Six Ways to Reform ICE and CBP

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In my testimony to the Illinois Accountability Commission last week about the long-running corruption and abuses by CBP and ICE, I concluded with a basic point:

“None of this changes unless we demand change and make it change — the way that the funding for ICE has been allocated, it can spend this money straight through 2029. Congress is going to have to act to turn that funding and hiring spigot off — otherwise, this continues on autopilot for the next four years.

“But the damage we are doing to our own country — Constitutionally, morally, and reputationally — is long-lasting. Remember we are two decades removed from the start of the CBP hiring surge, and I can still find you a news story or headline every day that traces its origins back to the mistakes made in that surge.

“We as a nation must act to change the trajectory of immigration enforcement in our country.

“America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year — let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.”

To that end, Congress is going to spend the next week arguing over the most necessary and politically possible reforms. This is a critical moment to change that trajectory and almost surely the best chance we as a nation will have all year to arrest the government-led violence on our streets.

But what could that reform look like? Across the board, it means making these agents act more like civilians in a democracy rather than a right-wing paramilitary militia loyal to the regime. I’ve spent the last few days talking to people in and around this issue and have six areas where I hope Congress focuses its attention to demand and implement major and concrete reforms could be made immediately.

Here’s a list of some things that would actually make a difference:

1) Basic Uniform and Identification Standards :: I was horrified last night to see a photo of (presumably) an ICE officer wearing full battle gear and a skull mask. I say “presumably” because too many times ICE officers and CBP agents are showing up in our communities as indistinguishable from Proud Boys, bounty hunters, or merely even “open carry” enthusiasts. There should be no doubt who is a federal agent and who isn’t. Most agencies go out of their way during enforcement operations to make clear their authority — as FBI agents do wearing their iconic blue raid jackets. How come ICE doesn’t have any sort of standard insignia by now?

ICE and CBP officers on the streets must begin to follow basic uniform standards — standards that reflect that they are not a military occupation force but a civilian law enforcement agency, e.g., there should be no camouflage gear allowed. Also: No “police” chest labels — they need to be labeled as “Federal Agent,” “ICE,” “Border Patrol,” “ERO,” or “CBP.” They’re not “police” and shouldn’t claim to be. Most of all this means no masks and clear, visible, and consistent identity labels. (I’m not saying that ICE officers need to display full names — even if you buy their fear of being “doxxed,” which research shows to be entirely invented, CBP and other federal agencies already has a system for unique identity codes on their uniforms that would at least allow people and observers to at least file complaints about individual officers using their unique IDs.) As Adam Serwer wrote this week in the Atlantic: Too often ICE agents in particular seem to be wearing masks in order to ease their ability to do unconstitutional things and assault civilians and bystanders.

2) Use of Force: As I said in my testimony last week, CBP is uniquely callous with human life as an agency. It has a long history of questionable shootings and abuse of migrants; the only difference over the last year is that Border Patrol agents are doing the same things they’ve previously done without consequence to vulnerable migrants in lonely deserts to white people in major cities on camera. Greg Bovino’s operations in particular have treated CBP operations more like it’s a Confederate cavalry raid than a professional, modern law enforcement agency.

I would love to see real restrictions on CBP and ICE’s use of chemical agents, like tear gas, pepper spray, and less lethal munitions like so-called “rubber bullets” or pepper balls more like the actually dangerous tools they are and not just as something that Bovino gets to throw when he’s annoyed. In particular, I’d like to see CBP and ICE removed from “crowd control” operations against protesters. There are other agencies that are better trained at such crowd control and protest policing. Federal judges in jurisdiction after jurisdiction have had to impose court orders limiting CBP’s use-of-force abuses — we shouldn’t have to continue to wait on a new tragedy and abuse in each city the ICE and CBP efforts move onto to draw those guidelines.

