ICE: America's Most Controversial Law Enforcement Agency

Based on Wikipedia: United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement

In July 2025, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement became the largest and most well-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history. Its agents wear masks and civilian clothing. They drive unmarked vehicles. They have detained American citizens and deported them to foreign countries. And as of late 2025, polls showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the agency—a level of public distrust that surpassed even the "Abolish ICE" movement of 2018.

How did a government agency created to fight terrorism become one of the most divisive institutions in the country?

Born from the Ashes of September 11th

Before 2003, there was no ICE. Immigration enforcement fell to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, which operated under the Department of Justice. Customs enforcement belonged to the United States Customs Service under the Treasury Department. These were separate bureaucracies with separate chains of command.

The September 11 attacks changed everything.

In the aftermath of that day, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the most significant reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. The act dissolved both the INS and the Customs Service. Their functions were carved up and redistributed among three newly created agencies, all housed within a brand-new cabinet department: the Department of Homeland Security.

The first new agency was United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, which handles visa applications, green cards, and naturalization—the paperwork side of immigration. The second was Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, which patrols the actual borders—the officers you encounter at airports and the agents who watch for crossings in the desert. The third was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which investigates crimes and removes people who are in the country without authorization.

It's worth pausing on that division. Border Patrol agents catch people crossing the border illegally. ICE agents find people who are already here. This distinction matters enormously, because the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants in the United States didn't sneak across a desert at midnight. They entered through an airport or a border checkpoint with a valid visa and then overstayed. Finding and removing such people requires a fundamentally different approach than border patrol work. It requires investigation, surveillance, and raids on homes and workplaces.

Two Agencies Under One Roof

ICE is actually two distinct law enforcement agencies awkwardly sharing a name and a leadership structure. Understanding this split is essential to understanding why ICE generates such controversy.

The first component is Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI. These are federal criminal investigators—special agents with badges and guns who build cases against human traffickers, drug smugglers, money launderers, child exploitation networks, and transnational criminal organizations. HSI agents work closely with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and foreign law enforcement agencies. Their work is the kind of federal law enforcement that generates little political controversy: arresting cartel members and rescuing trafficking victims.

The second component is Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO. These are the officers who arrest unauthorized immigrants, hold them in detention facilities, and physically deport them from the country. When people talk about ICE raids at restaurants or meatpacking plants or churches, they're talking about ERO. When activists chant "Abolish ICE," they're largely talking about ERO.

This shotgun marriage has not been happy. In 2018, nineteen senior HSI officials—every single one of the special agents in charge across the country—sent an extraordinary letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security asking to be separated from ICE entirely. They explained that their criminal investigations were being hamstrung because local police departments and community organizations refused to cooperate with any agency connected to immigration enforcement. Jurisdictions that might happily work with HSI on a child trafficking case wanted nothing to do with an agency that might use that cooperation to identify and deport their neighbors.

The letter compared the situation to imagining the FBI being merged with the Bureau of Prisons, or the Drug Enforcement Administration being combined with Immigration and Customs Enforcement—wait, that's exactly what happened. The agents argued that no other federal law enforcement agency was saddled with such a "disparate entity." Their request was ignored.

The Obama Years: Deporter-in-Chief

There's a common misconception that immigration enforcement became aggressive only under Republican administrations. The reality is more complicated.

Between 2009 and 2016, the administration of President Barack Obama deported approximately 2.4 million unauthorized immigrants—a record at the time. This earned Obama the nickname "Deporter-in-Chief" from Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, the largest Latino civil rights organization in the country. The label stung, and the Obama administration pushed back, arguing that it was prioritizing the removal of criminals and recent border crossers over longtime residents with families.

The statistics are revealing. According to ICE data, about forty percent of people deported in 2015 had no criminal conviction at all. Among those who did have convictions, a majority were guilty of minor charges—traffic violations, marijuana possession, the kind of infractions that wouldn't result in prison time for a citizen. The "criminal aliens" being prioritized for removal were often not the violent gang members of political rhetoric.

It's also worth noting that the record deportation numbers were partly a matter of accounting. Starting in the Bush administration and continuing under Obama, the government began counting "returns"—people caught at the border and immediately sent back—as deportations. Previous administrations hadn't counted these as formal removals. The change made the numbers look more dramatic than the underlying policy shift.

