The government of the United States has spent the better part of a year manufacturing terror in immigrant communities. It has done this with raids, with public threats, with the deployment of armed agents to cities that had never seen anything like them before. And now, courtesy of that very campaign, criminals have found a new business model: dress up as ICE, knock on a door, and collect.

According to an investigation by Noticias Telemundo, there were 31 reported cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating immigration enforcement agents — up from an average of 5.4 incidents per year over the previous decade. That is an increase of more than 484 percent. Some of these impostors committed robbery and assault. At least two involved rape. In one case, a Venezuelan immigrant in North Carolina was assaulted at her workplace by a man claiming to be from immigration enforcement. In another, a Dominican woman in New York was dragged into a basement, raped, and beaten.

These are not the crimes of confused opportunists. They are the logical product of an administration that has trained millions of people to fear anyone who looks like a federal agent wearing dark clothing and carrying credentials. When the government itself shows up at doors with guns and handcuffs, it teaches criminals exactly how to weaponize that fear.

Naureen Shah, director of government affairs at the ACLU, put it plainly to NBC News: "We've never in this country experienced masked agents on this kind of scale. And so we've never experienced this problem before of people being able to credibly impersonate federal law enforcement agents."

The key word is credibly. The Trump administration made ICE credible as a threat, which meant it also became credible as a costume.

The scam ecosystem that has grown around the deportation campaign is far broader than masked men in tactical gear. A ProPublica investigation examined more than 6,200 complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and found that immigration-related fraud reports have doubled since Trump returned to the White House. The FTC was fielding approximately 960 such complaints per year before the November 2024 election. In 2025, that number rose to nearly 2,000.

Over the past five years, more than $94.4 million has been allegedly stolen through immigration scams, according to FTC data — a figure that ProPublica notes is almost certainly a vast undercount, since many victims are too frightened of deportation to report being defrauded. The government you are supposed to trust has made the prospect of calling it on the phone unthinkable.

The scams have grown increasingly sophisticated, incorporating AI-generated images and targeted social media advertising. Jasmir Urbina, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan asylum-seeker living in New Orleans, was preparing for her immigration court hearing when federal agents swarmed the city for "Operation Swamp Sweep" in late November 2024. Terrified, she searched for help online and found a Facebook advertisement masquerading as Catholic Charities — the prominent aid organization that assists immigrants with legal services. She was connected via WhatsApp to a woman calling herself "Susan Millan," who claimed to be an attorney. The photo of "Millan" appeared to be AI-generated: professional-looking, with a small library visible in the blurry background.

Urbina handed over nearly $10,000 — savings she had set aside to buy her family's first home. She was then walked through a fake five-minute video call with a man in green fatigues wearing what appeared to be official insignia, seated against an American flag backdrop. The next day, "Millan" told her residency had been approved and that she could skip her real court date. Two months later, actual ICE agents put Urbina in cuffs and ankle restraints and flew her back to Nicaragua.

The real Catholic Charities has since been inundated with desperate migrants who realized too late they'd been duped. "There's a reason why we have a good reputation," Chris Ross, the organization's vice president of migration and refugee resettlement services, told ProPublica. "For someone to be trading on that goodwill with nefarious intent is very frustrating."

José Aguilar, a 56-year-old leather worker from El Salvador living in Minnesota, was conned out of $15,000 by Facebook fraudsters impersonating Miami immigration attorney Jorge Rivera — a real lawyer who has faced no wrongdoing allegations. Aguilar, a father of two who has undergone a heart transplant, now survives on food bank handouts. "It's unforgivable," he told ProPublica.

Mariela, a Honduran mother of three, was fleeced of more than $18,000 by a scam ring that impersonated a priest, an immigration judge, and a Texas attorney — before her 20-year-old daughter was deported.

There is something almost mechanical about the way this ecosystem functions. The government creates fear. Scammers monetize it. Victims are too afraid to call for help, because the institution they'd need to contact is the same one that made them feel vulnerable in the first place. It is a closed loop of predation, and the people at the end of it have no recourse.

The Department of Homeland Security told ProPublica that "anyone caught impersonating a federal immigration agent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law." A DHS spokesperson added: "We are declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud in all forms."

This is true, in the same way that a forest fire declares war on arson. The department has built an environment where the very concept of an immigration agent conjures panic — and then expressed surprise when con artists started wearing those uniforms. It is like rigging a casino and then filing complaints about gambling addiction.

The White House declined to comment on individual cases. In Washington, there is a particular kind of silence reserved for consequences that are technically unintended but entirely foreseeable.

At least one recent conviction offers a glimpse into the mechanics of these scams. Davyd George Brand Jimenez, 55, of San Ysidro, California — just across the border from Tijuana — pleaded guilty in April 2026 to federal charges for impersonating an immigration officer and scamming ten Latino immigrants out of large sums of money. He told victims they could obtain green cards if they paid him $20,000 each.

In Pittsburgh, a man allegedly posed as an ICE agent during a home invasion. In Greensboro, North Carolina, residents reported fake agents storming homes and targeting people too afraid to contact police. The pattern is consistent: find someone who doesn't belong, make them feel like they're in trouble with the government, and take whatever they have.

The most chilling dimension of all this is that it works precisely because the real thing is so terrifying. If ICE showed up at your door and you had nothing to hide, you'd open it. If you were told by a stranger claiming to be a lawyer that you could skip court, you'd ask questions. But when the government has spent years telling immigrant communities that their presence in this country is itself a crime, fear becomes an automatic reflex — and reflexes are easy to exploit.

The data does not lie. Three hundred fourteen percent more impersonation cases than before. Nearly 2,000 fraud complaints in a single year. $94.4 million stolen and counting. Behind every number is someone who trusted that the system existed to protect them, even as the people running that system made clear it did not.