ICE has been a “complete failure” under Trump’s administration, and agents need to be retrained, Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said Thursday.
Beshear’s comments come after news that a Lexington-based company is poised to get a $20 million no-bid contract to provide gloves designed to shock individuals to ICE agents.
When asked by reporters in a Thursday press conference, Beshear said his issue is less about the gloves themselves or that there’s a contract for them, but that they’re “going to the worst trained, most aggressive law enforcement unit I have ever seen.
“Every ICE agent needs to be withdrawn, retrained, and actually taught what the law does and does not allow,” Beshear continued.
ICE agents have been “taught that you can go into somebody’s home without a judicial warrant” and “taught aggressive tactics that have led to a body count”—things that he said should concern “every single American.”
Adding that the agency should be arresting undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes and that the country should have strong borders, Beshear said the current ICE system “is a complete failure by this administration that needs to be fixed as quickly as possible.”
A new analysis from the ACLU of Kentucky, released Thursday morning shortly before Beshear’s comments, found a nearly 300% increase in ICE detainer requests in Louisville alone following a local policy change under Mayor Craig Greenberg.
A detainer request is when ICE asks jails to alert the federal government before releasing an immigrant from custody, and hold them for an extra 48 hours. Louisville reverted to the practice in summer 2025, following threats from the Trump administration.
According to the ACLU analysis, Louisville was receiving about 17.2 detainer requests from ICE each month before last summer’s policy change.
After that, the monthly average number of ICE detainer requests jumped to 49.1 a month. Louisville received more detainer requests in the seven-month span between Aug. 2025 and March 2026—344 requests—than it did in the previous 19 months combined—326 requests from Jan. 2024 to Aug. 2025.
“Louisville residents were told this would be a limited policy affecting a relatively small number of people. The federal government’s own data show something very different,” Amber Duke, ACLU-KY’s executive director, said in a statement. “This policy has made Louisville’s jail a far more direct pathway into federal immigration detention and removal.”
That’s particularly problematic in Louisville, Duke added, which has struggled with a series of deaths in its jails over the last few years.
A spokesperson for Greenberg, who is up for reelection this fall, defended the practice, saying it is the best way to protect Louisville’s large immigrant population and calling it a “no-win situation.”
In his Thursday press conference, Beshear said he was “not going to criticize Louisville” because the city’s 2025 policy change brought it into alignment with how much of the rest of the state operates regarding detainer requests.
The statewide standard, Beshear added, has been in place since before the Trump administration. “So, they weren’t going outside the bounds of different practices that were there,” he said.
This story has been updated.
