ICE believes it will never face accountability again

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Day by passing day, we are watching what amounts to a national police riot by ICE.

Social media is filled with disturbing videos of masked ICE officers — or, I should say, people suspected of being or self-identifying as ICE officers, since for the most part they’re not wearing any identifiable police insignia — manhandling people, including the comptroller of New York, US citizens, suspected aliens, and even journalists alike. In recent days, ICE has also begun resisting congressional oversight efforts — oversight that clearly and legally it needs to provide. In fact, yesterday ICE announced a new “policy” that says it doesn’t have to provide congress access to its facilities that Congress itself wrote into law. (It goes without saying that you can’t create a “policy” that negates an actual bona fide law—and it’s worth explaining that the reason Congress created this very explicit law allowing ICE oversight is because of its past struggles in doing that exact thing! It’s not like there’s much ambiguity or “open to interpretation” here.)

ICE in just a few weeks has transformed itself into the closest thing that the US has ever had to a “secret police,” with more seemingly culturally in common with the Klan nightriders of Reconstruction than their federal agency brethren like the FBI or ATF.

What really worries me about ICE’s collective actions nationwide, though, is bigger than any single raid or social media post — what worries me is that what we’re witnessing nationwide are not the actions of an agency that believes it will ever be subject to meaningful oversight or legal authority ever again.

This is not an agency that is treating members of Congress as if it will ever be held to account by the men and women who control its budget.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions on the streets will be subject to meaningful review by judicial authorities — or that any of its actions will be litigated in the courts.

This is not an agency that believes that any of its actions will be subject to meaningful review by the DHS inspector general, either for policy violations or criminal use-of-force abuses, nor reviewed by US attorneys or federal prosecutors at any level.

This is not an agency leadership that believes that anyone in government — at the Justice Department, the White House, or DHS — currently cares about public perception, misconduct, or violations of civil rights and civil liberties.

And this is not an agency that believes that Democrats will ever be back in charge.

That’s what should terrify us.

ICE, in just a few short months, has lost the trust of the American people. In places like Los Angeles and other communities, ICE special agents and officers (Unlike most federal agencies, ICE has both agents and officers, and there’s a subtle but important difference job-wise between them that’s outside the scope of this column) are getting some tough lessons from crowds and bystanders about how in a democracy policing authority stems from the permission of citizens.

As such, it’s clear that ICE has forgotten the founding law enforcement principles set by Robert Peel, the 19th century British leader who is considered the father of modern policing for his founding of London’s Metropolitan Police. Writing 150 years ago, Peel laid out nine core principles for policing, three of which have an important bearing on ICE’s behavior today:

• “To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.”
  

• “To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.”

• “To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.”

ICE’s recklessness, use of force, and posture toward the public has betrayed all of these critical principles. 

ICE as an agency is turning its back on the foundations of policing in a free society.

That’s bad — but it’s getting worse and might soon get much worse. 

Broadly speaking, America until this spring had no widespread history of masked law enforcement — outside of limited instances where, for instance, undercover officers were engaged in public law enforcement activities or SWAT teams were escorting high-profile prisoners like, say, cartel bosses.

For its part, ICE is saying that its officers increasingly go about their duties masked because of rising assaults, internet threats, and doxing. They’ve bandied about a highly questionable statistic: “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.” But as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pulled apart, the number doesn’t bear any meaningful scrutiny.

It's also telling that ICE is only moving in one direction in its quest to become America’s secret police: A healthy, well-led agency might — for example — think about how if its officers now needed to be masked for their own protection in a democracy, they should go out of their way to be well-marked and clearly identifiable as police and federal officers. (Indeed, if you watch videos and photos of immigration task forces closely, you’ll often see FBI agents, who come from a healthier culture and history, still masked but clearly wearing yellow “FBI” insignia.) But ICE is going the opposite direction — more and more enforcement is being done by men wearing no visible insignia, who don’t even wear or produce visible badges while actively engaged in arrest and detention operations. (CBP appears to be following suit.)