The First Trump Administration: A New Philosophy

When Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he immediately began reshaping immigration enforcement. Within days of his inauguration, he signed an executive order directing ICE to hire 10,000 additional agents and vastly expanding the agency's enforcement powers.

The philosophical shift was stark. Under Obama, ICE had—at least officially—prioritized people with serious criminal convictions, recent border crossers, and those who had already been ordered deported by an immigration judge. Under Trump, that prioritization was abandoned. The new guidance directed agents to target anyone they believed had entered the country illegally or overstayed a visa. A grandmother who had lived in the United States for twenty years was now just as much a target as a recent arrival with a felony conviction.

The tactics changed too. ICE began conducting high-profile raids at workplaces, houses of worship, and schools—locations that previous administrations had generally treated as off-limits. The agency's arrests and encounters increased substantially, including encounters with American citizens. Being Hispanic and living near the border became enough to draw ICE attention.

The backlash was significant. Progressive activists and some Democratic lawmakers began calling for the abolition of ICE entirely. The phrase "Abolish ICE" became a rallying cry at protests and a position that several candidates for president would endorse during the 2020 Democratic primaries. The movement argued that the agency's core function—hunting down and deporting longtime residents and separating families—was fundamentally immoral and couldn't be reformed.

ICE has never had a Senate-confirmed director since Sarah Saldaña stepped down on January 20, 2017. For nearly a decade, the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security has been run by a series of acting directors, never subjected to the confirmation process that allows senators to question nominees about their vision for the agency.

The Second Trump Administration: Unprecedented Expansion

When Trump returned to office in January 2025, immigration enforcement accelerated beyond anything seen before.

On January 22, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was rolling back an Obama-era directive that had protected unauthorized immigrants in "sensitive locations"—hospitals, places of worship, courtrooms, funerals, weddings, and schools. Two days later, the acting Homeland Security Secretary announced plans to deport people who had been admitted temporarily during the Biden administration.

The military was deployed to assist ICE operations in multiple states. The administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an 1798 law originally passed to deal with French citizens during the Quasi-War, to quickly deport suspected unauthorized immigrants with limited or no due process. Some were sent directly to prisons in El Salvador.

American citizens were detained and deported.

That sentence deserves emphasis. United States citizens—people born in this country or naturalized through the legal process—were arrested by ICE, held in detention, and removed to foreign countries. Federal courts found evidence of racial profiling, with agents appearing to target people who looked Hispanic.

The administration began setting daily arrest targets for ICE agents and launched what critics described as a publicity campaign around enforcement actions. Agents wore plainclothes and masks, drove unmarked vehicles, and conducted arrests in ways that made it difficult for bystanders to distinguish legitimate federal officers from criminals impersonating them. Law enforcement experts noted a spike in arrests of ICE impersonators taking advantage of the confusion.

The One Big Beautiful Bill

On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed into law what his administration called the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The legislation allocated unprecedented funding to ICE—more than any federal law enforcement agency in American history, and more than the entire federal prison system.

The money was designated for new detention facilities, expanded deportation operations, and aggressive recruitment of additional agents. To attract sworn police officers to leave their local departments and join ICE, the government offered a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus and sixty thousand dollars in college loan forgiveness.

The scale of detention expanded dramatically. By December 2025, ICE held 68,440 people in custody. Nearly 40,000 of them—well over half—had no criminal record or only pending charges. Between January and December 2025, the administration arrested over 328,000 people and deported nearly 327,000.

Reports emerged of conditions in detention facilities. Advocacy groups documented allegations of detainees being deprived of food, water, and showers. Several people died in ICE custody in the early months of the second Trump administration. A Florida facility nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" became the subject of investigations by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and other organizations.

Public Opinion and Protest

By the summer of 2025, polls showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of ICE—the first time the agency had been viewed negatively by most of the country. The disapproval was stronger than during the "Abolish ICE" movement of 2018.

The Pew Research Center documented a sharp partisan divide. Seventy-two percent of Republican Party supporters viewed ICE favorably. Seventy-eight percent of Democratic Party supporters viewed it negatively. The agency had become a symbol of something larger than immigration enforcement—a proxy for deeper disagreements about national identity, the rule of law, and what kind of country America should be.

