We Don’t Know How Many People Have Been Harmed by ICE
Earlier this month, the nation erupted after Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot to death by an ICE agent after attempting to leave a Minneapolis enforcement action in her SUV. Good’s death was notable not just for its cruelty, but also for how the widely circulated video of the incident offered a glimpse into the increasingly unchecked violence of federal law enforcement and ICE in particular.
During the second Trump administration, ICE has grown dramatically in both size and authority. Yet the true scope of how that authority has been wielded against the public remains unclear. Currently, ICE is not required to report any use-of-force incidents against the public, typically defined as resulting in a death or serious bodily injury. Indeed, we know little about the full extent of ongoing violence from any federal law enforcement agency, in part due to a decades-long legislative failure to establish a compulsory national database on use-of-force incidents.
For decades, the fight to establish a repository for all national data on law enforcement violence has been waged silently in the background of police reform movements. The first attempt to initiate such an effort was a provision of the 1994 crime bill, which directed the attorney general of the United States to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” and publish an annual summary. Omitted from this rule was a mechanism that required agencies to participate in such a survey, leading to inaction and missing data. Since then, multiple avenues have been taken up to close this loophole, with none yet having fully succeeded.
For decades, the fight to establish a repository for all national data on law enforcement violence has been waged silently in the background of police reform movements.
The most significant effort thus far to create a national use-of-force database for federal and state law enforcement agencies was initiated by the FBI in 2019. The database is voluntary, though over the years, many agencies have participated in supplying their information. However, none of the data has been made public, due to a provision that it only be released if the participation meets an 80 percent threshold of all law enforcement agencies; as of August 2025, participation remains at 78 percent.
FOIA requests have revealed that federal agencies like ICE contributed information to the database as recently as 2024. Yet because publication is not required by law, many remain doubtful as to whether the Trump-led FBI would ultimately release the data, even if the participation threshold were reached. “I suspect that the Trump administration doesn’t have much interest in police use-of-force data,” said Matthew J. Hickman, chair of the Department of Criminal Justice at Seattle University and former statistician for the Bureau of Justice Statistics. “I’m not saying that out of the blue. I have actually experienced the current administration’s distaste for data about police accountability,” he added, referring to the Trump administration’s move to shut down a national law enforcement misconduct database early last year.
Where Congress has failed to act, a collection of nonprofits, academics, and journalists have stepped in to fill the gaps by combing together news reports on use-of-force incidents into publicly accessible databases. Most recently, nonprofit newsroom The Trace began collecting information in this fashion, including on shootings by ICE. But while these databases provide strong insight into law enforcement violence, they’re no substitute for a compulsory national system.
While research at the state level is quite strong, federal data remains limited, and both are often tied to information that agencies decide to reveal—a reality many researchers are not shy to admit. “It’s insane that agencies are not required to report when they kill a civilian,” said Andrew Zaharia, director of data science at Campaign Zero, a police reform nonprofit that runs the independent police killings database Mapping Police Violence. “That’s outrageous … we’d rather not have to collect this data, it would be better if they just reported it themselves.”
One example of potential and inadvertent bias in nongovernmental systems can be seen across multiple datasets, including Mapping Police Violence, and The Washington Post’s (now defunct) Fatal Force Database. The number of individuals killed by police with a race listed as “Unknown” (a determination made by researchers due to a lack of identifying characteristics in police reports or news coverage) has grown considerably over the last decade—with a notable spike coinciding with the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020. While pointing to any single definitive explanation of this rise is likely impossible, in speaking with Zaharia, he found the connection between a lack of disclosure on victim’s race by law enforcement and the protests around Floyd’s murder plausible. “It’s very possible. We’ve heard in specific localities, sort of off the record that that is happening.”
On the congressional level, efforts to mandate use-of-force data collection has been sporadic, typically emerging only in response to significant national fervor over police violence. The most recent significant attempt, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, would have mandated the collection of this information by federal law enforcement, and compelled state governments to participate by tying grant funding to a national database on violence.
Although the bill passed the House, negotiations collapsed in the Senate. President Joe Biden did sign Executive Order 14074, which established the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (a proposal originally pitched by the Trump administration in 2020), and mandated tracking of use-of-force incidents by federal law enforcement. Following this, the Department of Homeland Security also began to publish annual reports on incidents. However, on day one of his second administration, President Trump revoked this order, shut down the database, and canceled the publication of further reports—a move that also reduced the ability of federal agencies to prevent “wandering officers,” or individuals who move between agencies after being fired for misconduct.
This leaves us in 2026 with no federal law requiring the reporting and disclosure on law enforcement throughout the United States, a situation that has helped to facilitate the rise of an unaccountable, unsupervised, and increasingly rogue federal agency. Data on use-of-force incidents is critical for understanding areas for improvement, identifying problematic agents and agencies, and maintaining transparency with the public—a fact even recognized by Trump’s first administration.
Yet in Trump’s second term, transparency has taken a back seat to expanding the size and power of ICE. As the agency has nearly doubled its size to accommodate the administration’s goal of the “largest deportation operation in history,” numerous reports have shown the agency struggling to keep up with the surge. Training times for agents have been halved, vetting processes are minimal, and in one case an AI screening error resulted in 200 agents being sent out into the field with only four weeks of training. Although no official numbers exist, it is likely that these factors have led to an increase in incidents of force with members of the public, a number that the Trump administration seems disinclined to reveal.
While dozens of independent reports in the last year have described vicious assaults by ICE agents, we know more about the number of individuals injured by cows each year than we do about people injured by our own government. This is a decision that has been driven not by a lack of technological sophistication, but by a lack of action. As Hickman says, “The United States of America absolutely can build a database. It’s just whether the political will is there to do it.”
In the last few months, multiple pieces of legislation have been introduced to curb ICE’s wide authority to engage the public and establish mechanisms for transparency and accountability. Most recently, a bipartisan bill was introduced last week by Reps. Delia C. Ramirez (D-IL) and Seth Magaziner (D-RI), requiring the Department of Homeland Security to publish a public, semiannual report on all use-of-force incidents under the agency’s purview. But while the latest Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill released on Monday does contain some transparency measures, like body cameras for ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents, enhanced training, and independent oversight of detention facilities, it does not include any provisions for a compulsory database.
In many ways, America seems to have found itself at a similar point as it was in June 2020. As protests against ICE continue, and the Trump administration continues its brutal escalation of deportations and arrests, pressure seems to be mounting on the need for real reform. With a likely congressional turnover on the horizon and public opinion turning against ICE’s increasingly rogue and brutal behavior, legislators have been presented with another opportunity to increase transparency not just for ICE, but for law enforcement across the country. It remains to be seen whether they’ll take it.
The post We Don’t Know How Many People Have Been Harmed by ICE appeared first on The American Prospect.