America's principal immigration-enforcement agency, housed within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). ICE was created after the September 11th 2001 attacks, when the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS)—which had handled everything from visa processing and asylum to deportations for 70 years—was broken up and folded into the newly established DHS. The reorganisation reflected a shift towards viewing immigration through a national-security lens rather than a civilian law-enforcement one.
ICE has two main divisions: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which carries out arrests and deportations, and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which investigates weapons smuggling, human trafficking and other crimes. The two divisions have long competed for prestige and top jobs. HSI agents see themselves as detectives; ERO agents are characterised, even internally, as jailers.
As illegal border crossings increased in the mid-2000s, ICE became synonymous with its immigration mission—known colloquially, like the INS before it, as la migra. During Donald Trump's first term, "abolish ICE" became a rallying cry for progressives and a litmus test in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4th 2025, allocated nearly $75bn to ICE over four years—more than the annual budgets of nine federal law-enforcement agencies combined—for new detention facilities, additional agents and better technology. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, called it "a game-changer". Stephen Miller, the president's deputy chief of staff and architect of his immigration policy, set a target of 3,000 arrests per day; in early June 2025 the agency was averaging roughly 1,100.
In 1996 an immigration law expanded the list of crimes making someone deportable and created mandatory detention for certain migrants. Doris Meissner, who led the INS under Bill Clinton, wrote a memo establishing enforcement priorities: the agency would pursue criminals but might leave veterans alone. Trump eliminated such priorities during his first term but lacked the resources to pursue both criminals and farmworkers, so deportations remained relatively low. The BBB funding removed that constraint.
The Laken Riley Act says ICE must prioritise deporting criminals. Yet convicted criminals were only 34% of those arrested by ICE in July 2025, down from 57% in December 2024. By November 2025 the proportion had fallen further to 30%. Less than 10% of those detained in June had been convicted of a violent or property offence, according to the Cato Institute. The Washington Examiner reported that Stephen Miller "eviscerated" ICE staff for going after criminals when they could be rounding up day labourers outside Home Depot; the White House denied the report.
On September 4th 2025 the Trump administration arrested 475 foreign workers at a Hyundai electric-car factory near Ellabell, Georgia—the biggest worksite raid ever conducted in the Department of Homeland Security's two-decade history. More than 400 agents fanned out across the plant. Most of those detained were South Korean nationals with the wrong kind of visas; they were subcontractors flown over to install and inspect production-line equipment.
ICE's enforcement division employs roughly 6,000 officers, far fewer than the Border Patrol's nearly 20,000 agents. To compensate, the administration reassigned nearly 15,000 other federal officers—including Border Patrol and FBI agents—to help arrest immigrants in cities. In October 2025 DHS replaced the heads of several ICE field offices with Border Patrol officials, reflecting the administration's preference for the Border Patrol's more aggressive posture. Career ICE officials are accustomed to planning targeted raids that prioritise criminals; the Border Patrol, long considered a paramilitary organisation, is used to chasing smugglers through the south-west, not respecting the constitutional rights of protesters on city streets.
"Operation Midway Blitz", launched in Chicago, became a flashpoint. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official leading the operation, was filmed tackling and tear-gassing protesters. On November 6th 2025 Judge Sara Ellis ordered officers to restrict their use of force against protesters and journalists unless "objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat", and found that Mr Bovino had lied under oath about being hit by a stone.
The DHS is hiring 10,000 deportation officers by the end of 2025, offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and help with student loans. It received more than 175,000 applications and offered jobs to 18,000. Combined with existing agents, more than 30,000 federal officers could be involved in immigration enforcement—nearly as many as New York City's police department, the country's largest.
By late January 2026, ICE had more than doubled in size over the preceding year, having hired 12,000 new deportation officers. New recruits are rushed through training in 42 days. In contrast it can take up to a year for local cops to be deemed street-ready, according to Alex del Carmen, a criminologist who helps train police officers. Weekly deportations following an ICE arrest more than quadrupled in the first nine months of Trump's term, to 6,000 a week.
