ICE actions are harming trust between locals and police.
The growing violence associated with the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign was on display again recently in New York City, when plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers shot and wounded 28-year-old Oscar Belgal while his terrified 5-year-old sat in the car’s backseat. The New York City shooting is the latest in a troubling pattern of violent immigration enforcement encounters across the country and points to a larger issue: What happens when the federal government’s aggressive pursuit of deportations undermines the work of keeping communities safe?
Cities across the country are increasingly being forced to confront this question. One of the fundamental responsibilities of local police is to respond to emergencies and preserve public order. But no amount of effective local policing can compensate for the harms of the current federal immigration enforcement agenda to public safety, including decreased public trust in law enforcement.
The problem goes deeper than any single confrontation between ICE officers and community members. From the start, the Trump administration has made clear that sheer arrest volume is the goal: maximizing civil immigration arrests to meet quotas while minimizing accountability for tactics that violate basic policing norms such as the use of minimum force and the use of masks and unmarked cars. While prior administrations of both political parties typically focused arrest and deportation on those with criminal convictions, under Trump, ICE treats any person in violation of civil immigration law — regardless of their ties to the U.S. and their contributions to their communities — as a serious and violent criminal.
Despite false claims of targeting the “worst of the worst,” as of July 2026, most ICE arrests were of noncitizens with no criminal record, with only 27% of people arrested by ICE having a criminal conviction at all, a record low. In the New York City area, more than three-quarters of the people arrested by ICE that month had no criminal history. Recently, ICE has gone even further: targeting noncitizens with legal status and those appearing in court following the government’s rules, sweeping in longtime residents, workers and parents with no criminal records. Federal agents have focused on low-level immigration violations at the expense of prioritizing bona fide public safety threats such as child trafficking, drug smuggling and domestic terrorism.
This indiscriminate enforcement approach is facilitated by an unprecedented infusion of funding from Congress, with more than $170 billion for immigration enforcement last year making the agency the size of a small military force. This has led to rapid expansion of the ICE workforce, including 8,000 new hires, leaving ICE at approximately 29,000 employees, approaching the size of the FBI — with plans to hire another 5,000 by the end of 2026. But this hiring surge comes with less training and vetting than ever before, and many recruited using explicit white nationalist rhetoric. This means ICE officers with little or no training on use of force, constitutional rights or de-escalation tactics. In July, a newly hired ICE officer with a documented history of domestic violence shot and killed a young father in Maine who ICE later admitted was not even the intended target of the operation — just one tragic example of the public safety consequences of a poorly trained and unprofessional ICE workforce.
The Trump administration is also using financial incentives to lure an increasing number of local police departments into agreements that deputize local police to directly enforce federal immigration laws, turning everyday police interactions like routine traffic stops into detention and deportation. Effective policing depends on trust. But years of research show that when local police serve as a force multiplier for ICE, communities become fearful of their local police departments and are less likely to report crimes. Police officers need witnesses willing to come forward, and community members need to feel safe in reporting crimes. In Tennessee, a police chief reported that a noncitizen caretaker delayed calling 911 for an unresponsive infant, reportedly out of fear of immigration enforcement. The baby later died.
There have already been several reports of declines in crime reporting among immigrant communities fearful of deportation. A study published this year in the American Economic Review found that involving local police in federal immigration enforcement made Hispanic victims less likely to report crimes, while increasing the likelihood that they would become crime victims.
All this presents a real problem for police departments. Victims of domestic violence may hesitate to seek help. Victims of violent crime now have to fear arrest and detention. Potential witnesses lose incentive to cooperate with law enforcement and provide critical information about drug trafficking, sex trafficking or other serious offenses.
What, then, should cities do when federal immigration enforcement is actively threatening public safety? New York City has long recognized the importance of keeping local policing separate from federal immigration enforcement. City laws generally prohibit the NYPD from participating in civil immigration enforcement and restrict the use of City resources to support these operations, allowing police to focus on their core public safety duties.
Cities and states across the country are already taking steps to limit federal overreach and protect their communities. More than 30 localities have adopted policies restricting the use of public property as staging grounds for immigration operations. Cities like Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles are filing public records requests to increase transparency around ICE and Department of Homeland Security actions. And states like Illinois and Minnesota have established independent commissions to investigate alleged federal misconduct and document its impact on communities. Local city and state governments are proving that they are not powerless to respond when federal immigration enforcement undermines public safety.
However, cities cannot solve this problem on their own. While local and state governments can and should take steps to protect their communities and hold federal agents accountable, they cannot fundamentally change the laws behind immigration enforcement. That responsibility lies with Congress. Lawmakers must reform the outdated laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s that made detention and deportation the one-size-fits-all response regardless of whether someone poses a public safety threat. We need a new framework that prioritizes the safety of communities over arrest and deportation numbers. Construction workers driving to job sites or parents picking up their children at school shouldn’t be top targets for arrest, and federal law enforcement agencies should not treat entire communities as a threat.
There is a better way forward: ensuring immigration enforcement is centered on four key principles: compliance, safety, proportionality and accountability. That means giving people a viable pathway to earn permanent legal status. It means focusing enforcement resources on genuine public safety threats, instead of treating every immigration violation as justification for aggressive enforcement. It means ensuring proportional consequences for violations, rather than relying on deportation as a one-size-fits-all solution. And it means giving the federal courts and Congress more authority to hold federal agencies and agents responsible when they abuse their authority, so that accountability isn’t left only to states.
The shooting in New York City is a stark reminder of what is at stake when immigration enforcement undermines public safety. We cannot judge the effectiveness of an immigration enforcement system based on how many people are arrested or deported. The real test is whether it protects public safety, encourages compliance with the law and holds those enforcing it accountable. And by those measures, the current approach is failing miserably.
