ICE has refused to let its officers' body cameras switch themselves on. Congress's watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, told the agency to add automatic activation, the technology its own vendor already sells and that Border Patrol already uses, so that the camera starts recording when an officer draws a weapon or turns on emergency lights. The Department of Homeland Security agreed to the report's other six recommendations and rejected that one. Its reason, in its own words, is that automatic activation "presents operational risks, including inadvertent or false activations during routine movement."

The agency's cameras have been off for the killings that mattered most. On 7 July an ICE officer shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, dead at a vehicle stop in Houston. Six days later an officer shot Johan Guerrero, 26, dead at a vehicle stop in Biddeford, Maine. Neither man was the person the officers were looking for, and no officer at either scene wore a camera. DHS blamed "back-to-back Democrat shutdowns" for the Houston officers having none. On 20 September an ICE officer in Austin shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in the back while both cars were stationary. He had been issued a camera and was not wearing it. Ten days after that, ICE ordered every officer at a vehicle stop to wear an activated camera, and has now refused the one control that would make that order stick. On 8 October ICE agent Brenden Cuni's team shot Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill in the Bronx. That officer was wearing a camera, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says, and ICE has not released the footage.

The GAO's auditors went to ten ICE and Border Patrol field locations. At six of them, officers said they did not know when they were required to turn the camera on. They described camera use as "not mandated," "up to interpretation," and having "gray areas." At one ICE office the officers had been issued cameras, trained on them, and never started using them, because nobody had told them when to. As of September 2025 not one ICE officer had been reprimanded for breaking the camera policy.