ICE is out of control and beyond repair
This agency needs to be stripped down to the studs. Dems should start preparing now.
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When President Trump told the Proud Boys to “Stand back and stand by” in his 2020 debate with Joe Biden, it became clear that he saw the far-right group and others like it as a kind of Trump militia, ready to act in his interests and at his instructions — which they did on January 6, 2021.
When Trump took office again in 2025, it was reasonable to fear that those malcontented white supremacists would be activated again, this time with an emboldened and angry president behind them.
But it hasn’t really happened; the paramilitary cosplayers dreaming of civil war as their beer guts spill out below their tactical vests have been remarkably quiet. That’s because Trump no longer needs them. He has his own army of thugs, one even more lawless and violent. It’s called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and it is out of control.
State-level Democrats seem to have woken up to the fact that they need to work right now to contain ICE and limit its abuses. But their party should also start planning for the future, crafting a strategy to be implemented once they have institutional power at the federal level again.
Put simply, ICE needs to be stripped down to the studs.
Democrats have escalated their rhetoric
Something has definitely changed in Democratic rhetoric just in the last couple of weeks.
Officials are now suggesting that ICE agents are committing crimes and should be held accountable — which is very different from simply objecting to a policy shift. It’s fair to say this is a result not only of the street-level thuggery that has been so apparent, but the mounting evidence that top Trump officials feel unconstrained by the law, judges, or any established authority at all.
This is true of other agencies and individual as well — like the Border Patrol commander who was recorded personally throwing tear gas at protesters in violation of a court order — but ICE is the most visible and egregious offender.
“The tables will turn one day,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently said on a Chicago TV program. “These people should recognize that maybe they’re not gonna get prosecuted today, although we’re looking at doing that, but they may get prosecuted after the Trump administration because the statute of limitations would not have run out.”
Last week, Pritzker created an accountability commission “tasked with capturing and creating a public record of the conduct of federal law enforcement agents and recommending actions to hold the federal government accountable.” After reports that ICE agents are swapping license plates to avoid detection — which is illegal — the Illinois secretary of state created a “Plate Watch” hotline for people to report incidents of plate-swapping.
In a similar vein, New York Attorney General Letitia James created a portal where people can report ICE abuses and upload pictures and video so her office can determine if laws have been broken.
In anticipation of an invasion of San Francisco (which Trump walked back after an intervention by some tech billionaires and the city’s mayor), Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Kevin Mullin issued a statement saying “while the President may enjoy absolute immunity courtesy of his rogue Supreme Court, those who operate under his orders do not. Our state and local authorities may arrest federal agents if they break California law — and if they are convicted, the President cannot pardon them.” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said that if there is clear evidence that an ICE agent broke the law by using excessive force, the city would consider arresting them.
Pushback from the Trump administration was immediate and angry. Attorney General Pam Bondi went to Fox News (where she spends the bulk of her time) and said, “you’ve got Pelosi out there saying to obstruct their investigation. You can’t do it, and we’re going to investigate her now.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a letter to the governor and attorney general of California, as well as Pelosi and Jenkins, reiterating the supremacy of federal law and making a direct threat: “The Department of Justice will investigate and prosecute any state or local official who violates these federal statutes (or directs or conspires with others to violate them).”
“We urge you and other California officials to publicly abandon this apparent criminal conspiracy,” Blanche added.
Stephen Miller, the guiding hand behind the administration’s violent crackdown on immigration, went on Fox to warn Pritzker and other officials that they could be guilty of “seditious conspiracy” and told ICE officers, “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.”
There is a strict sense in which that’s true — federal officials acting lawfully in the performance of their duties can’t be prosecuted by a state. But that doesn’t mean that, for instance, an ICE officer who drove drunk on their way to a raid would be immune from prosecution. Yet it isn’t too hard to imagine ICE personnel hearing Miller tell them they have immunity and concluding that they get to do anything they want. Nor is it hard to imagine that’s exactly what Miller wants them to hear, given how violence and intimidation lie at the heart of his approach to immigration.
What all this amounts to is an escalation in the rhetoric and attention being given to ICE abuses. Which is a good thing.
ICE’s brief and troubling history
ICE has only existed since 2002, when the Department of Homeland Security was created and the agency that had enforced immigration laws, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was disbanded and its functions transferred to other agencies.
While ICE has had more than its share of problems and abuses, everything changed when Republicans passed their “Big Beautiful Bill” earlier this year.
Prior to the passage of that bill, Congress had appropriated approximately $10 billion for ICE’s 2025 budget. The bill gave the agency an extra $75 billion over four years on top of that, nearly tripling its annual budget. If it were a military it would rank as the world’s 17th costliest, ahead of Turkey and Spain and just behind Canada. In recent months it has boosted its purchase of weapons by 600 percent, according to an investigation by Popular Information.
