POLITICS: Damage to ICE’s Reputation Will Offset Its Progress – USSA News

The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has entered the University of Chicago. On October 15, an international student was detained by ICE personnel on campus grounds before eventually being released. A few days later, a friend of the Thinker witnessed and recorded two masked ICE personnel shove a man into the back of a black SUV at gunpoint on campus. UChicago’s administration has since recommended that all international students carry proof of legal residence. In the wake of these events, a critical reflection on ICE’s goal and methods is required. I argue that ICE’s goal is necessary and good, but its methods have been largely unprofessional thus far and will cause a political backlash that increases illegal immigration in the long-run.

ICE’s goal to deport illegal immigrants is worth pursuing. Every country needs a system for admitting new members. Without such a system, a country is unable to set immigration policy. It’s unable, for example, to prioritize family reunification over high skilled immigrants and set employment and civic requirements. The citizenry of a country must define and enforce a system of admittance to be able to determine its culture and composition. Immigration into a country is no different from immigration into smaller organizations like a college or company. Imagine if UChicago allowed students who did not apply to take classes and live in dorms. That would be unfair to the students who didn’t receive a spot and would prevent the community from deciding who a UChicago student is.

In Chicago, ICE has been carrying out its mission in an unprofessional and un-American way. The problem begins with how ICE staffs its ranks. The Trump administration has ordered ICE to double its headcount. Doing so has forced them to drop the bar on applicant standards and training. Rather than selectively pursuing top talent, as all other special forces do, ICE advertises en masse through platforms like Instagram Reels. The advertisements point to a website that offers applicants a $50,000 signing bonus and does not even mention the need for prior law enforcement experience. Once applicants join, the training is fast tracked. As the director of ICE from 2013 to 2014, John Sandweg, said, “The training academy can only train so many people at once. It would take years to fully deploy these agents. This administration clearly doesn’t want to wait.” Sandweg’s statement demonstrates that the Trump administration’s pressure has left ICE with no choice but to deploy a half-trained force.

This lack of training has resulted in agents detaining people with no rhyme or reason. In Chicago, 61% of the people arrested in June 2025 ended up receiving no criminal charge. The fact that the agency has detained about twice as many innocent people as criminals demonstrates the agent’s inexperience. Rather than deploy professionals to surgically and covertly detain illegal immigrants, the officers brazenly pull over crowds of innocent people in broad daylight for the public to see.

This reputation of illegitimacy is exacerbated by the agents wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves. The legitimacy of a law enforcement officer stems from them acting on behalf of an organization granted the power to use force by the community they police. When ICE agents refuse to identify themselves, the public cannot disentangle state-sanctioned power from arbitrary and unjust power. Masking is unprecedented and cowardly. American agents have always revealed their faces, even when going after dangerous criminals like the Gambino crime family or the cartel boss El Chapo. If these agents are brave enough to not wear masks, ICE agents who go after far less dangerous criminals need to as well. To those who may argue that the agents are at high-risk of being doxed, consider that judges are still revealing their faces despite an uptick in threats towards them. This is not a Kafka novel. There must be a face behind the person wielding power.

These untrained, unidentified ICE agents lack accountability as well. The agents operate with federal immunity, which means they are only beholden to the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS, however, has defied a judge’s insistence that it clarify who makes decisions in the chain of command. Without this information, judges are limited in their ability to hold the agency accountable.

ICE’s current methods have caused many Americans to view immigration law enforcement as a part of Trump’s partisan agenda. If ICE becomes seen as partisan as a result, when the political pendulum inevitably swings and the Democrats regain power, leftist politicians will reverse the progress ICE makes toward reducing the population of illegal aliens in the country. 

From the Pew Research Center, this graph shows that illegal immigration was on a slow and steady decline from 2005 to 2016. President Obama made progress because enforcing the law around immigration was bipartisan. During President Trump’s first term, the rate of deportations matched that of Obama. However, by the end of it, his bombastic rhetoric about deporting illegals throughout resulted in deportations being branded as partisan. When he lost power in 2020 and the political pendulum swung back, the left implemented policies that sent illegal immigration through the roof. The Biden administration gave federal officials parole authority to allow aliens without visas to enter with impunity. They also encouraged courts to issue a record number of protections from deportation orders to aliens who evaded the United States Border Patrol. The courts eventually became so lenient that aliens who successfully crossed the border undetected would often turn themselves over to be offered their protection. The result of this policy was illegal immigration skyrocketing, undoing a decade and half’s worth of steady progress.

If ICE does not change its behavior, public perception toward immigration law enforcement will be tarnished, and this damage to ICE’s reputation will eventually undo the progress achieved under Trump’s second term. Removing 14 million people from the country will take far longer than four years. When conservatives lose power and the left inevitably regains it, they will likely implement policies causing the number of illegal aliens in the country to skyrocket. Given that it’s easier to let in a million illegal aliens than to deport them, this swing of the pendulum will always worsen the problem. ICE should not speed-hire amateurs, empower them to detain Americans anonymously, post about their movements in cute social media clips, and refuse to hold themselves accountable. Rather, ICE needs to begin slowly and steadily hiring the best talent and deploy them with local law enforcement to surgically and covertly remove aliens. Professionalism and patience are the only ways to bring bipartisan support to solving the issue of illegal immigration.