if we change the whole scope of the event itself,” Martin said. “It will never go away. It’ll always be there.”

But Loring, who made her vendor debut in Long Beach, said she would not return if the event is run by the same people.

She was shocked when Pride asked in a June 10 email if vendors and ticketholders would consider donating back a portion of their refunds to the organization. “The audacity for that was on another level,” Loring said.

“It seems as though the entire Pride organization needs an overhaul,” she said. “It needs a fresh set of eyes, a fresh set of experience in order for the community to move forward faithfully.”

Two icons of Los Angeles are coming together in Alhambra for a food pop-up this weekend — each has carved a unique place in Asian America.

On one end you have Kogi, bringing its Korean-Mexican fusion kimchi taco and blackjack quesadilla — and its food truck — to the collab. On the other is Sam Woo, old-school purveyor of Cantonese taste lending its char siu and roast duck from its OG location on Valley between 5th and 6th.

Together, they represent two generations of immigrant entrepreneurship that reshaped how L.A. eats.

“The best way to do it would be to come together like Voltron, but be ourselves separately,” said Roy Choi, chef and founder of Kogi BBQ. “So don't do anything to your roast duck. Don't do anything to your char siu. Don't do anything to our blackjack quesadilla. Don't do anything to our taco.”

The mash-up features two items – roast duck kimchi taco, and char siu blackjack quesadilla. The best-of-both-worlds concept extends to where the food will be served.

“ My whole vision was for Kogi truck to be parked in front,” said Karen Cheung, daughter of Sam Woo’s original owner.

Kogi x Sam Woo

(

Courtesy Kogi and Sam Woo

)

From Chinatown to everywhere

Restaurants come and go, but Sam Woo has remained the byword for Cantonese barbeque in Los Angeles and beyond for more than four decades.

On Christmas Day 1979, new immigrant Peter Cheung opened a stand serving take-out roast duck, char siu and the likes in Chinatown, bringing the family craft from Hong Kong to L.A.

“At the time, it was just my dad, my brother, and me,” Cheung, 67, said in Cantonese. “We hired a cashier and a meat cutter, that was about it.”

Cheung also brought over the Chinese name from the family business back home. It means “three harmonies” – among earth, heaven, and man. The English name Sam Woo was chosen because it sounded like the Cantonese words.

Sam Woo in Alhambra.

(

Fiona Ng

/

LAist

)

In the late 1970s, his clientele was mainly Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants in the then-bustling enclave, with a small handful of customers coming in from Monterey Park.

Back then, he said, “All the restaurants were concentrated in Chinatown.”

As the Chinese-speaking diaspora expanded to the San Gabriel Valley, so too did Sam Woo. Cheung opened a Monterey Park location in 1981 (now closed) and the Alhambra outpost on Valley Boulevard in 1983.

Today, Cheung and his family own and operate four locations across the L.A. region — the oldest in Alhambra.

That little storefront served a loyal legion of eaters, including my family, who moved to Alhambra in the early 1990s — and a kid named Roy Choi.

Roy Choi, left, hands out food from his Kogi BBQ truck in Maywood in January 2024.

(

Allen J. Schaben

/

Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

)

When Roy met Sam

Choi was hanging out in Alhambra and nearby 626 cities during high school and into college, at all-night Asian cafes and their parking lots where a subculture centered around modified Japanese cars took root.

“It was the cafes and the barbecue spots back in Alhambra that were early on in having a kind of a meeting ground for young Asian youth,” Choi said. “It might have been the birth of the AZN movement, you know what I'm saying?”

One place he always ate at was Sam Woo.

Strip mall signs in San Gabriel point to a majority Asian population in this part of Los Angeles.

(

Samanta Helou Hernandez

/

LAist

)

“One of the top five things to eat for me is roast duck or roast pork over rice with the sauce that drips down into it,” he said. “That's where I started really eating barbecue  — and this is before I was a chef.”

Forty-three years since it opened, the hole-in-the-wall in Alhambra has not been changed — inside or out. Karen remembers hanging out at the shop with her sisters growing up, filling small containers of sauces while their parents ran the operation.

“ When you walk into Alhambra, you feel like you are going back in time,” Karen said. “That's what people remember Sam Woo as, like the Mahjong clock, or the vintage menu that you do not ever see anymore. That's people's memories.”

The mahjong clock at Sam Woo in Alhambra.

(

Karen Cheung

/

Courtesy Sam Woo

)

The take-out menu at Sam Woo.

(

Karen Cheung

/

Courtesy Sam Woo

)

How the collab fell into place

Choi wrote about eating at Sam Woo among other culinary adventures in L.A. earlier this year for the Financial Times.

Karen, one of Peter’s four children, read the story – and fired off a DM.

“I was like, ‘We're so honored. Out of all the restaurants you could talk about, you mentioned Sam Woo,” Karen said. “‘Let's do a collab.’”

Six months of planning later, with hundreds of pounds of char siu ready to be cooked, the crossover is happening.

Chef Roy Choi cooking inside Sam Woo in Alhambra.

(

Courtesy Kogi BBQ

)

Sam Woo in Alhambra.

(

Fiona Ng

/

LAist

)

“The inspiration is how delicious their food is [and] the longevity of their restaurant,” Choi said, whose Kogi has redefined fusion cooking and the food truck experience for 19 years and counting.

“We wanna bring something really special to Alhambra," he said. "Just a moment that you could say, ‘I was there.’”