Washington, D.C. —  Last month, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein released a leaked ledger from inside ICE revealing that ICE has already paid or promised $257 million to 282 law enforcement agencies across the country. FWD.us’ new analysis breaks those payments out by state and type of payment and includes a searchable and downloadable version of the agency-level file for further analysis.

Since the start of February, 215 new local law enforcement agencies have signed 287(g) Task Force Model agreements (101 in February alone — or an average of five new agreements signed every business day) bringing the total up to 976. This program, exposed in FWD.us’ February brief, allows police and sheriff’s deputies to enforce civil immigration law on the streets, and is incentivized by a promise of funding from the federal government. The biggest growth has been in Texas (50 new agreements), Missouri (33 new agreements), and Pennsylvania (26 new agreements).

“This data gives our first look at how ICE is spending its massive slush fund on a program that we know incentivizes racial profiling and low-level arrests without any impact on crime,” said Felicity Rose, Vice President of Criminal Justice Research and Policy at FWD.us. “It’s vital to trace this taxpayer money and hold those spending it accountable for its effects.”

Key findings from the new payment ledger include:

• This ledger confirms the basic structure of the program: agencies sign up a certain number of sworn officers (on average, around 36% of their force) and are paid a startup fund of $100,000 plus $7,500 per officer signed up. For at least four agencies, the amount they received in this first payment was more than their total annual budget.
• After that point, the amount and type of payment handed out gets considerably murkier. Just over a third of agencies (100 out of 282) have received a payment covering some officer salary and benefits, with nearly all of those payments coming in February or March of 2026. One quarter (71 out of 282 agencies) have received or been promised an “incentive” payment, with a median recorded incentive payment of $210,000 per agency. In program descriptions, ICE promised monetary rewards of up to $1,000 per quarter per officer. Actual incentive payments to these agencies recorded in the ledger total over $40,000 per officer. 

Check out the full new dataset including breakdowns by agency and type of funding here, and review our brief for context on this harmful program here.