(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s vow to wage the biggest domestic deportation program in American history – expelling a million people a year – is one of his signature goals.
His administration has enlisted multiple federal agencies to bolster immigration enforcement operations nationwide.
Camo-clad officers are flexing their presence in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Washington, DC and New York, often clashing with protesters along the way.
Some officers work for agencies such as US Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the US Coast Guard – all reporting up to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Other personnel are troops with the National Guard, the reserve arm of the Army and Air Force.
Here is a look at the agencies involved and how their complicated and often overlapping duties have evolved under the current administration’s deportation policy.
Customs and Border Protection
In its own words, US Customs and Border Protection “is one of the world’s largest law enforcement organizations and is charged with keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S. while facilitating lawful international travel and trade.”
The agency started as the Customs Administration in 1789 to collect tariffs, the federal government’s primary source of revenue at the time.
Back then, the United States was effectively an “open borders” country until the passage of a law in 1875 blocking the immigration of most Chinese women on the premise of curbing prostitution and human trafficking.
Full federal border inspections under a new agency began in 1891, which later became the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
The functions of enforcing immigration law and collecting tariffs and customs duties stayed separate until shortly after the September 11 terror attacks, when a push to consolidate more agencies under the new Department of Homeland Security created Customs and Border Protection in 2003.
“The intent was to create a single focused agency responsible for issues at the border,” Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service who is now at the Migration Policy Institute, told CNN.
The sizeable agency has more than 60,000 employees, including about 20,000 Border Patrol agents, all tasked with one mission: “Protect the American people, safeguard our borders, and enhance the nation’s economic prosperity.”
How it’s going
Two decades later, the Border Patrol division of CBP has taken on an increasingly significant role in high-profile immigration actions under Trump, with sector chief Gregory Bovino emerging as the on-the-ground face of “Operation Midway Blitz.” The initiative targets “the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens in Chicago,” DHS says.
Armed agents, who once apprehended migrants across the US’s borders and stopped drug and human trafficking operations, now stand sentinel over federal immigration facilities that are the sites of immigration protests.
“These officers are not accustomed to policing urban civil unrest; nor are they trained to do so,” former CBP Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske testified in a lawsuit filed by journalists. The lawsuit stemmed from what they called “overwhelming and illegal violence” against protesters in Los Angeles this summer, a response that was also helmed by Bovino.
Tensions from the summer’s violent clashes between immigration officers and demonstrators continued to boil over this fall in America’s largest cities.
Jason Houser, a former DHS official, said the current administration is putting Border Patrol agents in security and crowd control situations they’re not equipped to handle.
“They’re trained for border interdiction, terrorist threats, drug interdictions on swift boats,” Houser said. “Those tactics aren’t for de-escalation of a protest or riots. That’s not their core training.”
In Chicago, the indelible image of a pastor in a clerical collar shot in the head with a pepper ball by agents standing on the rooftop of an ICE building is a direct violation of CBP’s use of force policy.
Officers using pepper balls “shall not intentionally target the head, neck, spine, or groin of the intended subject, unless the use of deadly force is reasonable,” the policy states.
But Bovino, who has said agents have acted proportionally and in response to attacks from demonstrators, expressed ambivalence about protesters being injured – also a direct violation of CBP’s use of force policy.
“If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them,” Bovino told CBS News in October. “Don’t protest and don’t trespass.”
Like many law enforcement agencies since 9/11, the CBP has substantially beefed up its equipment with military-style weaponry and aircraft, including a fleet of Black Hawk helicopters and Predator drones.
The equipment was put to use in an overnight raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, when agents clad in tactical gear rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter and burst through the windows of an apartment building to pull families from their homes.
“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life, and the activity I saw – it was an invasion,” said neighbor Darrell Ballard.
The show of force in Operation Midway Blitz even included sending speedboats – the kind typically seen on the waterways along the nation’s borders – to patrol the Chicago River, in the shadow of the Windy City’s Trump International Hotel and Tower.
The boats “are from Detroit. Those are interdiction patrol boats that patrol up and down the border between Canada and Michigan,” said Houser, who worries their presence in Chicago leaves the northern border vulnerable.
“If they’re not there in Michigan, does that mean those smuggling lines are open that day, but they were out going up and down (the Chicago River) like it was St. Patrick’s Day?”
CBP has not said if the Border Patrol assets used on the Chicago River impacted operations along the Canadian border and did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
While a city that is more than 400 miles from the nearest international border crossing may seem like an unusual choice for intense stops and searches, there is a legal loophole.
The CBP can legally conduct warrantless searches of vehicles and property believed to be involved in immigration violations anywhere within 100 miles of the US border or coastline. The agency also includes the entire coastline of Lake Michigan, which lies fully within the United States, as the “functional equivalent” of an international border.
