The Trump administration has ordered ICE officers to ramp up arrests—whether they have warrants or not.
Internal emails reported by The Guardian show top immigration officials telling officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” and arrest not only their targets, but also anyone they come across during operations—so-called “collaterals.” That includes undocumented family members, co-workers, or even bystanders who were not the original target.
“If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing,” wrote Francisco Madrigal, a senior ICE official, in one of the emails.
These new instructions mark a serious escalation. ICE officers were told over the weekend to make more arrests nationwide. The emails follow pressure from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to hit 3,000 immigration-related arrests a day.
Marcos Charles, the acting head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told agents in an email: “All collaterals encounters need to be interviewed and anyone that is found to be amenable to removal needs to be arrested.” He continued: “We need to turn up the creative knob up to 11 and push the envelope.”
Charles added: “We complained for the last four years about not being allowed to do our job, and now the time has come for us to step up!”
The term “collateral” refers to people who weren’t the original target of an arrest but are swept up anyway. They may not have committed any crimes. In fact, being undocumented is a civil offense—not a criminal one. ICE typically needs a warrant or at least probable cause to arrest someone. But these emails suggest those rules are being ignored.
Mark Fleming, a lawyer at the National Immigrant Justice Center, said, “I am extremely troubled by [the emails] for a number of reasons.” He accused ICE of trying to work around legal protections.
A 2022 court settlement required ICE to justify arrests with a warrant or show strong evidence that a person would flee. That agreement ended in May, but Fleming and his organization argue that its protections should still apply.
Fleming said the new ICE orders show the agency “learned nothing from the litigation and the policy that resulted. It sure seems like there is an intention to once again violate both the statute but also the requirements for making warrantless arrests.”
In another email, Madrigal encouraged field officers to outdo their previous weekend’s arrest numbers. “While the weekend is still young, please look at efforts to increase our arrests over these two days compared to our results from last weekend,” he wrote. “If it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing.”
The Trump administration has expanded its efforts by pulling in other federal agencies and local law enforcement. Officers were told to share these new tactics with local and federal partners.
In response, the Department of Homeland Security defended the aggressive push. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: “After four years of not being allowed to do their jobs, Ice officers are being empowered under President Trump and Secretary Noem’s leadership to enforce the law and arrest illegal aliens.”
Michael Kagan, director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, called this shift a major departure from Obama- and Biden-era policies, where ICE focused on people with criminal records. Under Trump, Kagan said, “everyone can be a priority.”
“Collateral arrests are an outgrowth of that,” he said, warning that the strategy opens the door to abuses like racial profiling—and even arresting U.S. citizens. “It’s about immigration enforcement becoming indiscriminate and just targeting whoever they can get their hands on.”