Spurred by Miller’s orders to rapidly increase the number of arrests and deportations it makes, ICE has rushed to hire thousands of new agents. In order to do so, it began offering $50,000 bonuses, waived the age limit on recruits, and lowered the training time from 13 weeks to eight weeks, then shortened it again to six weeks. The agency’s human resources personnel are overwhelmed, and candidates with disturbing and even criminal histories seem to be slipping through the cracks, at least at early stages.
“It’s a shit show,” one ICE official told CNN.
NBC News reported that nearly half the recruits at the training center washed out because they failed an open book exam “at the end of a legal course on the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Fourth Amendment, which outlines when officers can and can’t conduct searches and seizures.” The Atlantic reports that more than a third of candidates are unable to complete a test that requires them to perform 15 push-ups, 32 sit-ups, and a 1.5 mile run in 14 minutes, which doesn’t exactly require Olympic-level physical fitness.
Amidst all the attention given to ICE’s violence and lawlessness, what kind of people are likely to apply for these jobs? Who looks at what’s happening and says to themselves, “I’d love to put on a mask and a bulletproof vest, then go around smashing car windows and tackling terrified housekeepers and landscapers on the sidewalk”? It isn’t a stretch to assume that a significant portion of the applicants will be law enforcement washouts, right-wing extremists, and various types of discontented goons.
The next step for Democrats
This may bring back memories of 2018, when the #AbolishICE hashtag began to spread. But there’s a difference between then and now.
At that point the controversy was about President Trump’s specific immigration policies, particularly the horrific “family separation” policy, which the Trump administration intentionally designed to be as cruel and traumatic as possible as a way to discourage illegal immigration. For a brief moment, Democratic presidential candidates — even those coming from the center-left such as Kirsten Gillibrand — embraced the idea of abolishing the agency.
But the abuses weren’t playing out in the streets and Americans’ social media feeds nearly to the extent they are now. The energy for reform quickly dissipated within the Democratic Party, and many Democrats concluded that being “soft” on immigration is too dangerous politically. Yet over the last few months, ICE has developed a new and sinister identity in the public mind that it didn’t used to have.
Which means that the ground has been sown for Democrats to pull this poisonous plant out by the roots. But to do it, they need a systematic plan that can be implemented over the next few years.
They can take one lesson from the way Republicans gutted the IRS. After they took control of Congress in 1994, the GOP set about to discredit and undermine the tax-collection agency not only with legislative proposals but with dramatic, high-profile hearings about alleged IRS abuses of innocent people victimized by cruel and unaccountable bureaucrats. That’s exactly what Democrats should do if they manage to take back the House next year. Their power will be limited between then and the 2028 election, but they will have the ability to create news events that highlight the worst ICE abuses and turn public opinion against it. That change in opinion has already begun; polls show Americans increasingly disapproving of ICE.
That will then set the stage for genuine reform of ICE the next time a Democrat is in the White House, under the banner of improving and professionalizing the agency. It can start with firing every one of the unqualified thugs hired between 2025 and 2028; if you joined during the Trump administration and consider yourself a solid civil servant, you’d be welcome to reapply. Wearing masks should be barred; American law enforcement officials have done their jobs for two centuries without hiding their identities, and ICE agents can, too. All officers would have to wear badges and identification whenever they’re on the job, just like real cops do. New policies would be put in place to ensure the highest standards of competence and respect for the law.
And any ICE official — from the agency’s director all the way down to the guys kicking down doors without warrants — ought to be subject to accountability if they are found to have broken the law, up to and including prosecution.
The next presidency is going to have to embark on a sweeping de-Trump-ification of the entire federal government to purge it of the culture of abuse and lawlessness that has taken hold, and there are few more vivid examples than ICE. The agency doesn’t necessarily have to be abolished; we do need to enforce immigration laws. But it will have to be completely remade. And it’s not too early to start preparing.
That’s it for today
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This piece lands squarely within the architecture I’ve been mapping: Trump doesn’t need cosplay militias anymore, he’s institutionalized the violence.
ICE isn’t just out of control. It’s been re-scripted as a state-sanctioned enforcement wing for a regime that no longer pretends to respect law, precedent, or restraint.
The paramilitary fantasy has been absorbed into federal infrastructure, and the result is a culture of impunity that rivals any transitional autocracy.
In The Collapse of Moral Authority and The Praetorian Age, I’ve traced how cruelty became currency and unpredictability became policy.
This ICE moment is a textbook case:
• Unqualified hires
• Masked agents
• Court-defying commanders
• A legal vacuum filled with brute force
This isn’t just about immigration. It’s about whether state violence can be professionalized..
And yes, it’s not too early to start preparing. The architecture of cruelty won’t dismantle itself.
— Johan
Bernie & others were right. DHS, etc, etc should NEVER have been created after 9/11.