Spending $200 Billion on ICE Is a Terrible Idea – Mother Jones

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Special Response Team (SRT) officer holds a shoulder-fired grenade launcher for less-lethal ammunition. Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty

This column originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s site Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here. 

There are many reasons Trump’s new giant domestic agenda, the so-called one big beautiful bill, will be a tragedy for our country—a mean-spirited, life-wrecking, community-destroying stain on our history—from the fact that it will gut our health care safety net, force the closure of rural hospitals, and cut food supports to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest. I mean: How cruel do you have to be to raise taxes on those making less than $15,000 a year? How do you look at those making less than $15,000 a year and say, “You have it too easy and the billionaires need more of your money?”

But as someone who has covered federal law enforcement for the last two decades and has spent recent years writing both about the state of democracy today and authoring history books about the fall of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, it’s hard not to look at the new legislation and fear, most of all, how we’re turbo-charging an increasingly lawless regime of immigration enforcement and adding superpowers to America’s newly masked secret police.

As the New Republic summarized, “The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration’s ramp-up of enforcement, detention, and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on.”

It’s easy intellectually to realize that pouring $200 billion dollars into immigration deportation and expulsion efforts is a bad idea, but I haven’t seen a lot of reporting and analysis that breaks down the why. So I wanted to write about why specifically we should fear this increase in ICE funding—many of these reasons are related and intersect, but to me there are four unique and specific reasons that we should be deeply fearful about what pouring $200 billion of combustible rocket fuel on our immigration enforcement will do to our country.

No healthy law enforcement agency can grow quickly. And ICE is far from a healthy law enforcement agency. ICE’s annual budget is about $10 billion a year, and the new legislation is about to hand it about nearly untold billions more—including $30 billion for hiring staff and conducting deportations and $45 billion for detention operations, as well as about $46 billion for border security construction, which could include the border wall and more detention facilities.

“With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and I think the smartest immigration watcher on social media.

History shows us what a disaster this will be.

What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.

I spent nearly five years reporting heavily on the decade-long epidemic of corruption that paralyzed the Border Patrol after its ill-conceived Bush-era post-9/11 hiring surge—including interviewing every single person who had served as commissioner of CBP, visiting detention facilities, and even doing ride-alongs on the southern border by truck, boat, and helicopter. The Border Patrol’s hiring surge doubled the size of the force in just a few years, from about 9,200 to 18,000, a move roughly equivalent to (but still less than!) what we’re about to see happen with ICE.

Back then, my Border Patrol reporting was titled “The Green Monster.” Today, we’re creating something even more dangerous to the country: A masked monster of a law enforcement agency, one uniquely unsuited for its new power, authority, reach, and funding levels.

As CBP’s then-commissioner, Gil Kerlikowske, told me back in 2014, “Law enforcement always regrets hiring quickly.” Anyone familiar with policing can rattle off the police hiring surges that inevitably led to spikes in corruption—including mistakes like the 1980 Miami police hiring surge and the infamous Washington Metropolitan Police class of 1989, when Mayor Marion Barry tried to increase the police force by nearly half in a single year. Both agencies saw widespread corruption problems that took years to fix.

All of this happened with the Border Patrol. CBP and the Border Patrol hired cartel members and even a serial killer—and put them out in the field with inadequate training and supervision. According to two people I interviewed who had been involved in the hiring process, the Border Patrol regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. As I wrote, “By the middle of the hiring surge, some southwest sectors reported to the GAO that average agent field experience was down to 18 months—and falling. And whereas the agency aimed for an agent-to-supervisor ratio of 5 to 1, some stations reported ratios as high as 11 to 1. By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years.”

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”

Now we’re about to repeat all of those mistakes with ICE—and with CBP all over again.

Hiring fast doesn’t work in law enforcement, but I think there’s a specific reason we should be wary of the next 10,000 people who want to be ICE officers in the United States: We’ve never seen anything in modern US history like the fast-rising social stigma and politicization of ICE as an agency and brand in terms of recruiting. Whole swaths of “normal” ICE applicants, the types of standard former local or state law enforcement officers who have made up the applicant pool, will surely think twice before applying to an agency that makes the NYPD or the Ferguson PD look like “Officer Friendly.” Instead, the types of people who will be attracted to a job in the wake of Kristi Noem’s special-forces cosplay, the eye-popping photo ops at El Salvador’s CECOT torture gulag and the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp are exactly the people who we shouldn’t imbue with federal law enforcement powers—you’re going to tell a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January. If you’re excited to dress up like you’re taking Fallujah for a raid of hard-working roofers in the Home Depot parking lot, working ICE or CBP shouldn’t be for you.

A major part of what the Border Patrol dealt with in its hiring surge was it played to post-9/11 terror fears. As I wrote in 2019, “CBP spent that first decade after 9/11 recruiting and equipping what it touted would be an elite counterterrorism force—the first line of defense against Islamic terrorists and drug cartels. But this only perpetuated a message and culture that has left the agency ill-suited to confront what it actually has to do in the second decade after 9/11: Provide humanitarian aid for women, children and families amid global instability that has strained border forces worldwide. CBP went out and recruited Rambo, when it turned out the agency needed Mother Teresa.”

Right now, the exact recruiting pitch for ICE and CBP is even worse than that post-9/11 pitch: Are you watching the news and excited to rough up abuelas, hog-tie the guy cutting the lawn down the street, or manhandle a member of Congress? Apply today!