3) Enforcement Standards and Restrictions: One of the most useful things Congress could do is a host of reforms aimed at re-drawing where and how enforcement operations can unfold. This could include:

• Border Patrol can only be used at the borders and redefine the “100-mile rule” :: CBP was never intended — and cannot be allowed to be — a roving presidential “interior police force.” Right now, the Border Patrol has broad authority to enforce immigration laws within a “reasonable distance” of the border, which the Justice Department in the 1950s asserted, without congressional approval, as 100 air-miles of any land or sea border. That’s absurd — and it allows Border Patrol to operate in an area that encompasses a swath of the country inhabited by upwards of 200 million Americans, most of the nation’s largest cities (like Chicago and Minneapolis), all or nearly all of seven entire states, and land where some 75 percent of all Hispanics live in the US. Want to change border enforcement? Change the definition of “reasonable distance” to something, well, reasonable.
  
  I don’t pretend to know how to precisely define “reasonable distance” but 100 miles from any edge of the country certainly ain’t necessary. I do believe that certain “back from the border” operations at fixed and roving checkpoints make sense, as do perhaps targeted enforcement efforts targeting inter-city bus and train travel along the border regions. The Border Patrol, for instance, has a long-standing fixed checkpoint at Falfurrias, Texas, which stops traffic 70 miles from the border on Highway 281; two other checkpoints guard the other two routes out of the Rio Grande Valley, Highway 77 and Highway 83. Drug-sniffing dogs work the lines of vehicles, while agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship, and a Pentagon-surplus blimp — known as an aerostat — watches over the surrounding brushland to catch any migrants or smuggling mules attempting to walk around the checkpoint. Does that have a place in border enforcement? Maybe, sure. Do armored convoys of Border Patrol agents swarming through urban cities and dropping tear gas canisters to sweep up brown people off the streets? No.
  

• Restore DHS’s “Sensitive Locations” Restrictions :: For decades, including through the first Trump administration, DHS had clear restrictions on immigration enforcement at so-called “sensitive locations” like churches, schools, and hospitals. As one of the other witnesses at last week’s hearing said — herself the former acting chief of staff at ICE — it shouldn’t be controversial that children be allowed to go to school or that parents should be able to seek medical treatment for children without fear of arrest. And yet the Trump administration has changed all of that. Congress should codify the longstanding policies and start re-drawing circles about where we allow immigration enforcement to take place.
  
  One thing I’d add looking ahead? Congress should mandate that no ICE or immigration enforcement can occur near polling places on election day, as Steven Bannon advocated ICE do today — or, heck, go one step further and declare that ICE isn’t even allowed to work on election day anywhere in the country. Take away the threat that Donald Trump is going to turbocharge 20,000 ICE officers to set up checkpoints near polling places or stage large-scale raids in minority-majority congressional districts during polling hours in November. (Everyone who says “there aren’t enough ICE” misunderstands how this would work — you don’t need to “patrol” or scare off voters at every polling place. Control of Congress will be decided by a small number of swing districts; deploying 100-200 agents apiece into just 15-20 congressional districts and urban polling places would probably be all they needed to do.)
  

• Judicial Warrants Are Necessary and Administrative Warrants Are Not a “Skip the Constitution” Card :: With no basis in law or the constitution, DHS is asserting effectively that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to immigration warrants. A simple reform would be clarifying that — as with any other type of policing or federal law enforcement operation — only judicially approved warrants cover forcibly entering a residence or business. This really is one of the most basic freedoms in the US system — the government can’t forcibly enter your property without your permission except in exigent circumstances. That’s like “Colonists objecting to British Redcoats 101.”
  

