Tear gas is deployed on protesters on Jan. 16 in Minneapolis, near the scene where Renee Nicole Macklin Good was fatally shot by an ICE officer.Adam Gray/The Associated Press
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal agency under the Department of Homeland Security responsible for enforcement and removal operations, as well as homeland security investigations.
It was created in 2003 in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center as part of a major government restructuring aimed at bolstering national security.
The agency has come under widespread criticism and been the subject of nationwide protests for its role in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, including in Minneapolis, where federal agents have shot and killed two U.S. citizens this month.
A rosary adorns a framed photo of Alex Pretti that was left at a makeshift memorial in the area where Pretti was killed by federal immigration agents on Sunday in Minneapolis.ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
In response, Senate Democrats have said they will oppose a DHS funding bill, increasing the chances of a partial government shutdown by the end of the week.
Here’s a look at why the agency was created, how its mandate has shifted over the years and across administrations, and why it has become one of the most controversial federal agencies in the U.S.
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Why was ICE created?
After 9/11, the Immigration and Naturalization Service faced intense criticism for failures that enabled the attack, including the failure to flag the visa violations of two hijackers.
The service was disbanded and its functions divided into three agencies under the DHS: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
CBP was responsible for securing the country’s borders, airports and ports, while USCIS dealt with immigration. ICE handled enforcement in the country’s interior, on matters that included trafficking and fraudulent document rings, as well as enforcement and removal operations – removing people who were in the country illegally and had committed other crimes.
A police officer questions ICE agents at the scene of a crash involving their vehicles, after a woman said they struck her car as they sped past, in Maplewood, Minn., in mid-January.Leah Millis/Reuters
How has the role of ICE changed over the years?
The mission of the DHS enterprise was to prevent another 9/11 and mitigate all other terrorist threats – a focus that was carried through the 2000s and 2010s.
Doris Meissner, a former INS commissioner who is now a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said significant technological advancements, such as interoperability across immigration systems, travel records and criminal databases, have since fulfilled many of the original national-security objectives that justified placing immigration enforcement within DHS.
“What we see ICE doing now was not at all what was being done when it was created, and not at all what was envisioned when it was created,” she said.
Ms. Meissner said policies that have led to a reduction in people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border have also created a new and growing role for CBP in interior operations, alongside ICE. Academics, immigration policy experts and some law enforcement have raised concerns over the mismatch between their training and their new interior enforcement roles.
“They are not trained to do the kind of policing that large city police departments and large state law enforcement agencies typically do,” Ms. Meissner said. “They’re not trained in crowd control, they’re not trained in de-escalating. They’re certainly not trained or responsible for law enforcement where U.S. citizens are concerned.”
U.S. President Donald Trump holds a poster of an alleged criminal taken off of Minnesota streets by ICE during a press briefing at the White House last week.Jessica Koscielniak/Reuters
How have arrest targets changed under the Trump administration?
President Donald Trump campaigned on carrying out what he said would be the largest deportation operation in American history, setting a goal of one million people a year.
DHS said in December that 622,000 non-citizens had been deported since Mr. Trump took office. The Migration Policy Institute called the figure “high, but not historic,” noting it is below the 778,000 repatriations carried out under the final fiscal year of the Biden administration.
“But the pressure on these agencies to generate numbers at that scale is part of the recipe for what it is that we’re seeing,” Ms. Meissner said.
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Last week, law enforcement leaders in Minneapolis held a news conference accusing ICE agents of racial profiling when stopping people, including an off-duty police officer, to demand proof of legal residency.
“Recently, the last two weeks, we as law enforcement community, have been receiving endless complaints about civil-rights violations from U.S. citizens,” Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley said Tuesday, describing stops in traffic and on the street.
“Every single one of these individuals is a person of colour who has had this happen to them.”
ICE agents and other law enforcement officers force entry into a home during an immigration raid in St. Paul, Minn., in mid-January.Leah Millis/Reuters
What is ICE’s budget?
In the decade leading up to last summer, ICE had a typical annual budget of between US$8-billion and US$10-billion.
Then Mr. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was signed into law on July 4, allocating ICE a supplement of US$75-billion over four years, on top of its base budget. The act specifically earmarked US$45-billion for detention facilities – a figure that the American Immigration Council noted was a 62 per cent larger budget than the entire federal prison system.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the DHS funding bill, which included renewing ICE’s US$10-billion budget, would signal a stamp of approval of ICE’s actions if also passed by the Senate this week.
“The bill fails to rein in ICE and Border Patrol at a time when they are engaged in an unprecedented assault on our rights, safety and democratic way of life,” ACLU senior policy counsel Kate Voigt said in a statement.
A person holds up an anti-ICE sign during a rally in Minneapolis last week.Tim Evans/Reuters
Who is ICE accountable to?
With oversight concentrated in Washington, ICE operations have faced few immediate constraints on the ground.
Ms. Meissner said ICE’s authority normally would have come with checks and balances, including scrutiny from internal watchdogs and oversight by Congress. However, partisan gridlock has weakened those mechanisms.
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Trump fired 17 inspectors-general charged with investigating fraud, waste, mismanagement in government agencies and making non-partisan recommendations to improve public policy.
“We’re just not seeing the normal levels of oversight that we would always have expected in the past,” Ms. Meissner said.