When Donald Trump won a second term as US president a year ago, members of violent militias and far-right extremist groups who had spent years boosting the lie that the 2020 election was rigged were ready to assist the president with delivering on one of his main campaign promises: mass deportations.
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“I’m willing to help,” Richard Mack, a former sheriff who founded the far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, told WIRED at the time, claiming he was in touch with Tom Homan, the man Trump installed as his “border czar.” Tim Foley, head of the Arizona Border Recon, which describes itself as a “non-government organization,” also told WIRED he was in contact with administration officials. William Teer, then head of the far-right Texas Three Percenters militia, wrote a letter to Trump offering his help. Homan even met with an affiliate of the Proud Boys after the election, the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed. According to reports about the meeting, they discussed deportations.
Despite all of these militia leaders and far-right extremist groups salivating at the prospect of being deployed to the streets of American cities to round up immigrants at gunpoint, the call never came.
Instead, the Trump administration has remade the federal government so completely that it has no need for far-right formations from outside the government to traumatize and terrorize immigrant communities across the country. Instead, it is relying on a vastly increased federal force encompassing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), FBI and DEA agents, state and local law enforcement officers, and others. This newly enlarged force is emboldened not only by a massive influx of cash but also by tacit approval from the White House to do whatever it feels is necessary to meet Trump’s wild deportation goals.
“What we’re seeing right now is the Trump administration effectively realigning the federal government to support mass deportation,” says Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council. “This has meant diverting law enforcement resources from several agencies that have never before been involved with low-level immigration arrests, so that they are now focused only on profiling and arresting immigrants.”
As devastating as the past 12 months have been for immigrant communities in the US, experts believe the worst is yet to come. Installing CBP, which has a documented history of alleged human rights violations, as the agency at the forefront of the immigration crackdown is a deeply worrying sign, they say.
“I think we’re just at the beginning,” says Naureen Shah, director of government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I think we ain’t seen nothing yet. They will scale up dramatically in the coming [months].”
Trump campaigned in 2024 on a promise to unleash the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country” during his second term in office, and within days of returning to the Oval Office in January, he signed multiple executive orders designed to fulfill his supporters’ demands.
The person tasked with carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda was the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, who spent the early months of the administration LARPing as an immigration agent. She was aided by Homan and her “shadow secretary” Corey Lewandowski. But behind the scenes, immigration policy is being dictated by White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller, who has a long history of promoting white nationalist ideas. In recent months, this administration has green-lit raids at previously protected locations like schools, courthouses, and hospitals; disappeared people to countries they had no connection to without due process; and arrested elected officials. When people fought back, the administration deployed the military to the streets of US cities to combat the all-but-nonexistent threat of violence from protesters.
Then in July, as part of his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump approved $170 billion to fund immigration and border enforcement over the next four years, $75 billion of which goes directly to ICE. No volunteer militia leaders or anti-immigrant extremists needed.
After the bill passed, the nonprofit American Immigration Council claimed the “new infusion of money [made] ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history.” It would “bring the administration’s effort of repurposing the federal government to focus primarily on immigration enforcement close to reality,” the AIC wrote.
Seeking to capitalize on the terror it was bringing to immigrant communities, official accounts from the White House and DHS documented their actions by posting videos, memes, and AI slop—some incomprehensible outside of extremist spaces—to official social media accounts.
Richard Mack, who claims to have been in touch with Homan as recently as this past fall, hasn’t played any official role in the deportation effort. But local sheriffs and other law enforcement agencies were co-opted into doing ICE’s work for them, including interrogating anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, demanding citizenship papers, arresting illegal immigrants, and detaining them in local jails until ICE agents arrive to take them away. Homan did not respond to a request for comment.
“They’re not only cannibalizing the federal government, they are building out their tentacles in cities and states across the country through a radical version of the 287g program, which taps state and local law enforcement to support immigration [enforcement],” Shah says.
A year ago, just 125 agencies had signed up to 287g programs. As of November 25 that number had skyrocketed to more than 1,200. ”They’re trying to treat it as miniature ICEs all across our communities,” Shah adds.
