Immigration enforcement through the 287(g) program has been expanding at an extraordinary rate under the current administration. Andrew Thrasher has been meticulously tracking these agreements. He recently discovered that as of March 18, 2026, ICE has overseen the growth of the program from 134 active agreements on January 20, 2025 to now more than 1,537 agreements involving over 1,200 different law enforcement agencies nationwide.
The expansion has drawn in agencies that traditionally had no immigration enforcement role: Fish and Wildlife in Florida, state attorneys general offices tasked with victim advocacy, and increasingly, school-based law enforcement specifically at universities. But his latest discovery goes a step further and raises questions about whether ICE is going as far as partnering with elementary schools, as well.
On Monday, March 17, Thrasher identified something unprecedented in the 287(g) data. Caney Valley Public Schools in Washington County, Oklahoma, became the first K-12 school system to sign up for the ICE partnership program. The school system, which includes an elementary school, was added to the ICE spreadsheet as an active partner under a Task Force Model agreement that would allow school resources officers—cops in school, basically—to proactively ask people about immigration status. This is especially alarming given the high percentage of students in the district who identify as Native American and could face increased scrutiny as a result of this.
This is the first recorded instance of a K-12 school system ever to enter into such an arrangement. The agreement was technically signed the previous Friday, then uploaded to the public data spreadsheet on Monday morning. Thrasher flagged it in a Substack post Monday night and began investigating. But what makes this remarkable and unsettling is that by the time ICE released its updated spreadsheet a couple of days later, the agreement had been removed. Whether the entry or the deletion was a mistake or whether the school system will reappear in the data—we have no idea yet. Follow Andrew’s work at Maxwell Commons to stay in the loop.
Oklahomans: we need your help! This whole situation leaves us with essential questions that only on-the-ground reporting and local knowledge can answer:
Did the school district actually enter into this agreement?
Who authorized the decision: the superintendent? The school board?
Were parents consulted or informed?
What happened between Monday and today that prompted its removal?
If you’re a reporter, educator, parent, or community member in an area where this might have occurred, we need your help. Reach out to Andrew Thrasher or contact me directly if you have information about what’s happening in this school district. Andrew continues to dig into the details, but without on-the-ground attention from journalists, parents, and community members, we may never know what’s going on or whether this is just the first of a new era of ICE getting direct access to elementary schools. We need to understand what it means and whether it’s happening anywhere else.