Trump Administration Plans To Boost Worksite Immigration Enforcement After Criminal Investigations Increase

The Trump administration is planning an increase in worksite immigration enforcement operations, with multiple federal agencies involved in determining how to boost arrests, according to five sources familiar with the discussions.

“The Trump administration is planning for an increase in worksite immigration enforcement operations, with multiple federal agencies involved in determining how to boost the number of arrests and placate the president’s base, according to five sources familiar with the discussions”

CNN

A Homeland Security spokesperson told CNN there has been an “increase in criminal investigations targeting fraud,” and the internal effort is described as stemming from those probes.

CNN

CNN reports that officials say any additional enforcement measures would be tied to ongoing criminal investigations, while a White House official said, “This isn’t a new policy,” and that the administration has been conducting criminal investigations into violations including welfare fraud, benefit fraud, and identity theft.

The plan also includes educating employers on hiring responsibilities and conducting immigration arrests at worksites involved in criminal activity, one source told CNN, as the administration tries to balance deportations without agitating key industries or unsettling a fragile economy.

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on June 27 that the Trump administration would add about 10,000 new personnel to immigration-enforcement forces to bolster border monitoring and intensify efforts to arrest and deport undocumented migrants across the United States.

Homan said the expansion would be allocated to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and related units under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to enhance border surveillance and investigate human trafficking networks.

Masrawy

In New York, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said the administration was “deporting on average over 3,000 individuals,” and that “the average has been, for several weeks now, over 3,200 individuals a day.”

The same CNN reporting describes how ICE stepped up immigration arrests, taking around 2,000 people into custody daily on average, up from previous months, as officials want to sustain the target.

NPR reports that ICE’s budget surged during President Donald Trump’s second term, reaching $85 billion, and says the increase is due to the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law last July.

“From emergencies to blocking birthright citizenship”

Masrawy

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the new bill and other allocations make ICE’s funding “larger than the annual budget of all the other federal law-enforcement agencies combined.”

NPR adds that the One Big Beautiful Bill allocates $45 billion to ICE to expand its immigrant detention system, and it quotes Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying the agency could hold up to 100,000 people in custody daily.

As of November 30, 2025, NPR reports that 65,735 people remained in immigrant detention facilities, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data-tracking project, while ICE said it had “more than doubled the number of officers and agents, from 10,000 to 22,000.”