Trump wants to make ICE bigger than the FBI

Under plans, it'll be the biggest federal security agency

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For all of the focus on the tax and welfare provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed Congress a few weeks ago, perhaps just as significant in its own way is the boost that the bill gives to immigration enforcement.

The BBB contained a huge amount of cash for both Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the network of prisons that houses immigrants on their way to deportation.

ICE’s budget will be roughly doubled in the next four years, giving it the funds to hire more agents than the FBI currently employs. About $45bn extra is allocated to immigration detention facilities, bringing total spending to a higher level than the U.S. spends on federal prisons.

That means that one way of looking at this is that if the plans in this bill get carried out, ICE will replace the FBI as America’s foremost federal security agency in terms of manpower. And that could be really bad news, because ICE is out of control.

Although it’s dropped out of the news since the protests stopped, the agency has still been busy rampaging around Southern California in recent weeks. It’s carried out a shocking and systematic series of rights violations, essentially just going into particular neighbourhoods or places of work and scooping up anyone with brown skin. Things have gotten so bad that a federal judge has ordered the agency to stop using these tactics in Southern California, although we’ll see how far that order gets given recent changes to how judicial injunctions work.

Aside from terrifying immigrants and American citizens alike in the course of its normal enforcement operations, ICE has also engaged in a series of bizarre shows of force which are clearly designed to intimidate Californians. Last Monday, heavily - and I mean heavily - armed agents marched through LA’s MacArthur Park for no apparent purpose, looking like an occupying army. And given that the Trump regime has said that it is “liberating” California from its leaders and threatened to have them arrested, that is kind of what it is.

There have also been continued clashes with protesters and residents. Although Trump claimed that ICE would be backing off from workplace raids on farms, they have continued in the agricultural areas north of LA. In one incident last week, ICE used tear gas and rubber bullets after encountering resistance while trying to raid a farm in Camarillo, Ventura County.

I’m a bit shocked that this has all dropped out of headline news, but maybe it’s just because it all feels very real to me. My wife comes from Ventura County and her mom used to work on a farm in Camarillo. This is close to us in ways I don’t want to write about, especially given the current climate.

But I also think that everyone else ought to be paying more attention too. ICE has become a rogue agency, and it’s not likely to get more respectful of the law if it undergoes a sudden expansion and floods thousands of under-trained officers into the field. What is happening in Southern California - masked federal agents disappearing people into unmarked vans and sending them to camps - is bad enough when it’s happening in one place. But soon it could be coming to the whole nation on a much bigger scale.

There are some reports of discontent within the ranks of ICE. The agency has for a long time seen itself as “the agency that deports violent immigrant criminals”, and it was sticking more or less to that mission even under Trump before Stephen Miller lit a fire under its leadership a few months ago. Even for the sort of person who might join ICE, there’s a difference between “deport a foreign-born serial killer” and “deport a mother who has lived in America for 30 years while her U.S. citizen children cry in front of you”. But so far at least, this discontent doesn’t seem to have resulted in much pushback that we know about.

But what concerns me is that anyone who chooses to join ICE now is actually going to be the sort of person who wants to deport that mother. After all, nobody can claim that they don’t know what the Trump administration’s immigration policy is now. The growth of the agency is an opportunity to Trumpify it further and bring in a new crop of agents who can be trained in the loose standards of the Trump regime. So I’m worried that it’s not only going to get bigger, but also much worse.

If there is one ray of sunshine here, it’s that this type of rapid expansion of ICE is probably going to be extremely difficult and slow to carry out. Recruitment and training take a long time, as does buying and building physical infrastructure to house and equip of all these agents. But it seems predictable that the agency is going to lower its standards in order to satisfy political pressure from the White House to move quickly and hit the target of one million deportations per year.

A similarly fast build-up of Customs and Border Protection occurred under George W. Bush after 9/11, and the result was a culture of mismanagement and abuse that persisted for years afterwards. So this is another way in which ICE get worse as it gets bigger.

So keep your eye on Southern California, because what is happening there could soon become a reality everywhere - and even worse.