BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Emotion, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 24.2% saturation with 247 hits. Analysis detected 1,262 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,019 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35% and a BS Rank of 33% (19,402 of 28,818 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 67.30% of the article peer group.
An ICE agent covers his face while arresting migrants on Elmwood Avenue in November 2025.
Photo by Diane Hinman.
ICE is on a nationwide hiring spree — including in the Buffalo region — but the agency is refusing to release even basic information about its workforce in upstate New York.
Taxpayers are footing the bill to the tune of billions: Congress approved $170 billion last year for immigration enforcement and another $70 billion in June.
But ICE won’t release the names, salary information, home zip codes or any other information about the agents carrying out Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
The agency won’t even say how many people it employs in the region.
Investigative Post in October filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act seeking basic payroll information on ICE employees assigned to its Buffalo field office, which covers 19 counties in Western and Central New York.
ICE denied the request, a decision Investigative Post appealed.
ICE then issued a final rejection last month.
ICE should be more transparent with the public, said Heather Murray, associate director of the Cornell Law School First Amendment Clinic .
“Because it is the public’s money that supports ICE’s budget, payroll records are public information that must be released,” said Murray, who assisted Investigative Post with its FOIA request.
“The type of information Investigative Post seeks is disclosed by federal, state and local governments around the country.”
The refusal to release the information comes as immigration arrests have exploded across the state.
Since Trump’s return to office, ICE arrests have quadrupled compared to 2024 .
Two-thirds of those arrested had no criminal history.
Arrests by masked agents have become a hallmark of the past 18 months.
Residents have seen roofers ordered down by ICE agents, workers dragged out of restaurants and day laborers pulled out of their vehicles.
New York lawmakers this year enacted legislation that bans ICE agents from wearing masks and requires them to wear badges with their names and agency displayed.
The Trump administration subsequently sued the state to block implementation of those rules and the matter is now pending in court .
Investigative Post began requesting information about who ICE employs in the region in December 2024, prompted by Trump’s campaign pledge to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Investigative Post asked ICE, via the Freedom of Information Act, for a database of all employees assigned to work at the detention center in Batavia.
After a denial and an appeal, the agency in June 2025 released salary information for 73 “detention and removal directors” assigned to work at the immigration jail.
Other requested information, like names, ages, home zip codes and specific job titles was redacted.
Investigative Post then, in October 2025, sought similar information for all ICE employees assigned to the Buffalo office.
With assistance from Murray, Investigative Post crafted a second FOIA request for information about ICE agents.
The FOIA request did not seek agents’ names, as ICE was likely to withhold that information.
After another denial, appeal and a monthslong delay, ICE last month issued a final ruling rejecting Investigative Post’s request.
“The privacy interests of the individuals in the records you have requested outweigh any minimal public interest in disclosure of the information,” wrote Megan Davis, the deputy FOIA officer for ICE operations.
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Davis went on to argue that releasing the requested information could contribute to “increasing violent activity directed against ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] offices and detention facilities.”
“Coupled with the more than 1300% increase in assaults and 8000% increase in violent threats directed against ICE and CBP officers, any information that could identify the number of individuals assigned to any ICE facility could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual, both employees and non-employees,” Davis wrote.
Multiple news outlets, via court records and data analyses , have found that the administration’s statistics are inflated .
A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Why ICE records are being withheld
Lauren Harper, an expert on FOIA and national security records with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said ICE is withholding information about its agents for a key reason: In June 2020, the first Trump administration classified ICE as a “ security agency.
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That’s the same classification that keeps information and records related to Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service agents shrouded in secrecy.
“For many years, ICE has worked to be designated, in its entirety, as a ‘security/sensitive’ agency, so that [the Office of Personnel Management] would withhold all employee information under FOIA Exemption 6 (unwarranted invasion of personal privacy),” stated an ICE memo obtained by The Nation in 2020 .
Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation , explained that the designation means there’s now “an extra layer of secrecy” around ICE personnel records.
“It’s unworkable and it’s untenable,” she said.
“And I think it’s something that, if [the Department of Homeland Security] doesn’t get a handle on, it’s only going to escalate and just continue to erode trust — in DHS in particular.”
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It’s not just a Trump problem, Harper added.
She said removing a federal office’s “security agency” classification is extremely difficult.
“It will continue to be a problem under any other administration,” she said.
“If they get their footing, it’s going to be extremely impossible to roll them back.”
Nonetheless, Harper and other transparency advocates said the public ought to be allowed to know who’s working for ICE and what they make.
Kyle Clauss, another Cornell attorney who assisted Investigative Post, said the agency’s security classification is no excuse.
“ICE has shrouded payroll records in secrecy without any legal basis for doing so,” Clauss said.
“ICE cannot hide behind its security/sensitive designation to withhold salary and other information that is routinely disclosed.
The public has an undeniable right to know what their government is up to.”
Speakers
4speakers49%attributed speech516writer words
Selected voice
72%flagged-word coverageMegan Davis
115 attributed words23% of attributed speech65% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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