Some Thoughts about ICE's Future

And yikes.

This is what an official ICE badge looks like.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to think out loud a little in front of you about ICE.

So the One Big Beautiful Bill is now One Big Awful Law, the future ramifications of which are too big and too profound for any one newsletter edition (or brain) to think sort through.

But during my commute this week in my new 2025 Expecto Patronus through the wilds of suburban Northern Virginia I’ve had a few initial — and very unfinished — thoughts about the expansion of ICE’s budget. And these are thoughts about the law enforcement end of the equation and aspects of the future of ICE. I’ll have to talk about the ramifications to all of us ordinary folks and to the economy another time.

So. ICE — which has been a quarter of the size of FBI — will now be funded to four times the size of FBI. The up-sizing of ICE means, yes, mass arrests of brown people (undocumented and citizens) are now far more likely to occur soon, but the effort to expand ICE that rapidly will probably result in some badnesses and weirdnesses beyond the obvious. And I don’t think ICE will become “Trump’s Secret Police” for reasons I’ll explain in a minute — I think they’ll become different and worse.

• Now, I’m going to be overly generous to ICE agents sometimes — same for FBI agents and police officers — and really unfair at other times but bear with me here. Just because I’m overly generous or that I overgeneralize does not mean that I am wrong.

In my limited experience with ICE agents, ICE agents believe (as Trump does) that the United States is suffering through an invasion of illegal immigrants who are entering the country to “get free stuff”/be leeches on the American economy and taxpayer and to criminally prey upon innocent Americans. They believe their hands have been tied by liberals and the law and that Trump briefly unleashed them during his first term to finally defend America and protect Americans and that he’s unleashing them again now and supercharging them.

Because they are law enforcement and because they work for an agency formed to counter illegal immigration they tend to live within a particular paradigm and hold particular beliefs as a result. Yes, I am overgeneralizing here. I’m aiming to be mostly right on this most of the time not perfectly right on every person or instance. I’m doing this to make broad points.

• Like most cops, ICE agents believe that people choose their own punishment through their behavior. An ICE agent once told me to my face during the first Trump term that family separations and imprisonment of children is fine because people who come here illegally are selfish and that if they truly loved their children they wouldn’t have risked having their children taken away from them by coming here in the first place. No, I did not throw that ICE agent off the roof.

• ICE agents believe undocumented people are criminals — that they’re either violent thugs or nonviolent economic leeches.

• ICE agents, because they are part of the justice system, believe that the court system will sort out whatever mistakes they may unwittingly make and that the innocent will be freed and the guilty deported. They do not believe there will be any failure of due process or that the people they arrest may be imprisoned indefinitely or in horrifying conditions and do not think any harm will come to the prisoners after they are deported back to the places they came from (and may have fled from).

• ICE agents generally do not think about the human or economic ramifications of mass forced migration outward. (I can’t think about the human terms right now because I’m mad so I’ll mention an economic thing instead.) For example, they do not consider the ramifications of the removal of millions of taxpayers or the removal of a significant part of the American labor force.

• ICE agents believe every arrest they make helps Americans and helps the country and that their work is a moral good.

• ICE agents do not want to become Trump’s Secret Police — and they don’t think Trump will turn ICE into a secret police agency — they just want to do ICE work.

• ICE has a recognizable standard ICE badge but has never had a standard duty uniform. That’s why they all dress like military surplus bounty hunters. (More on this in a minute.)

• Past ICE leadership generally has had a better, more strategic, right-sized understanding of how immigration issues work and what ICE overreach or what bad tactics from ICE would do.

• ICE agents are afraid of the angry public far more than they are afraid of resistance from brown people during raids and arrests. All federal agents are permitted to cover their face if they fear reprisal from criminals if they are identified. But ICE agents are not covering their faces or hesitant to show their badges because they are afraid of MS-13 or somebody; they’re doing it because they’re afraid of you. They’re afraid of the angry public doxxing them or reporting on them. This is also why they travel in larger numbers now — they’re afraid they’ll be turned back by an angry crowd. (Very Important Point: Do not violently attack ICE or CBP agents or facilities. It’s wrong, operationally stupid, and will help dumb people make the argument that Antifa-Ninja-Force-That-Doesn’t-Actually-Exist actually does exist. Seriously, these guys successfully committed grafitti, fired a gun, and escaped almost 300 frickin’ yards before getting arrested. This was not a crack team of commandos here. And if you want to commit suicide by cop and try to go out by attempting a Shot-Heard-Round-the-World inspirational attack, don’t do it. That’s what Breivik, Tarrant, Gendron, and a bunch of others on the Right did with their attacks and they didn’t die and they didn’t get the racist and/or Christian nationalist violent uprisings they wanted. If you want to oppose ICE, use the law, moral authority, the camera app on your phone, your force of personality, and your God-given gift to be an asshole. ICE is afraid of those things about you far more than they’re afraid of guns.)