• Officers should be civilly and personally liable for wrongfully detaining bona fide US citizens :: To me, one of the most important aspects of changing the way ICE and CBP are operating on our streets is altering or making them second-guess their “arrest first and ask questions later” approach to street enforcement. We’ve seen too many instances of ICE and CBP agents grabbing people off the street uncertain of who they are and then, when it’s clear later that they’re US civilians, unceremoniously dumping them on the street far away — sometimes hours or days later, sometimes bloodied after an assault by officers. We need to draw stronger lines that ensure immigration officers actually try to understand who they’re targeting before they start detaining and assaulting people simply based on the color of their skin. (cough, Kavanaugh stops, cough)
  
  Removing what Stephen Miller has told them is the “blanket immunity” under which agents carry out their job (actually, it’s complicated) in circumstances where they wrongfully detain a US citizen — and giving those US citizens a clear ability to act legally against them for damages — would certainly force any agent who wanted to keep his job and not bankrupt his family to slow down and act more respectfully toward random civilians on the street.
  

• No case bonuses for arrests or for meeting quotas. This should go without saying, but it evidently does need to be said. Immigration enforcement is not meant to be bounty-hunting in the US.

4) Hiring Standards and Training: I outlined in my testimony last week more than a half dozen reasons for concern about who ICE is hiring in its new surge of funding and how it’s training those people. Congress should mandate basic hiring and training standards that at least guarantee ICE officers and CBP agents meet the standards of other federal law enforcement agencies. As I warned last week, “The fact that as DHS deploys CBP and ICE in new ways in American life that it is actually CUTTING, and not increasing, training, shows that DHS has no intention to have them up to the basic national law enforcement standards — they are being designed to be a blunt instrument only, a roving paramilitary force that serves at the pleasure of the president himself.” We can’t allow that to happen if we want to protect our democracy and preserve the chance for something approaching free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028.

5) Technology Limits: I’d love to see Congress draw some boundaries around DHS’s creeping dystopian surveillance technology — including its “Mobile Fortify” facial recognition app that ICE and CBP say is the “definitive” source of whether someone is in the country legally and a “targeting” app made by Palantir called ELITE.

6) Detention Facilities :: Lastly, short- and medium-term reform efforts can’t be only focused on what’s already happened. We need Congress to look ahead too — the flood of ICE and immigration is so giant that it’s already clear where the next round of scandals will come: Detention facilities. I don’t even know where to begin to mandate reforms on a system as inhumane and corrupt as the burgeoning network of ICE detention and deportation operations, but we need much focus here over the coming days, weeks, and months.

Any deal Congress passes must include codifying and clarifying that Members of Congress have on-demand access to any immigration detention facility. ICE has played fast and loose skirting congressional oversight and access over the last year, and two separate court orders have had to reaffirm that House and Senate members can conduct no-notice inspections.

Beyond that, we need to reconsider all the guardrails about what’s about to happen to our country. Quoting again from my testimony to the Illinois Accountability Commission last week:

“The Trump administration and ICE are in the midst of enormously ambitious plans to double the capacity of detention facilities, from about 55,000 beds to more than 107,000 beds, as part of the plan to pour about $45 billion into detention facilities. I would expect and predict that over the course of 2026, we will see this plan move to the forefront of national news coverage and scandal.

“According to news reports, ICE hasn’t paid medical bills for detainees since October, critically endangering detainees, and we’re already seeing ICE detainees begin to die in these facilities at new alarming rates. In just the first 21 days of this year, at least six people died in ICE custody — a rate that if it continues, let alone increases, would mark more than a quadrupling of the worst-ever year of deaths in custody.

“It’s clear that the Trump administration plans the next phases of its immigration enforcement to not work in the traditional systems of due process for migrants. We can tell because these giant increases in officers, arrest quotas, and detention facilities are balanced with only the most modest of modest increases to the number of immigration judges in the country — a rise from 700 to 800, an increase so out-of-scale to the problem that we could have used those extra 100 to work through the existing backlog from the Biden years.

“If the Trump administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges. The fact that it’s not doing so makes clear that the Trump administration, DHS, and DOJ have no intention of normal due process.