I wrote last month about the dangerous culture we’re seeing play out in ICE—it clearly believes it will never face accountability again—and a lot of that has to do with how unhealthy and new ICE is as an agency. Other law enforcement agencies, like the FBI and DEA, are more cautious culturally because they have long-enough histories to know how mistakes happen and political climates shift. They’ve seen the pendulum swing. ICE hasn’t. It’s young, formed in the wake of 9/11, and its widespread and rapid embrace of masked enforcement is terrifying—other federal agencies also operate in plainclothes but then go out of their way to make clear their law enforcement bona fides during enforcement operations. Think of the FBI’s iconic blue raid jackets. That ICE has gone so quickly to masked operations in unmarked vehicles with no clear law enforcement identification makes clear how unhealthy and fundamentally undemocratic its core culture now is. It’s a resounding indictment of the current leadership at ICE and a warning sign of what’s to come.

According to the latest figures, DHS already has more federal law enforcement officers and agents than the Department of Justice. CBP was already the largest federal law enforcement agency. As of 2020, DHS had about 66,000 officers and agents—almost entirely ICE and CBP, with about 5,000 Secret Service agents and another 1,000 building guards and TSA investigators—while DOJ had about 40,000 officers, including the FBI, DEA, Marshals, ATF, and the Bureau of Prisons. Now, we’re going to funding ICE and CBP at a level where they will dwarf the Justice Department’s resources, tipping the balance in the government even more so from DOJ to DHS. That matters, in part, because DHS is much less grounded in the rule of law and Constitution than DOJ. Generally speaking, its agents and officers are trained less, face lower hiring standards, and come to the job with less and more narrow professional experience.

As just a few examples: FBI special agent requirements include a bachelor’s degree and two years of professional experience (or an advanced degree, often a J.D. or accounting degree for the bureau), be at least 23 years old, pass a Top Secret security clearance background check, and then special agent candidates undergo 20 weeks—five months—of training at the academy at Quantico. ICE officers do not have a basic educational requirement (they can use three years of work experience instead), pass only a Secret level security clearance background check, and go through just 13 weeks of training (plus a five-week Spanish course).Out in the field, ICE and CBP officers and Border Patrol agents face a different policing environment—there are a lot of areas where civil rights and civil liberties are different in border and immigration policing than they are for Justice Department law enforcement agencies who primarily deal with Article III courts, standards of evidence, and US citizens. We’re already seeing how corruption and fear-inducing applying that “border mentality” to the nation’s interior is—and we’re about to radically increase the number of times and frequency that ICE and CBP officers are in contact with US citizens. “You think we’re arresting people now?” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan bragged. “Wait till we get the funding to do what we got to do.”

We’re already seeing “mistakes” made in who is arrested. We’re already seeing people disappear in a system that’s detaining too many people too quickly. We’re already seeing ICE officers harass and assault US citizens. We’re already seeing tensions boil over in communities because of the heavy-handed ICE and CBP tactics. “It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play,” AOC wrote after the bill’s passage.

Lastly, DHS is not—and was never designed to be—the Justice Department. It’s notable and important that presidents have (or at least are SUPPOSED to have) a fundamentally different relationship with their attorneys general than they do their homeland security secretaries. Attorneys general—by tradition, culture, and design—are supposed to maintain an arms-length from the presidents they serve; their oath and duty is to the rule of law and the constitution. This is the tension we saw play out in Watergate, the Clinton administration, the first Trump administration, and even—notably—in the Biden administration, where Merrick Garland famously was less aggressive prosecuting past Trump transgressions than the Biden White House wished. DHS secretaries, though, are more traditional Cabinet secretaries—their role is to implement forcefully the president’s agenda.

As one might say, the warning signs that Trump’s lawlessness will increase are flashing red. This is particularly worrisome in the context of immigration detention and enforcement because the courts are still battling over exactly what kind of due process the administration is required to provide before kidnapping you off the street and expelling you to a country where you may or may not have ever been in your life. 

The signs aren’t good.

We know that this giant increase in detention facilities and officers isn’t meant to actually work with the existing immigration system because compared to the rest of the bill, there’s only the most modest of modest increases to the number of immigration judges in the country—a rise from 700 to 800, an increase so out-of-scale to the problem that we could have used those extra 100 to work through the existing backlog from the Biden years. If the Trump administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges. The fact that it’s not makes clear that the Trump administration, DHS, and DOJ have no intention of normal due process.

Now combine the ICE and CBP expansion with the other startling and worrisome revelation of the Trump administration last week: It asserts, in “allowing” companies to ignore the TikTok ban, that it has the power to grant clemency for illegal actions. The always-smart Jack Goldsmith, a veteran of the Justice Department and careful student of executive power, called it “an astounding assertion of executive power—maybe the broadest I have ever seen any president or Justice Department make, ever, in any context—and that is saying something.”

The new arguments emerged in a Fourth of July news dump, where the administration finally released the letters it has issued companies like Apple and Google to tell them they’re okay to ignore the ban on TikTok in the US. As Goldsmith says, “The logic of the letter seems to be: The law touches on national security and foreign affairs; I, President Trump, do not like the law; therefore, I need not enforce it. That logic would enable the president to not enforce (and presumably not comply with) every one of the many, many hundreds of statutes that touch on foreign relations or national security—just because the president does not like the law.”

As the also always-brilliant Steve Vladeck wrote, “Attorney General Bondi’s TikTok-related letters rest on a view of presidential power that has no support in even the most capacious understandings of the ‘unitary executive’ theory.”

The idea that the attorney general can issue a letter basically saying “don’t worry, ignore that federal law because I say you can” is a level of lawlessness that cannot stand in a free society. And it’s an ill portent of what’s to come.

Put all of the above together, and I fear that Congress just passed legislation hastening our transformation toward a federal police state unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our history.