Protests erupted nationwide, most notably in Los Angeles in June 2025. The demonstrations drew attention to both current enforcement practices and historical grievances—including the displacement of Mexican American communities from Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium in the 1950s, and the connections between the stadium's current ownership and funding for immigration enforcement.

Violence also emerged. In 2025, at least three attacks targeted ICE facilities in Texas. On July 4—the same day the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed—a group attacked a detention center in Alvarado. In August, a man was arrested at a Dallas field office claiming he had a bomb. In September, a gunman on a rooftop fired into a van at the same Dallas facility, killing one detainee and critically injuring two others before killing himself. One of the injured died six days later.

On January 7, 2026, an ICE officer shot and killed a thirty-seven-year-old woman named Renée Nicole Good during an incident in Minneapolis. The shooting occurred amid protests over ICE enforcement actions targeting Somali residents in the city.

Institutional Turmoil

By November 2025, at least half of ICE's top leadership had been fired or reassigned. Many were replaced with officials transferred from Border Patrol—an agency with a different mission and different methods.

The Chicago Tribune described this shakeup as part of the administration's desire to increase deportations "at all costs." The paper noted that Border Patrol's methods were less targeted than traditional ICE approaches, involving stopping random people on the street and demanding to know their birthplace and citizenship status. The investigative precision that HSI agents had spent years developing was being replaced with something blunter.

In late November, ICE began a series of immigration raids in New Orleans. The operations drew enough public attention that the mayor-elect and several city council members issued statements calling for transparency about federal enforcement activities—an unusual public pushback from local officials against a federal agency.

The Deeper History

To understand how we got here, it helps to look further back than September 11.

The federal government's authority over immigration was established in an 1876 Supreme Court case called Chy Lung v. Freeman. Before that ruling, states had significant control over who could enter through their ports. The case involved a ship arriving in San Francisco carrying Chinese passengers, and the resulting decision established that immigration was fundamentally a federal matter.

For most of American history, immigration enforcement was minimal. The Immigration Act of 1891 created a commissioner of immigration within the Treasury Department—a single commissioner for the entire country. In 1903, this function moved to the Department of Commerce and Labor. When that department split in 1913, immigration went to the Department of Labor. The Immigration and Naturalization Service wasn't established until 1933.

The INS moved to the Department of Justice in 1940, as World War II approached and national security concerns intensified. It would remain there for over sixty years, until the post-9/11 reorganization created the Department of Homeland Security and, within it, ICE.

In Spanish, ICE and its predecessor the INS are known informally as "la migra"—a term that carries decades of meaning for Latino communities, representing fear, family separation, and the precariousness of life without documents.

What ICE Actually Does

Setting aside the controversy, it's worth understanding ICE's actual structure and operations.

The agency maintains offices throughout the United States and attachments at major American diplomatic missions overseas. Its personnel—special agents and uniformed officers—do not patrol borders. That work belongs to Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard. ICE operates inland, within American communities.

The agency entered the second Trump administration with over 20,000 employees. The administration began recruiting 10,000 additional ICE agents while deploying 5,000 personnel from other federal law enforcement agencies and 21,000 National Guard troops to assist with immigration arrests.

ICE enforces more than 400 federal statutes covering customs violations, immigration enforcement, terrorism prevention, and trafficking. On paper, its mission statement focuses on protecting national security and public safety through criminal investigations and immigration law enforcement. In practice, the balance between those functions—between HSI's criminal investigations and ERO's deportation operations—has shifted dramatically depending on who occupies the White House.

The Accountability Question

Critics describe ICE as a "militarized police force," a "secret police," or a "paramilitary civilian law enforcement agency." These phrases capture something real about how the agency operates: the masks, the unmarked vehicles, the plainclothes arrests, the apparent immunity from consequences when American citizens are wrongly detained.

But ICE is also a federal law enforcement agency operating under the same legal framework as the FBI or the Secret Service. Its agents are bound by the Constitution. Its operations can be challenged in federal court. Its budget is set by Congress.

The tension between these realities—between an agency that operates in shadows and an agency theoretically accountable to democratic institutions—may be irresolvable. The debate over ICE is ultimately a debate over what kind of immigration enforcement, if any, is compatible with American values. And that's a question that extends far beyond any single agency.

As of early 2026, nearly 70,000 people sat in ICE detention facilities, the largest such population in American history. The majority had no criminal record. And the agency that held them had not had a Senate-confirmed leader in almost a decade.