Under CBP policy, Chicago is as much of a border town as El Paso, Texas.
“Border enforcement does need to be as modern as possible and as updated as possible in terms of technology,” Meissner said. “But it should be taking place at the border because that’s the crossing point.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Like its cousin CBP, ICE started as part of the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003. But in addition to having a catchier name, ICE had a different mission – focus on the nation’s interior to catch and deport undocumented immigrants, along with investigating “narcotics smuggling, human trafficking, gang violence, money laundering and other financial crimes,” the agency’s website says.
To accomplish these two very different tasks, the agency has two divisions: Enforcement and Removal Operations, which deports people in the country illegally, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), where agents “launch and pursue investigations into transnational crime.”
During the Biden administration, HSI took steps to rebrand itself and set up its own website to try to distinguish its work from deportations.
“The civil immigration enforcement side of the ICE mission is not what HSI does,” Katrina Berger, then-executive associate director of HSI, told ABC News last year, a few months before retiring.
How it’s going
Since the start of his second term, Trump made clear that ICE – including HSI – has a singular focus under his administration.
“The primary mission of (HSI) is the enforcement of … (laws) related to the illegal entry and unlawful presence of aliens in the United States,” the president said in an executive order signed on Inauguration Day.
The HSI patch on uniforms has become a common sight in immigration raids. It was the lead agency in the operation at a Georgia Hyundai plant in September that rounded up nearly 500 workers accused of being in the country illegally.
While HSI is typically the lead on worksite enforcement issues, former agency leaders fear that increasing HSI’s focus on removing undocumented workers from the country comes at the expense of investigating more significant dangers to the US, like targeting the importation of fentanyl and firearms smuggling.
“HSI, within ICE, has always been focused on human smuggling, sex trafficking, cybercrimes, Deep Web threats to children,” said Houser, who served as the ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration. “What we see now is a fundamental shifting away from that focus on national security.”
The agency has also faced criticism for aggressive tactics used by ICE agents in executing the president’s immigration policy. Migrants have been pulled from cars, off streets and tackled in courthouses by masked agents.
The heavy-handed tactics have also been used to control crowds at protests, where federal agents have at times used pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas to clear demonstrators.
ICE and US Customs and Border Protection agents are trained “to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and themselves,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
Federal officers under DHS are “highly trained” in de-escalation tactics and “regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” McLaughlin said.
Illinois’ Democratic governor disagreed, accusing the agents of being provocative with protesters.
“ICE is causing this mayhem,” Gov. JB Pritzker said. “They’re the ones throwing tear gas when people are peacefully protesting.”
Illinois state Rep. Hoan Huynh says he got firsthand experience after accusing an ICE agent of pointing a gun at him when he was following an ICE vehicle.
“These are ICE agents who are wearing masks. Their badges aren’t very clear,” Huynh told CNN.
DHS did not comment on whether a gun was drawn, but McLaughlin accused Huynh of “stalking law enforcement” and said agents had to “assess if he was a threat.”
Huynh’s encounter demonstrates the difficulty people have just figuring out what agency an officer represents, especially since most DHS agencies do not have standard uniforms.
Video of the incident shows the ICE agents wearing camo uniforms marked with “POLICE.” The agency’s tan and olive shoulder patch blends into the camouflage color scheme. On a backpack, another agent is identified as being with “SRT,” the ICE Special Response Team, with SWAT-style training. Another uniform appears to say BORTAC, the Border Patrol’s own tactical unit. None of the uniforms seen in the video specifically said ICE.
A federal judge in Chicago expressed her own concerns about the confusion caused when agents aren’t clearly identified, issuing an order that all agents “must have visible identification.”
“The way that they’re carrying on without any visible identification – even that they’re law enforcement, much less what agency they’re with – it really is pretty unprecedented to see at this scale, and I think it’s very dangerous,” said Scott Shuchart, a senior ICE official during the Biden administration.
It’s not just the uniforms – masked federal officers have also become the new calling card of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
DHS officials say the masks are necessary to deal with increasing threats against ICE agents, including violence from protesters and doxxing.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has said federal officers are covering up to protect their families after some have been publicly identified and then harassed online, along with relatives.
“I’m not a proponent of the masks at all, but if it’s going to keep officers safe, it’s going to keep people from using advanced AI to find out their addresses and their families’ information, then by all means I’ll let them do it,” he told NewsNation in October.
John Sandweg, an acting director of ICE under President Barack Obama and a former acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, has been on dozens of ride-alongs during his tenure and said he never saw anyone wear a mask.
