Feds and Deputized Cops Stockpiling War Machines for Deportation by Whitney Curry Wimbish

[justaprogressive]

Federal agents and local cops are inking thousands of deals to collaborate on immigration law enforcement, while stockpiling historic amounts of military-grade weapons. That’s the takeaway from contractual agreements, federal procurement records, Department of Defense property data, and information obtained through records requests, the Prospect found.

A year after President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act poured a record amount of money into his mass deportation project, which after a second law passed this year now comes to nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, the United States is in the grip of a heavily militarized joint force whose goal is to throw one million people out of the country annually. It stands to harm immigrants, protesters, and community members in general, because the federal government rapidly hired 12,000 officers and agents to staff it without requiring they meet rigorous standards or background checks, immigration advocates, attorneys, and researchers told the Prospect.

An Associated Press investigation found, for example, that the new recruits include those who failed to graduate from a police academy, were caught lying in a police report “to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman,” used excessive force, and faced lawsuits alleging misconduct in prior law enforcement positions.

“The number one thing I worry about and think about all the time with the basically doubling or tripling the size of ICE is they attempted to do that at a time when there’s a nationwide shortage of law enforcement officers,” said Kenneth Lowande, associate professor of political science at Rice University, who researches military equipment in law enforcement and was a creator of an interactive map on the topic. Police departments can’t find qualified applicants to fill jobs, he said, but immigration agents don’t have to meet the same standards to get hired, nor must they undertake the same length of training.

https://prospect.org/2026/07/13/feds-deputized-cops-stockpiling-war-machines-for-deportation-ice-trump/]