ICE cannot survive past the Trump administration

Another day, another video on social media featuring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents behaving badly.

Sometimes they act like bullies, intimidating goons trampling the Constitution. Other times they show they’ve learned nothing from their deadly encounters in Minnesota and Texas, using excessive force and putting people in harm’s way.

And every time, my blood boils at the rampant thuggery on display.

I abhor facile slogans, but as more and more incidents pile up, this one’s an easy call: Abolish ICE.

Smash it up. Close it down. Dismantle it. It shouldn’t be too hard, since it’s already been broken by President Donald Trump and his GOP allies in Congress, who have flooded the agency with billions of dollars and a mission directive that rewards lawlessness and recklessness.

Under Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s anti-immigrant policies, the goal is mass arrests and deportations, no matter the cost. A June 2025 post by the president on Truth Social made it explicit: “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.”

This has led to the foreseeable consequences that are playing out on America’s streets and inside immigration detention centers. The stories of abuse are so common, their number so overwhelming, that I don’t see how the agency survives.

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This should not be interpreted as a call for nonexistent borders or unfettered immigration. Having spent much of my life in and around southwest Texas, I count myself among those who have a particular appreciation for the importance of humane, rational, and consistent immigration policies — but, by almost any measure, we’re getting none of the above from ICE as it’s currently formulated.

And it’s not just me or the usual left-leaning advocates who are questioning the national framework on immigration. Nearly three-quarters of Americans believe immigration is a good thing for our country, and most people prefer widening paths to citizenship rather than increasing enforcement efforts.

The prospect of doing away with ICE does not garner nearly as much support from undecided midterm voters, with just 21% of them saying in a recent poll that they favored eliminating the agency.

As I’ve written about how the administration is demonizing immigrants, I’ve heard from conservative readers who say the media is doing the same to ICE, casting it as the worst of the worst and inevitably forcing a critical look at its future.

To answer the question of what the agency might look like in the years to come — or if it should even continue to exist at all — I reached out to a few people who may know ICE better than nearly anyone else: those who’ve worked inside it.

I put the question of ICE’s future and how its agents are regarded to Jason Houser, who spent his government career at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and is a former ICE chief of staff. The Afghanistan combat veteran told me it starts and ends with leadership.

“The tactical and operational guidance and directives from the administration are putting ICE officers in a place to be demonized,” he said. “There’s a lot of authority and power in law enforcement, and the way that power is being used by this administration for the first 18 months has been disjointed, punitive, shortsighted, and targeted at the most vulnerable communities.”

While the behavior of some agents is inexcusable, and they should be held accountable, the agency is ultimately an instrument wielded by those in power.

For example, some of the same agents who are being maligned today were redeployed to Del Rio, Texas, in 2021 to help humanely and safely process almost 16,000 mostly Haitian immigrants who were living in substandard conditions in a makeshift border camp, Houser noted.

How ICE is operating today cannot be separated from the administration’s demands.

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Some of the worst examples of abuse by ICE agents have come during vehicle stops, including the July killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. Agents have been captured on video in high-speed pursuits, cutting off cars, and smashing windows.

Before Trump returned to office, the agency rarely engaged in these kinds of tactics, let alone used them to target noncriminal immigrants, said Joe Sifuentez, who worked for ICE until he retired in 2020.

“If it’s a bad guy in that vehicle, we have a judicial warrant, we stop them. Then we can break that window and drag that person out of the vehicle,” he said. “But that’s not what’s happening now.”

While the president campaigned on mass deportations, many voters believed the government would focus on immigrants with serious criminal records. Increasingly, that is not the case, with most people being detained only charged with violating civil immigration laws.

And in trying to fill a reported White House quota of 2,000 arrests a day, federal agents are engaged in random sweeps and racial profiling that put people at risk.

“I’m concerned that one of my loved ones could get pulled over tomorrow,” Sifuentez said. “God only knows what can happen.”

The Republican-controlled Congress has given the administration more than $150 billion for immigration enforcement. The question is what taxpayers are getting in return. It isn’t increasing public safety, the former officials I spoke with said.

Houser pointed to a recent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General that found that as ICE shifted priorities toward immigration enforcement, its efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking declined. From fiscal years 2024 to 2025, the report said, fentanyl investigations decreased by 24%, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl decreased by approximately 30%, and fentanyl seizures decreased by almost 40%.

It’s not just drug trafficking investigations that are falling by the wayside over Trump’s misplaced priorities. ICE agents descending on a Home Depot or a Walmart to fulfill their arrest quotas fail to target the kinds of criminals the agency should be focused on.

“Real sex predators, convicted rapists, murderers, aren’t just hanging out at a Starbucks on a Tuesday, right? They’re not at the corner, walking their kids to school,” Houser said.

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Mass arrests also put people in detention who do not have a final order of removal. These are immigrants who are going through the system and would generally be allowed to walk free until they had exhausted their legal options. Instead, the administration is deciding to hold them without bond for what can be an indeterminate amount of time.

Sifuentez, who oversaw ICE’s national fugitive operations program and detention facilities, told me that even under regular circumstances, detention is extremely challenging. As the government works to not only increase the number of such facilities in the country, but also how many people these places hold, the situation is bound to get worse.

“When I was in Atlanta, I oversaw a facility with 2,000 detainees. That in itself was very difficult to oversee and keep your staffing levels intact,” he said. “What do you think it’s going to be like when you ramp it up to 10,000?”

Already, there have been more than 50 deaths in detention since the start of Trump’s second term, with the detention fatality rate hitting a two-decade high.

“You’re going to see more suicides. You’re going to see more people die of health conditions. You’re going to see more both mental and physical stress that leads to horrific outcomes,” Houser added. “It’s just math.”

If ICE is being used to indiscriminately terrorize communities, and ignore constitutional protections while disregarding its public safety charge, what is the point of its continued existence? Even if you see it as a tool, if it can be abused so readily and so thoroughly by an out-of-control executive, wouldn’t the cause of sensible and coherent immigration policy be better served by replacing it?

Neither of the former officials I spoke with would endorse the call to abolish ICE, and perhaps their experiential knowledge of the agency’s complexity would keep them from ever embracing what can feel more like a facile bit of political sloganeering than anything else. After all, activists have long called to eliminate the agency, rightly underscoring the need for accountability over the lives that have been destroyed by detention and deportation — but they hardly ever offer realistic or politically viable alternatives.

Indeed, as long as we are a nation of laws, there will be the need for enforcement. In humanitarian terms, whatever agency takes ICE’s place will be judged harshly under those same standards, but exist it must.

Still, Sifuentez, until recently a lifelong registered Republican, said that at the very least ICE should be renamed and its functions divided among other agencies.

“Everybody in America should be very concerned about what’s going on,” he said. “This isn’t about politics. This is about what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s going on is wrong.”

For his part, Houser stressed that we need migrants in this country, and we need public safety. Immigration enforcement is difficult, nuanced work and should be entrusted to those who have the highest level of training and expertise.

“No matter what the structure and organization of the bureaucracy is, there’s going to be immigration enforcement, and it needs to be handled with professionalism,” he said. “Remembering that 95% of individuals who are coming to this country want the American way of life, and that’s something to be embraced.”