Such hiring surges carry risks. When the number of Border Patrol agents roughly doubled between 2003 and 2013, the Government Accountability Office found more than 2,000 arrests for officer misconduct between 2005 and 2012. During that era 125 agents were convicted of corrupt acts, including drug- and people-smuggling.
On February 6th 2026 a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals broke with decades of precedent and blessed the administration's mandatory-detention policy. In mid-2025 ICE had changed its interpretation of American immigration law to classify any migrant who had entered the country illegally—even if they arrived years ago and are law-abiding—as someone who is "seeking admission", and therefore subject to mandatory detention without bond. "For purposes of immigration detention," wrote the dissenting judge, "the border is now everywhere." The case may eventually be heard by the Fifth Circuit's full bench or the Supreme Court.
East Camp Montana, a tent camp at an army base in Texas, is ICE's biggest detention facility. Members of Congress are entitled to make unscheduled visits to detention facilities as part of their oversight duties but have in practice been prevented from doing so or from speaking with detainees.
DHS has gutted internal oversight bodies. Julie Plavsic was forced to retire when Trump all but eradicated the department's Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, the highest number since 2004. An autopsy report released in January 2026 showed that Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban migrant held at Fort Bliss in Texas, was killed by his jailers; ICE had previously said he had committed suicide.
ICE agents enjoy "supremacy-clause immunity"—an umbrella that generally protects federal officials from state prosecution when they are on the job. The roots of the doctrine are found in In re Neagle (1890), in which a federal marshal was deemed immune from criminal charges for killing the would-be assassin of a Supreme Court justice he was assigned to protect. In the 1960s a federal marshal was similarly protected after deploying tear-gas during a riot spurred by the enrolment of a black man at the University of Mississippi. Two limits apply: the action must be authorised by federal law, and the agent must do no more than what was "necessary and proper" to fulfil his duties. The Supreme Court has not elaborated on the standard since 1920, and two competing interpretations have developed in lower courts: a minority view that asks whether the agent genuinely believed his action was justified, and a favoured, more objective test asking how "the reasonable officer" would have acted.
Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old protester, was killed by CBP agents in Minneapolis on January 24th 2026. Pretti was carrying a legally owned gun but had been disarmed when he was shot ten times; agents fired repeatedly into his body when he was already prone on the ground. The CBP agents involved were placed on administrative leave but had not been publicly identified as of late January. Trump said the death was "very sad" but blamed Pretti for carrying a gun, and promised an investigation—though DHS would investigate itself, rather than the FBI or another outside agency. Democrats demanded a "Bivens fix": in Bivens v Six Unknown Named Agents, the Supreme Court established the right of plaintiffs to sue federal officials who violate their constitutional rights, only to chip away at it in subsequent cases.
On January 7th 2026 Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent, shot and killed Renee Good in her car on a residential street in Minneapolis. Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, claimed the killing was justified because Good was allegedly using her Honda Pilot as "a deadly weapon". Trump said the shots were discharged in self-defence and that the victim's "highly disrespectful" attitude helped seal her fate. The Department of Justice investigated the victim's widow rather than the agent; six prosecutors resigned in protest. J.D. Vance claimed Ross enjoys "absolute immunity" from prosecution. Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, argued that supremacy-clause immunity does not subvert all state and local prosecution of federal officials. Minnesota investigators may bring state charges.
In December 2025 some 3,000 federal agents were deployed to Minneapolis—dwarfing the scale of previous operations in Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans—in an effort dubbed "Operation Metro Surge". The operation resulted in at least 3,000 arrests, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Gregory Bovino, who had previously led the Chicago operation, acknowledged that organised local resistance made Minneapolis "a difficult operating environment", complaining that his agents were even being stopped from buying coffees.