“When you’re at ICE and you’re at DHS, the first and highest priority is the safety of the workforce, and you have to do what’s necessary to protect them, but I think there’s no doubt it’s gone past what any reasonable policy would allow, and it really has to be a situation where it’s the exception, not the rule,” he said.
US Coast Guard
The Coast Guard was created in 1915 after a merger of agencies that focused on maritime tax evasion and emergency response on the high seas. The Coast Guard is responsible for “safety, security, and stewardship” on the water.
Over the years, its jurisdiction has expanded to include coverage of inland waterways, coastlines, bridges and ports.
It is the only agency of government that is a branch of the military but operates as a civilian law enforcement agency during peacetime. The Coast Guard has been under civilian command since the end of World War II, and DHS has been in charge of the agency since 2003.
How it’s going
The Coast Guard’s unique hybrid structure straddling the military and civilian worlds allows Trump a great deal of leeway in deployment. But the administration has turned its focus to largely urban areas instead of waterways, relegating the Coast Guard to a supporting role.
The Coast Guard said it was preparing to support CBP agents at the Coast Guard base in Alameda, California.
It is working with other agencies to “detect, deter, and interdict illegal aliens, narco-terrorists, and individuals intent on terrorism or other hostile activity before they reach our border,” the Coast Guard told CNN affiliate KCRA.
Last month, Coast Guard “personnel defensively fired their weapons” at a U-Haul truck backing toward them outside the Coast Guard base in Alameda, where a protest had taken place against an anticipated federal deployment in the San Francisco Bay Area.
No Coast Guard personnel were hurt, DHS said at the time, and the driver’s injury was not life-threatening, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California.
Trump later stood down on plans to “surge” resources to San Francisco after friends, including local tech executives Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Marc Benioff of Salesforce, told him San Francisco had made “substantial progress” against crime.
National Guard
The National Guard says its beginnings go back more than a century before the Revolutionary War, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony established its own permanent militia. But the current organization didn’t come until 1933, when the National Guard Mobilization Act created a unique two-tiered structure.
Today’s National Guard is the descent of state militias and also the combat reserve for the Army and Air Force. The National Guard is under the direction of its state’s governor, who decides when and where to deploy troops. The president has full power over the DC National Guard and can also federalize the states’ National Guard for US operations in the case of an emergency when “regular forces” are unable to enforce federal law. Exactly what the law means by “regular forces” is still being discussed in the courts.
Prior to Trump’s call-ups this year in Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, the last time the National Guard was put under federal control for an operation within American borders was during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 – and it was coordinated with state officials at the time.
How it’s going
The Trump administration’s attempt to invoke a rarely used law to deploy National Guard troops to several major American cities to curb crime and shut down protests has been one of the most striking and legally aggressive moves by the president — and one that’s come up against legal challenges over and over again.
The Trump administration recently attempted to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to protect ICE facilities that have been targeted by demonstrators in Chicago and Portland, comparing the cities to a war zone and saying there is either “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” there.
“You look at a place like Portland, it’s just — it’s ridiculous, when they say that there’s no problem. The place is — it was on fire over the weekend,” the president said last month.
But both deployments have been halted by federal judges who say there is no justification to bring in the military.
In August, Trump announced he is placing the Washington, DC, police department “under direct federal control” and deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, saying the move is aimed at restoring order in the city. The president has repeatedly complained about rising crime in DC, but overall crime numbers are lower this year than in 2024.
More than 2,000 National Guard troops in DC are stationed throughout the city at metro stations and monuments or memorials, while other soldiers and airmen are helping with “beautification projects,” like picking up trash, replanting grass and spreading mulch.
The ongoing mission costs about $1 million a day, experts estimated to CNN.
The president brought the stepped-up law enforcement model next to Memphis, Tennessee, in an attempt to crack down on crime. The move marked the first such effort in a Republican state, and Tennessee Republicans, including Gov. Bill Lee, welcomed the announcement.
Like in Washington, DC, the National Guard troops in Memphis are not dedicated just to securing federal property but are also supporting local law enforcement in their operations.
Although the city’s leadership disagreed with the Guard’s deployment, officials have cooperated and advised residents that the troops will be “serving as extra ‘eyes and ears’ in our neighborhoods.”
“I want to be clear I did not ask for the National Guard and I don’t think it is the way to drive down crime,” Mayor Paul Young said in September. “However, that decision has already been made.”
Young and others said they wanted the task force to focus on targeting violent offenders rather than use their presence to scare, harass or intimidate the general public.
Democratic-elected officials in Tennessee filed a lawsuit trying to stop the Memphis deployment, but the court has taken no action yet.
CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, graphic designer Leah Abucayan and photo editor Austin Steele contributed to this report.
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