By Steve Neavling
For more than 15 years, ICE required officers to complete a “field operations worksheet” before making an arrest. The form included details such as name, appearance, addresses, employment, and criminal history, and had to be approved by a supervisor.
That safeguard has been scrapped under the Trump administration, according to six current and former ICE and Department of Homeland Security officials who spoke to NBC News.
“It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official said.
The change has fueled a shift from targeted arrests to broad sweeps in immigrant neighborhoods and parking lots where day laborers gather. Viral videos have captured ICE agents conducting what critics say are indiscriminate arrests.
Darius Reeves, who led ICE’s Baltimore field office until May, said he was told about the change before leaving.
“The worksheet is actually a very valuable necessity now bypassed … so they could keep constantly flooding the streets,” Reeves said. Some officers, he added, still use them out of fear of future legal liability.
Trump officials, including White House adviser Stephen Miller, have pressed ICE to escalate arrests, even threatening to fire field office leaders who don’t meet quotas.
ICE did not respond before publication, but DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin later said in a statement the agency “replaced this inefficient and outdated paperwork with a streamlined tech-based platform. This more efficient system cuts down on time and allows our law enforcement officers to spend more time out in the field. We still have the same information of who we are targeting well ahead of time… The only change is instead of manual paperwork—we now are using technology to make our officers more efficient.”