Police chiefs from the Minneapolis suburbs pushed back publicly. Mark Bruley, the chief of police in Brooklyn Park, said residents, including American citizens, were being stopped and hassled on the street "for no cause" by federal agents. He described an incident in which ICE agents boxed in an off-duty police officer's car, drew their weapons and demanded her immigration paperwork, though she was a citizen. The situation was defused only when they discovered she was a cop.
Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, speculated that someone high up in the Trump administration had ordered agents to "arrest and deport a bunch of Somalis", but the vast majority of Somalis in Minneapolis are American citizens. As a result, he said, federal agents were "running around picking on protesters and people who look a bit foreign, many of whom turn out to be citizens."
Minneapolis residents organised a dense resistance network: unions, non-profits, church groups and private citizens delivered food to immigrants in hiding, tracked ICE vehicles, and blew whistles to warn migrants as agents approached. Several school districts started offering remote learning. On January 21st 2026 a federal appeals court lifted restrictions on the use of tear gas on protesters. The Department of Justice issued subpoenas to six Democratic officials in the state, including Tim Walz, the governor, and Mr Frey.
ICE has been adding to the types of data it processes for years. Information on vehicle, phone and utilities usage is hoovered up, as are data from local police, jails, courts, commercial databases and social media. Palantir's ImmigrationOS software aims to unify these data on a single screen using AI, replacing what one former official called "swivel-chair analytics"—navigating several disparate computer systems.
ICE's data-acquisition tactics include subpoenas and court orders (AI has reduced the time to prepare warrant paperwork from two or three days to less than an hour) and purchasing data from aggregators. Some government bodies that refuse to share records with ICE nevertheless sell them to data aggregators that do: Cook County, Illinois, for example, disallows data sharing for civil immigration enforcement but its jails sell records via intermediaries to Lexis-Nexis Risk Solutions, which has a contract with ICE.
ICE also buys data from advertising firms that track consumer behaviour. Automated licence-plate readers and Amazon's Ring video-doorbell service (partnered with more than 2,000 local police and fire departments) provide additional information. For facial recognition, ICE agents can snap and upload pictures to Clearview AI's database of more than 70bn images. A separate firm with a secret HSI contract matches distinctive marks (such as a dented bumper or torn clothing) across CCTV, body-cam and online footage.
Courts have begun restricting ICE's access to some data. On February 5th 2026 a federal judge ruled that the Internal Revenue Service had illegally shared taxpayer data with DHS, and barred further access. Many government bodies, especially in "sanctuary" cities, refuse to share.
According to polling by YouGov published on January 14th 2026, 70% of Americans saw footage of Renee Good being killed. Over half now view ICE unfavourably.
By mid-June 2025, 42% of Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov viewed ICE favourably, an eight-percentage-point drop from February. Support among Republicans increased by nine points over the same period.
After the killing of Alex Pretti on January 24th 2026, more Americans supported than opposed ICE's abolition, according to YouGov, including 47% of independents. Three in five Americans said immigration officers' tactics were too forceful. Support for abolishing ICE rose even among Republican voters; nearly a fifth backed it, up by ten percentage points from June. Net approval of Trump's handling of immigration had sunk into negative territory in 2025, around the time DHS ramped up raids in Los Angeles, and continued to fall.
ICE received such a massive infusion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that it can fund its operations twice over for the next three years. Customs and Border Protection has enough to last between nine and 11 months.
After Kristi Noem's firing as homeland-security secretary in March 2026, Democrats refused to approve further DHS funding unless it included new restrictions on ICE, such as a ban on agents wearing face-masks. Most Hispanics now favour abolishing ICE; an Economist/YouGov poll found 68% of Hispanics disapprove of Trump's handling of immigration.
During the DHS funding standoff, Trump dispatched ICE agents to airports to help with TSA staffing shortages. A former ICE official questioned the decision, noting that ICE agents are not trained to screen passengers; they appear to be guarding exits and checking IDs. Democrats say any funding bill must require agents to wear body cameras and remove their masks—something they have done at airports but which Trump insists they should not do when making arrests.
"The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut."