# ICE — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement The federal law enforcement agency at the operational center of the Trump administration's mass-deportation campaign. Founded **March 1, 2003** as part of the Homeland Security Act reorganization that followed September 11, ICE absorbed the immigration-enforcement functions of the former **Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)** (under DOJ) and the customs functions of the former **U.S. Customs Service** (under Treasury), placing both inside the new [[Department of Homeland Security]]. By 2026, ICE is the **highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history** — with cumulative authorities of roughly **$85 billion** (against a 2024 base of single-digit billions) — and a 50% national approval cratering that has made "abolish ICE" a majority-or-plurality position in Economist/YouGov polling for the first time. ## Origin (2003) The Homeland Security Act of 2002 dissolved INS on March 1, 2003 and split its functions across three new DHS components: - **U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)** — interior enforcement, removal, criminal investigations - **U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)** — border interdiction, ports of entry - **U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)** — benefits adjudication, naturalization The split was framed as separating "enforcement" from "service" — a structural decision that immigration scholars argue baked in an enforcement-first institutional culture, since both ICE and CBP are sworn law-enforcement entities and USCIS is not. ## Structure ICE has **~20,000 employees across more than 400 offices** in the U.S. and abroad. It is organized into two operational directorates plus three support divisions: ### Operational directorates **Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)** — ~10,000 employees, 237 offices, 56 countries. - Mission: transnational criminal investigation (drug trafficking, financial crime, cybercrime, child exploitation, counter-proliferation, IP theft). - Acting EAD (2026): **John A. Condon**. - HSI agents have repeatedly tried to distance themselves publicly from the deportation mission — there is a long-running internal debate about whether HSI should be removed from ICE entirely. See the [[Brennan Center]]'s "Realignment for Homeland Security Investigations" reporting. **Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)** — operates **25 field offices** nationwide. - Mission: arrest, detention, removal of immigrants. The component most associated with "ICE raids" in popular discourse. - Acting EAD (2026): **Marcos Charles**. - ERO is the part of ICE that ran the career of [[Todd Lyons]] (Dallas → Boston → headquarters → Acting Director). ### Support divisions - **Management and Program Administration** — agency operations - **Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA)** — ICE's prosecutors in immigration court; over 1,000 attorneys, hit hard by the 2025–26 funding lapse during which they went unpaid for stretches - **Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)** — internal affairs ## Leadership chronology — the "acting director" pattern ICE has **not had a Senate-confirmed director since Sarah Saldaña stepped down on January 20, 2017** — over **nine years of "acting" leadership** as of April 2026. This is the longest stretch any major federal law-enforcement agency has run on acting leadership in the modern era. [[Trump 2.0]] acting directors: - **[[Caleb Vitello]]** — Acting Director, January 20 – March 9, 2025. Reassigned after roughly five weeks; reporting indicated White House dissatisfaction with deportation pace. - **[[Todd Lyons]]** — Acting Director, March 9, 2025 – May 31, 2026 (announced resignation April 16, 2026). - **[[David Venturella]]** — Acting Director, **June 1, 2026 – present**. DHS announced the succession May 12, 2026. A former ICE official who ran Secure Communities, and a GEO Group executive 2012–2019 — the agency's largest buyer of detention beds is now run by a former seller. [[Lance Schroyer]] is the pending nominee for the confirmed directorship. The deputy director since January 2026 is [[Charles Wall]], named after Madison Sheahan resigned. Both Venturella and Wall appear in the 2026 voter-fraud records released under FOIA ([[ICE Voter Records Collection]]). The "acting" pattern is functional for the executive: it keeps the director removable at will, sidesteps Senate confirmation testimony, and concentrates accountability at the Acting Director and Cabinet Secretary level rather than distributing it through the institution. ## Trump 2.0: budget and detention expansion **Funding.** Across two tranches in 2025, Congress authorized: - **$10 billion** baseline appropriation (March 2025) - **$45 billion for detention through FY2029** (July 2025 reconciliation / "Big Beautiful Bill") - **$75 billion total over four years** (~$18.7B/year) Cumulative authorities now ~$85B — making ICE larger by budget than the FBI, ATF, DEA, and U.S. Marshals **combined**. **Detention expansion.** - ~40,000 detained on January 20, 2025 - ~66,000 detained by early December 2025 (a 65% increase) - 104 additional detention facilities brought online during 2025 (a 91% facility-count increase) - Original administration target: ~108,000 beds online by January 2026 - Detention-to-release ratio shifted from 1.6:1 (December 2024) to **14.3:1 by November 2025** — the system stopped functioning as a holding mechanism and became a conveyor. **Removals.** Per DHS's own December 19, 2025 messaging: 622,000 removals + 1.9M claimed self-deportations during Noem/Lyons's joint tenure. The Brennan Center has labeled the cumulative funding+detention buildout the **"deportation-industrial complex"** — a permanent infrastructure that will outlast the current administration. ### The GAO audit, September 24, 2026 — money without a plan A [[Government Accountability Office]] report released **September 24, 2026** found that ICE **never built a strategic plan** for the $45 billion detention appropriation, and that the resulting improvisation has destroyed tens of millions of dollars outright: | Item | Amount | Outcome | |---|---|---| | Tents erected at Guantanamo Bay | ~$2.85M | Never used; did not meet detention standards | | Warehouse purchases (11 facilities) | $1.07B | 7 now being divested ($707M of the total) | | Unrecoverable costs on the divested warehouses | $20M | Zoning assessments, title insurance, utilities, security | | Arizona and Maryland renovations | $426M | On hold pending legal challenges | | Two facility purchases (July 2026) | $1.5B | — | The GAO's conclusion is about process, not politics: > [!quote] Government Accountability Office, September 24, 2026 > "Without taking action to manage detention investments in accordance with program and project management practices, ICE will likely continue to make uninformed decisions and risk further inefficiency and wasted resources." DHS told the GAO it would produce a spending plan by **August 31, 2027** — roughly eleven months after the report and more than two years after the appropriation. The GAO treated that timeline as inadequate given that the money is being spent now. Read against the funding table above, this is the structural finding: the appropriation was sized to a political target (bed count) rather than to a plan, and an agency spending $18.7 billion a year against a target it cannot yet cost is the mechanism that produces unused tents at Guantanamo. ### 26 Federal Plaza, September 24, 2026 — conditions held unconstitutional On **September 24, 2026**, U.S. District Judge [[Lewis A. Kaplan]] (S.D.N.Y.) ruled that conditions in the holding rooms at **26 Federal Plaza** in Manhattan were **"inhumane and unconstitutional."** The rooms were designed for custody of twelve hours or less and have no showers, beds, cots or windows; ICE was holding far more people in them, for far longer. > [!quote] Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, Southern District of New York, September 24, 2026 > "By detaining far more persons in the hold rooms than ever was intended and for far longer than ever was intended, ICE objectively deprived detainees of sleep, sanitary living conditions, basic personal hygiene needs, sufficient food and water, and adequate medical care." Kaplan found ICE's disregard of his earlier capacity orders **"persistent, egregious, and, at a minimum, reckless, if not willful,"** and that the agency had "repeatedly violated this Court's orders either by intentionally flouting them or by employing so-called 'best' efforts that simply have not been good enough." He ordered a floor of conditions: a minimum of 50 square feet per person excluding the toilet area, temperatures held between 68 and 74°F, three meals a day with bottled water, hygiene supplies, clean bedding for overnight detainees, dimmed lights overnight, a licensed medical professional on site at all times, basic medical screening, and confidential unmonitored calls to counsel. The two findings of September 24 belong together. One says ICE cannot account for $45 billion; the other says its detainees lack soap and floor space. Those are the same fact seen from the appropriation end and the cell end. ## Operations and controversies — Trump 2.0 ### Killings of U.S. citizens Two incidents documented in which ICE agents killed American citizens during the second Trump term: - **[[ICE Shooting of Ruben Martinez]]** (South Padre Island, March 15, 2025) — HSI agent Jack C. Stevens shot and killed Ruben Ray Martinez (23, U.S. citizen, San Antonio) during a traffic encounter on South Padre Island. The first known killing of a U.S. citizen by immigration agents under Trump 2.0. ICE agents were directing traffic at a car accident — not performing immigration duties. Martinez's family was not told an ICE agent was responsible for nearly a year; the fact was exposed only through an [[American Oversight]] public records lawsuit in February 2026. Cameron County grand jury declined to indict. Martinez's sole civilian witness, Joshua Orta, died in a car crash hours after learning ICE was responsible. - **Minneapolis ([[Operation Metro Surge]], January 2026)** — federal officers killed two U.S. citizens, **Renée Good** and **Alex Pretti**, during anti-ICE protests. [[Kristi Noem]] characterized Pretti as having committed an act of "domestic terrorism," language she refused to retract under congressional questioning. The deaths produced the sharpest backlash of the campaign. The racial and class disparity in coverage and accountability is striking: Good and Pretti (white, middle-class) received national coverage and criminal charges; Martinez (Hispanic, working-class) received almost no coverage and a no-bill. ### New York: a police commissioner contradicts the federal account (October 2026) On **8 October 2026** an ICE officer shot **Oscar Belgal**, a 28-year-old Dominican man, in Marble Hill, with a five-year-old boy in the car. He survived and was moved from the hospital into federal custody the same night. DHS called it a "targeted enforcement operation" and did not describe what led to the shooting; NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said plainclothes officers approached the car with a gun already drawn and that at least one fired seven rounds. [[Zohran Mamdani]] and [[Kathy Hochul]] both pressed [[Donald Trump]] and [[Markwayne Mullin]] directly to halt operations in the state; Mullin declined. Full account: [[ICE Shooting of Oscar Belgal]]. ### The 3,000-a-day directive (October 6, 2026) On **Tuesday 6 October 2026**, ICE leadership gave agents nationwide a **verbal** directive to add **1,000 arrests a day**, lifting the daily target from a recent average of about **2,000 custody arrests to 3,000** — the figure the White House had imposed earlier — with a weekly goal of **19,000** to allow for lighter weekends. CNN reported it the following day from two sources familiar with the instruction. No written version has surfaced. A DHS spokesperson responded that there are **"NO quotas on arrests,"** and [[Markwayne Mullin]] said he had never discussed a quota with anyone at the White House; senior officials characterise the number as a goal rather than a requirement and say agents are not punished for missing it. > [!important] ⭐ The verbal-directive pattern, twice > This is the second nationwide instruction in this file distributed **verbally so as to leave no document** — the first being the [[ICE Home Entry Memo]], circulated in a "deliberately verbal, non-retainable manner" and surfaced only through a whistleblower. A target that exists in instruction but not in writing is also a target the department can deny in the same week it is being enforced, which is exactly what happened here. The denial and the directive are not in tension; the absence of paper is what makes both available. The timing is the other half: the directive landed **four weeks before the 3 November midterms**, against open unease from Republicans in immigrant-heavy districts and from the agriculture industry. ### Austin: a shooting with no footage (September 2026) On **September 20, 2026** an ICE officer shot **Wilber Rafael Garces Perez**, a Venezuelan food delivery driver, during a traffic stop in north Austin. He survived; he was discharged from the hospital into ICE custody with the bullet still lodged in his back, and returned to the hospital the next day after public outcry. The officer **was issued a body camera and was not wearing it** — against DHS Secretary [[Markwayne Mullin]]'s public commitment that the agency would be equipped by the end of September. The officer was a recent hire from the 10,000-agent expansion. Full account: [[ICE Shooting of Wilber Garces Perez]]. ### City surge operations ICE/CBP joint operations targeting major U.S. cities, with deliberate political-spectacle framing. Notable: - **Chicago** — sustained surge through 2025 ### The home-entry memo (May 12, 2025) [[Todd Lyons]] signed an internal directive authorizing ICE officers to use a **Form I-205** — an administrative warrant of removal/deportation, signed by an ICE supervisor, *not* by a judge — as the legal basis to **forcibly enter homes**. The memo was distributed in a deliberately verbal, non-retainable manner. Disclosed via Whistleblower Aid in **January 2026**. Now subject to multiple federal civil-rights lawsuits (Minnesota class action; House Judiciary Democrats demanding rescission). This is the canonical artifact of ICE's expanded interior-enforcement posture under Trump 2.0. See [[ICE Home Entry Memo]] for full coverage. ### NSPM-7 implementation ICE is one of the implementing agencies named in [[NSPM-7]] (September 25, 2025) — Trump's "[[Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence]]" presidential memorandum. The framework permits ICE to share data and coordinate operations with the FBI, DOJ, IRS, and ODNI against U.S. persons designated under belief-based criteria. ICE's role in NSPM-7 implementation is one of the through-lines connecting interior immigration enforcement to broader political-repression infrastructure. ### The mid-2026 escalation Through July and August 2026 the enforcement posture escalated on four fronts at once, against a YouGov poll released in August showing only **40% approval** of Trump's handling of immigration. **The TSA partnership.** ICE teamed with the Transportation Security Administration to arrest people with expired visas at airports — including those awaiting extensions or green cards who hold valid work permits. The operative premise is that any visa overstay constitutes criminality, which removes the prior filter of a criminal charge. DHS's stated internal target is **2,000 arrests per day**. **Docket compression.** Immigration judges are deciding hundreds of cases a day, frequently in under five minutes, driving missed-appearance rates to record highs; a missed appearance produces an immediate removal order. The due-process failure is manufactured by scheduling rather than by any change in the governing law — nothing had to be repealed for hearings to stop functioning as hearings. **Shock gloves.