And yet, despite everything that the Trump administration has done, it was not enough for a cohort of his base.
“The administration is not serious,” Nick Fuentes, a far-right white nationalist influencer who recently sparked a civil war within the GOP, said in October, criticizing the administration’s deportation numbers.
A report from the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank published in November came to the same conclusion, pointing out that the Trump administration was “substantially off pace” to meet its stated goal of exceeding President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1954 deportation program. To remedy this, the report suggests adopting a broader approach targeting all immigrants by dramatically increasing worksite enforcements—or, to copy the Eisenhower administration’s methods, using a “system of blocking off an area and mopping it up.”
DHS has said deportations in Trump’s first year back in office would shatter records, but it’s difficult to confirm this, as the agency stopped publishing monthly deportation figures. Internal numbers obtained by NBC News show ICE deportations to be well below Trump’s predicted figures.
In late October, the administration sought to increase deportations by replacing ICE personnel with CBP agents in leadership positions across the country, an unprecedented use of agents typically tasked with patrolling the Mexican and Canadian borders.
“Border Patrol is an agency with a culture of abuse and impunity,” says Shah. “They have for years harmed people and even killed people and not faced accountability for it. They are bringing their culture of abuse and xenophobia and their sense of impunity to American cities deep into the interior, and it is a recipe for disaster for our civil rights.”
Explaining the decision at the time, a DHS official told NBC, “The mentality is, CBP does what they’re told, and the administration thinks ICE isn’t getting the job done. So CBP will do it.”
Leading the charge is Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino, who gained notoriety for his role in some of the most infamous anti-immigrant actions since Trump took office, including leading a group of agents on horseback, supported by military personnel, into MacArthur Park in Los Angeles where children were playing. He has also led deportation actions in Chicago where he was captured on video throwing tear gas into a crowd.
In a ruling issued in November to extend an injunction against, in part, the excessive use of force by ICE and Border Patrol agents in Chicago, US District Court judge Sara Ellis wrote that she found Bovino’s evidence “not credible,” adding that he “appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying.”
Initially, experts worried that having far-right Constitutional Sheriffs working directly with ICE would lead to potential violations of human rights, but those incidents would have been isolated to particular counties where those sheriffs operated. CBP, on the other hand, is a federal agency which now has a mandate to operate across the entire country.
“Bovino has a terrible track record of obvious anti-immigrant rhetoric and action, and Border Patrol has a long-standing history of abuses and impunity and no experience in enforcing immigration law in the interior of the United States,” says Gupta, pointing out that it’s “unprecedented to have Border Patrol officers in cities like Charlotte or Chicago or New York making at-large arrests in communities that have long-standing ties to this country.”
And the scope and scale of the agency’s activity is increasing, including revelations that CBP has monitored the travel patterns of millions of Americans to identify what it sees as suspicious activity.
Meanwhile, ICE continues to expand its reach, building a shadow deportation network in Texas and contracting with bounty hunting firms to track immigrants. As WIRED exclusively revealed earlier this year, operatives from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are building a master database at the DHS that could be used to surveil undocumented immigrants.
Experts WIRED spoke to point to mass protests like No Kings marches and state lawmakers, like Illinois governor JB Pritzker, standing up to ICE as signs of hope that Trump’s mass deportations could be scaled back or ended. But ultimately, Shah says, as long as Miller remains in place, very little is likely to change.
The White House and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
A year ago, experts warned about the potential for isolated incidents of overreach by extremist sheriffs in relation to immigration enforcement. Today, those concerns are moot, given how radically the Trump administration, orchestrated by Miller, has reshaped the federal government to execute their deportation demands.
“The thing that could stop this is if Stephen Miller is no longer at the helm,” says Shah. “He’s the evil genius, and as long as he has power, he can keep moving the chess pieces. It doesn’t matter if it’s Tom Homan or Kristi Noem or Corey Lewandowski, all these people are just pieces on the board.”
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