It is increasingly impossible to tell whether the group of masked men in plainclothes kidnapping people off the streets are federal agents or just vigilantes. And the fact that ICE apparently doesn’t even care should terrify us as a democracy. In any other foreign country, if William Boot was reporting on this, we wouldn’t hesitate to call ICE’s operations a “paramilitary force loyal to the regime” or “masked right-wing militia” (and that, by the way, is exactly what other countries’ media are calling it here.)

It’s worth remembering that ICE hasn’t always been this controversial; the agency was created by the post-9/11 governmental reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security, bringing together customs agents from the Treasury Department — now known as ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations or HSI side — and officers from the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service, a half of ICE now known as ERO, Enforcement and Removal Operations. It’s been a difficult marriage — HSI has repeatedly tried to pitch breaking off from the unpopular immigration side, but overall ICE is the third-largest federal law enforcement agency and has fought for years for respect; it wasn’t always perceived by the public as jack-booted thugs.

During the Obama administration, I profiled its then-director John Morton, and ICE at the time was maturing as an organization — its work targeting people in the country illegally was primarily aimed at criminals, not grandmas, and there was what’s known as prosecutorial discretion for offenders. Morton was a lightning rod in certain circles, but largely uncontroversial as a public figure. And it wasn’t that President Obama was any softie on immigration: “[Morton] has deported more immigrants than anyone in US history. Under his leadership, ICE has deported more immigrants in the first three years of the Obama administration than the George W. Bush administration did in its first five.”

There’s a version of ICE that we as a nation need and should want to be part of our constellation of federal law enforcement.

What’s changed since is how ICE is carrying its duties — it’s getting rougher in its tactics and changing who it is detaining, increasingly going after the millions of undocumented immigrants who have lived peaceful, productive lives here for years and decades. Yes, the two Trump administrations have created a permission structure that lets ICE run more amok, but the reality is also that year by year passing, the agency has been left to rot itself and founder leadership-less. It hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed director since the day Barack Obama left office — and in the roughly eight-and-a-half years since, it’s churned through a dozen acting directors. As in many parts of government, Joe Biden missed a big opportunity to appoint a confirmed leader who could have tried to right the ship from the first administration’s missteps.

The reality is that ICE officers and executives have good reason to believe they will never be held to account for their current and future abuses and use-of-force in our democracy: What worries me now is that the bill before Congress right now would supercharge ICE and turn this increasingly secret-police-like organization loose on the country in ways that would be explosive. Various versions of the $150 billion proposal to boost immigration enforcement throw around numbers like adding between $8 billion and $30 billion for ICE hiring and operations.

ICE’s entire current annual budget is around $10 billion, so imagine an ICE an order of magnitude larger than it is now.

I spent years writing about the corruption that followed a similar radical and rapid transformation of the Border Patrol — a decade of corruption during which one agent or officer of CBP was arrested almost every single day for misconduct or criminal activity, a decade during which it rushed new hires out into the field without proper vetting or training. “We made some mistakes,” one CBP commissioner told me back in 2014. “We found out later that we did, in fact, hire cartel members.” Not just cartel members, actually, but also an actual serial killer. CBP for years was the nation’s most troubled federal law enforcement agency, and the Border Patrol over the last decade has become politically active in a way that we should not tolerate as a free society.

Now we appear to be set to repeat all of those mistakes by pouring gasoline on ICE’s misconduct — hiring thousands of new agents and officers in a rush just as surely problematic, if not worse and bigger, as the one that wrecked CBP for years — and turn it loose on the country’s interior, cities, and small communities in a way that the Border Patrol’s corruption and misconduct for the most part never affected ordinary Americans. 

Lawmakers shouldn’t be enabling ICE’s growth — they should be terrified of watching ICE increasingly cast aside efforts at oversight and should heed the clear and still-present warnings of what happened when the Border Patrol also tried to expand so rapidly. But most of all, if and when Democrats regain control of Congress or the White House, I don’t see how an agency as corrupted to its core as ICE now clearly is can be allowed to continue to exist in a free society.

Going into 2026 and beyond, breaking up HSI and ERO and abolishing ICE has to be the moderate position in American politics. Accountability for ICE’s current leadership has to be at the top of the agenda for any new leader of DHS or the Justice Department.

America cannot survive as a free society if ICE operates like this.

GMG

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