** On August 10, 2026 ICE published a notice to spend **up to $20 million** on gloves delivering an incapacitating electric charge; the award was subsequently reported at **$16.7 million**, through what Senator [[Angus King]] characterized as a no-bid contract. The manufacturer's own warnings are the most damning document in the file: the device should not be used beyond 15 seconds; no more than one pair on a person at a time; operators must touch only arms or legs, avoiding head, face, throat, chest and groin; it must not be used on the elderly, children, pregnant women, or people with severe disabilities; and it must not be used to stop people from talking back, as punishment, or to torture. A manufacturer that has to write down "not for torture" has told you what it expects the buyer to consider. **Death-reporting.** DHS adopted a practice of not reporting deaths of detainees recorded as released from custody. Its application in the third [[Delaney Hall Protests]] death — where the release date followed the medical emergency — is documented on that page. King's oversight statement is the sharpest congressional response on record, and it is a claim about institutional design rather than about policy severity: that the "worst of the worst" justification is pretextual and the object is a standing national police force. See [[Angus King]] and [[Angus King - a national police force to do the bidding]]. ## "Abolish ICE" — the inversion of public opinion ICE has been a target of progressive abolition advocacy since approximately 2018 (post-family-separation), but the abolition movement was a minority position throughout the late Trump 1.0 / Biden years. The second Trump term has flipped the polling: - **January 2026 (Economist/YouGov):** 42% support abolishing ICE / 45% oppose - **Early March 2026 (post-Minneapolis):** 50% support / lower opposition — first majority-or-plurality result in YouGov's tracking - **Independents:** 52% support abolishing - **Republicans:** 68% oppose, but **23%** now support — a record GOP-side defection This is the political backdrop against which Noem was fired (March 5) and Lyons resigned (April 16) — the agency they ran went from a Trump political asset to a Trump political liability inside fourteen months. ## Pattern relevance ICE's institutional history is a case study in **the post-9/11 enforcement state**: 1. Created in a 2003 reorganization that fused civil immigration enforcement with criminal investigative authority, giving the agency unique combined civil-and-criminal powers no predecessor had. 2. Enforcement-first institutional culture inherited from INS, plus the "no service mission" structural exclusion of USCIS — the agency was built to be aggressive. 3. Run by acting directors continuously since 2017 — political accountability concentrated upward, institutional reform stalled. 4. Dramatically over-resourced in Trump 2.0 to a scale that creates path-dependency: the detention-bed footprint and ICE attorney corps now exist as a permanent capability, regardless of who controls the White House next. A key research question for the KB: **what does ICE look like once a "deportation-industrial complex" infrastructure exists but the political mandate to use it shifts?** The 2017–2021 pattern (Trump 1.0 ICE) suggests the answer is "it persists, finds other targets, and is hard to wind down." ## Doctor Paradox Blog Content - **[The killing of Renee Good](https://doctorparadox.net/renee-good-murder/)** (January 18, 2026) — First-person analysis of ICE agent Jonathan Ross's killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Covers DHS policy violations, the smear campaign, and the administration's dehumanizing response. - **[The GOP budget bill takes the US further into debt for no good reason](https://doctorparadox.net/gop-budget-bill-debt-for-no-good-reason/)** (September 11, 2025) — Documents the BBB's $171B ICE funding expansion and argues ICE is being turned into the 4th largest branch of the military — deployed on home soil against Americans. ## See also - [[Immigration Removal Pipeline]] — the process map: where ICE's arrests, detainers, detention decisions, and OPLA prosecutions sit in the removal pipeline - [[David Venturella]] — Acting Director, 2026–present - [[Todd Lyons]] — Acting Director, 2025–2026 - [[ICE Shooting of Wilber Garces Perez]] — the Austin body-camera case, September 2026 - [[Lewis A. Kaplan]] — the judge who held the 26 Federal Plaza hold rooms unconstitutional, September 2026 - [[Government Accountability Office]] — the September 2026 audit of the $45B detention appropriation - [[Third-Country Removal]] — the removal policy the First Circuit held unlawful, September 2026 - [[Caleb Vitello]] — predecessor as Acting Director - [[Tom Homan]] — Acting Director (Trump 1.0); current White House border czar - [[Kristi Noem]] — DHS Secretary 2025–2026; Lyons's boss - [[Stephen Miller]] — administration architect of immigration agenda - [[ICE Home Entry Memo]] — defining Lyons-era directive - [[NSPM-7]] — domestic terrorism framework ICE participates in - [[Project 2025]] — Heritage's Trump 2.0 policy framework - [[Department of Homeland Security]] — parent agency - [[CBP]] — sister agency (border) - [[USCIS]] — sister agency (benefits)