• ICE agents do not understand that shows of strength backfire and alienate the public far more than they intimidate or deter.

Before I go further, here’s a PBS NewsHour report from this week on the expansion of ICE that touches on a few things I’ll talk about next. And it’s a good, short recap:

Reporter Laura Barron-Lopez (why can’t I put the accents over the “o”s in her name?) mentions that ICE will have difficulty staffing up and thus may have to turn to contractors to accomplish their mission, especially to meet the 7,000 arrests per day quota set by the Trump Administration.

Here’s some context on the staffing-up problem:

Every federal law enforcement agent from every federal office or agency receives standardized training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) which has several campus but the main one is in Glynco, Georgia.

• Basically, every federal agent who carries a badge and a gun goes through FLETC — Secret Service agents, Department of Agriculture investigators, security officers for State Department and other federal government facilities, bailiffs for federal courts, even investigators for the United States Mint (yes, there are Mint Police) Everyone. (Here’s a starter list of agencies who sends their law enforcement officers through FLETC. You’ll see a bunch of agencies on there and think I had no idea we had that.) Oh: FBI agents go through the FBI Academy instead, I think because the FBI Academy predates FLETC.

• Each federal agent goes through standardized basic training and then gets specialized agency-specific training from their own agency at their own agency’s sorta mini-campuses within FLETC.

• The training is professional and it’s the sort of training you’d generally want all sorts of federal agents to receive. It’s not an evil school. The courses aren’t, you know, Jackbooted Thuggery 101 or Rights Suppression 203 or Accidentally-Lethal-Chokeholds-and-How-to-Hide-a-Body-in-the-Forest 400. (ICE does train its agents to use ruses, but I don’t know if that’s taught at FLETC or afterward.)

I cannot imagine that FLETC has the bandwidth to handle the training needs resulting from a massive hiring surge by ICE. This means:

• FLETC — and ICE’s instructional presence at FLETC — will have to expand incredibly.

• ICE may ask other federal law enforcement agencies to temporarily surge any FLETC-graduate field agent to them. This has already begun to happen.

• ICE may start its own academy with shorter, perhaps substandard, unmonitored training courses to churn out new perhaps undertrained rookies as rapidly as possible.

Let’s talk about the new recruits themselves because ICE probably won’t be picky.

• They’ll probably take anyone who can pass the background check, ie. Any Given Cleetus or Any Given Insecure Man who wants a badge and gun to become a big manly man.

• They’ll probably take FLETC graduates even if they can’t pass the background check because they were fired by their prior law enforcement agency for doing something bad. Remember that part of the reason bad cops who get fired from one police department tend to get hired by other, often more financially-strapped, police departments is that the new department often can’t afford to send new hires through a police academy and thus often tries to hire someone who already graduated from a police academy whose credentials they accept. ICE may take any bad-former-federal-agent-who-is-a-FLETC-graduate that they can and hope that the bad agent won’t be bad in a new context. And every bad unemployed ex-cop in the country is now gonna come out of the woodwork to apply to ICE.

• They’ll probably take any bounty hunter/bail enforcement agent (prior relevant work experience!) who wants a steady paycheck rather than continuing to live as part of the unreliable, feast-to-famine manhunting gig economy. Speaking of which…

• While I’m sure there are fake ICE agents out there — and legitimate ICE agents’ hesitance to show their badges sometimes out of fear of being doxxed may make it look like there are more fake ICE agents operating than there actually are — I am not yet convinced that ICE is hiring or will hire bounty hunters in order to make their quotas. ICE now has the money to hire as many agents as they want and ICE agents (and no federal agents, I think) have the power to deputize anyone to make arrests. If ICE agents set up in, say, a parking lot and arrest whoever a bounty hunter plops in front of them, then maybe they could accept the (awful) gift but I’m not sure under what argument or authority ICE agents could pay cash on the barrel head for the bounties. Beyond that, if hundreds of bounty hunters were snatching people off the street on behalf of ICE or to get paid, I think we’d have heard of it by now. Or maybe we will soon. I hope I’m right about this but won’t be surprised if I’m wrong. Here’s what I’m going to watch for, though — if ICE makes a deal with the National Association of Fugitive Recovery Agents (NAFRA) then ICE will have (at minimum) a Rolodex/database of semi-credentialed professional bounty hunters in every part of the country that they can task rather than have to take any random brown person that Any Given Bounty Hunting Cleetus delivers to them.

I am not worried about ICE becoming Trump’s Secret Police against dissidents; only that it will be a racist army of legalized kidnappers who violate rights and will gleefully cause us all to live in fear.

If Trump doesn’t establish a secret thug force under the radar (via, say, hiring Blackwater to quietly kill or disappear Americans — which ain’t gonna happen, at least not at scale — and Trump knows he can deploy the MAGA faithful to intimidate or gleefully engage in thuggery at the drop of a hat at Any Given Capitol), Trump would have to convert FBI into his secret police, and as Kash Patel has been learning, FBI ain’t gonna do that.

