Under Trump administration, ICE scraps paperwork officers once had to do before immigration arrests

One source noted that for ICE officers, “it’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot.’”

For more than 15 years, before they conducted any operation to arrest an immigrant in the United States, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division have been required to fill out a form with details about their target — name, appearance, known addresses and employment, immigration history, any criminal history and more — and give it to a supervisor for approval.

This year, in a sign of how the agency has moved from targeted enforcement to broad street sweeps under the Trump administration, that policy has been ended, six current and former officials and agents of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security told NBC News.

“It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one of the former ICE officials said.

The policy shift sheds light on the way ICE is now operating ahead of anticipated immigration crackdowns in Chicago and Boston, and it helps explain the seemingly spontaneous nature of recent arrests in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

Both Darius Reeves, the former director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, and two former officials with DHS, under which ICE falls, said the form, known as a field operations worksheet, had been required for nearly every arrest the division made. The only exceptions, they said, were instances in which ICE was called out to assist local law enforcement agencies.