“Instead, the administration is building these detention camps and highlighting how terrible they will be with names like Alligator Alcatraz — again, immigration detention facilities are intended to be civil facilities, not criminal prisons. In doing so, they make clear that the express purpose is for these facilities to seen as a punishment camp and experienced as a concentration camp so full of horrors and deprivation that they will terrify immigrants into waiving due process to speed their own deportation overseas.

“Or worse — we will see the expansion and spread of other so-called “third country deportations” like what we’ve seen already with the Trump administration’s attempts to send detainees to a torture gulag in El Salvador, African countries, or its emerging agreement with Argentina that completely lack human rights protections, or promises of safe treatment, or the shuttling of detainees to countries where they have no ties whatsoever. Absent vigorous oversight by the legislative branch, there’s every reason to believe that Donald Trump is planning a detention and expulsion system that will be a lasting stain on our national conscience.

***

But all of those reforms — even if literally all of them come to pass, which they surely won’t in the congressional sausage making — only goes so far. Which brings me to:

The Real Problem with ICE and CBP Reform:

Overall, here’s the real challenge: I’m not actually sure any of the above really matters. Congress can’t mandate or legislate the only type of reform that is actually going to matter: Culture and leadership. All of these proposed reforms are arguing and negotiating around the margins of the fundamental problem: We have created a monster rampaging through the heart of our democracy and are trying to define and restrict which cities it can pillage and how many civilians it can eat. The problem isn’t the restrictions on the Frankensteinian monster we’ve brought alive over the last 20 years; the problem is the monster.

An agency that perfectly obeys the letter of every single reform above here, but that still employs the people that CBP and ICE has let loose in Minneapolis — agents who clearly feel unaccountable to a free society and who so clearly see the Constitution not as a lodestar but as a hindrance — and that still takes orders from Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Tom “Bag of Cash” Homan is still an agency that is not going to respect America’s constitutional civil liberties and that is still going to find ways to abuse and assault ordinary Americans. Body cameras or better paperwork isn’t going to change that.

The actions of ICE and CBP over the last year have proven that the core of their culture is incompatible with a free society and deep, systemic reform is necessary — the type of reform it should be said that Obama squandered across six of his eight years as president without action and that Biden, for whatever strange reason, never even really attempted at all.

In the medium- and longer-term, I don’t see how a future Democratic administration or Democratic-majority Congress ever continues the mess that is the current ICE and CBP.

Whether you call it “abolish,” “defund,” “reimagine,” or some other action verb, we need to completely overhaul the functions and culture of these agencies. I do believe that immigration enforcement and the legal process behind and around it is important for a functioning and safe country; we need some structure that fulfills the services that ICE, CBP, and USCIS currently do, but all three are merely inventions of this century. There’s no reason we can’t redo them again. (Although I would, if I were in charge, welcome far more immigrants from far more places for far more reasons — immigration is America’s greatest historic strength, not a weakness!)

More broadly, years ago I came to the conclusion that the Department of Homeland Security was a mistake in all sorts of various ways. I believe as we now approach the 25^th anniversary of 9/11 later this year, we must revisit it and break it apart. At the very least, it should be split in two — with one Cabinet department bringing together the agency functions now held by CBP, ICE, and USCIS to focus only on immigration process and enforcement. The other functions of DHS are way way way less controversial and politically fraught — like the Coast Guard, FEMA, CISA, TSA, and Secret Service — and should be overseen by something more like a civil defense department. Immigration and the border should either be its own standalone department or, better yet, go back to the Justice Department, where it will (in theory) be more firmly grounded in the Constitution and we will return the bulk of federal law enforcement to the department meant to oversee law enforcement.

I’m going to remain, for now, hopeful that the horrors of January in Minneapolis, piled on top of all that we suffered in 2025, will urge Congress to action and change in the next two weeks. There’s certainly plenty that they could do!

GMG

PS: Are you an immigration advocate, experienced law enforcement officer, or even a disaffected CBP or ICE employee annoyed at the bad apples in your agency and want to talk reform or vent? Get in touch: I’m @vermontgmg.14 on Signal.

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