• FBI in the past, under Hoover and on the behalf of a few presidents, did function as a secret police force in part by using its counterintelligence authorities to investigate dissent against whatever Administration. If you remember, FBI bugged Martin Luther King, Jr. because they suspected he was a Communist agent and that the Civil Rights Movement might be a Soviet operation to destabilize the United States from within. Counterintelligence authorities are what can enable an agency to become secret police-y.

• FBI agents today think of the Bureau’s abuses and misdeeds of the past as breaches of integrity and they vilify that sort of behavior now. FBI agents nowadays think of themselves as the closest thing that America has to incorruptible knights in shining armor who do things and solve crimes no one else can. FBI agents’ heroes — especially over the past few decades — are Eliot Ness (who got Capone), Melvin Purvis (who got Dillinger), and the team of FBI agents who solved the murders of Civil Rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 (and also less seriously Agents Mulder and Scully of The X-Files). Remember that The Untouchables came out in 1987, Mississippi Burning came out in 1988, and The X-Files series began in 1993. Public Enemies, about Purvis’ hunt for Dillinger, came out in 2009 — all within living memory of this generation of FBI agents and career leadership. My point here is that FBI Special Agents culturally object to becoming secret police, they’re extensively trained not to, their career-agent leadership loathes that idea, and all modern-day agents’ heroes are agents who upheld the law bravely even under impossible political, cultural, and legal pressure. I am not worried about FBI becoming Trump’s own secret police.

Local cops usually can’t arrest ICE agents because they’re enforcing (or they must assume they’re legitimately enforcing) different sets of laws. Local cops enforce local laws; federal agents enforce federal law. And you don’t cross the streams.

• Local cops can arrest ICE agents if the ICE agents are breaking a local law.

• Local cops can arrest fake ICE agents on the spot so if you see one or see someone who won’t show their ICE badge, you can absolutely call the police on them immediately so the police can establish whether the ICE agents are legitimate or are impersonating a federal agent.

• Local cops may respond to protect ICE agents if the ICE agents are facing an angry crowd. This doesn’t mean the local cops are helping ICE, it means they are, well, in a conflicted professional position. Remember that for a while during the first Trump term when neo-Nazis and counterprotesters showed up in the streets to yell at each other or throw punches, local police would show up to keep the groups separate but since the crowd of counterprotesters always dwarfed the Nazis, the police line always faced the counter protesters and thus appeared to be protecting the Nazis. A lot of departments wised up to that pretty quickly and started alternating which way the cops were facing when they had to establish those lines. Same thing is sorta happening now with local police and ICE: a lot of departments haven’t quite figured out yet how they’re going face/deal with ICE in their jurisdictions.

A lot of local police are mad about ICE raids for a lot of reasons.

• The biggest reason is that police want undocumented people to call them when they see a crime or are a victim of a crime because they’re cops and cops don’t like crime against anyone. It’s kinda their thing.

• They also know — because they interact with undocumented people every day — that most undocumented people are not criminals and are not economic leeches and are trying to live the same lives as anyone else and love their children and hurt and hope just the same as any of us and that they want to become citizens and would if it weren’t so fucking hard to accomplish.

• They don’t want undocumented people to hide from police or hide from the courts for fear of deportation.

• And they don’t want undocumented people — because they feel they must hide from the police and the courts — to form their own underground systems of vigilante justice to protect the innocent and keep the peace.

So. Again, right now I’m thinking only about the law enforcement side of the question, not the all-of-us-ordinary-compassionate-humans-and-our-rights side of the question.

By 2028, 80% of dollars spent toward federal law enforcement will be directed toward immigration enforcement and deportation. (Source is that Cato Institute guy in the PBS interview above.) And an angry public and local police may. have. a say. in. the matter.

If any sort of organized underground to thwart ICE’s mass arrest efforts emerges in this country then I fully expect many police departments and/or individual police officers to be quietly complicit with it rather than arrest it. After all, Any Local Cop may say to him or herself I have no authority to enforce federal immigration law and I will forget to report what I see. I am so forgetful. I am such a silly person. I see no brown people… anywhere.

My larger point is that what’s coming is a far more complicated future than you may think and it may not behave the way your prejudices lead you to expect. This is not the Bad Old Days. It is not. The Blue now is not a unified conservative racist whole. It is not unified. It is not uniformly conservative. It is not inherently racist and it is not uniformly racist. And there is no whole.

Is it Anne Frank time? Is it time to hide brown people in your attic or basement? No, but it’s getting close. Know what’s between today and that stage? You and a whole lot of other people.

See, ICE isn’t the Nazi SS and it’s not the secret police. Here’s how to know: the Nazi SS wasn’t afraid of the public; ICE is. And the minute their patron and defenders (Trump, and thus Stephen Miller, et al.) are gone they’re going to be terrified of the public and they will be on their back foot with many local police departments.

So. Be fearsome.