What is ICE?
ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
With an annual budget exceeding more than $7 billion and more than 20,000 employees throughout the United States and in 47 foreign countries, ICE has become a major federal law enforcement agency. Most of ICE's budget — about $4 billion — goes to “detention and removal operations.”
ICE is not the agency conducting family separations at the US border. They are not responsible for patrolling or securing US borders; that task falls to the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP).
Instead, ICE is primarily tasked with what it calls Enforcement and Removal Operations: essentially the location, detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who are living in the US. In other words, while ICE isn’t responsible for carrying out taking immigrant children from their parents at the border, it does hold and deport the parents.
History of ICE
Following the events of 9/11, then-president George Bush and Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a mega-bureaucracy that now has 229,000 employees and a $50 billion annual budget. DHS was supposed to streamline the process for getting goods and people into the US, and keep dangerous people out. Its subsidiary agency ICE is supposed to focus on the latter.
ICE’s primary mission is to “prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities,” as described by the Department of Justice in 2004. The focus was meant to be on crimes like money-laundering and human trafficking, and ways terrorists could get anything from small pox to suitcase bombs into the country.
In the following years, the agency grew wildly. Its budget jumped in 2009, when Congress started funding ICE detention centers based on arbitrary numbers of beds set by lawmakers. This essentially established a quota of detainees for ICE agents to catch.
ICE currently maintains over 40,000 beds worth of people who crossed the border illegally, and private contractors are big beneficiaries of these detentions. ICE estimates that the cost to the US taxpayer per bed is about $126 per day.
Today, only the agency’s 6,000 Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents are tasked with ICE’s original mission: tracking terrorism and transnational crime syndicates in the US and around the world.
About 8,000 ICE agents are dedicated to locating, arresting, detaining, and removing undocumented immigrants; the agency’s 1,100 attorneys and 300 staff also prosecute the government’s immigration cases each year.
ICE Under Biden
During his campaign, Biden vowed that his administration would focus its enforcement efforts on public safety and national security threats—while also promoting due process in enforcement and removal proceedings. On Inauguration Day, President Biden issued an executive order which revoked one of Trump’s executive orders and the enforcement priorities contained therein.
Biden’s immigration platform contained a commitment to reduce prolonged detention in favor of community-based alternatives and case management programs. His plan also discussed ending contracts with private detention facilities.
However, an executive order he issued on January 26, 2021, which instructed the Attorney General not to renew any Department of Justice (DOJ) contracts with private criminal detention facilities, did not mention private civil or immigration detention. Four months into his new administration, Biden was detaining considerably more noncitizens than were detained at the end of his predecessor’s term in office.
Biden has mentioned that the overlap between law enforcement and immigration enforcement “undermine[s] trust and cooperation between local law enforcement and the communities they are charged to protect,” and it includes a bullet point on voiding all 287(g) agreements executed under Trump. But, as of writing, the administration has taken no action to end 287(g) agreements.
ICE Under Obama
Under Barack Obama, ICE was still responsible for detention and deportation, but its interior functions were redirected.
In 2011, John Morton, then director of ICE, ordered agents to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” by focusing on the violators of US immigration laws who posed the greatest threat to national security and border safety. His focus, particularly toward the end of his administration, was on quick "returns" of new arrivals at the border who were perceived to have had fewer ties in America.
The Obama administration also started the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was meant to provide a path to citizenship for young adults brought to the US illegally as children.
In total, approximately 1,242,486 undocumented immigrants were removed from the interior of the United States during Obama's full eight years, averaging 155,311 removals per year. ICE under this administration removed an average of 1.38 percent of the interior immigrant population per year of his presidency.
ICE Under Trump
Just days after his inauguration, Donald Trump issued an executive order on “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” A sharp turnaround from the Obama administration’s approach, it instructed government agencies to deport all “removable aliens.”
Trump also moved to terminate DACA, making good on a 2016 campaign promise in which he called the program an illegal executive amnesty. The result has been a nationwide manhunt that has ensnared people who have been in the country peacefully for years or decades.
The overall number of people trying to cross the US southern border plummeted in the months after Trump took office. Even so, removals from the interior of the country increased by about 25% for fiscal year 2017. ICE also increased overall arrests by over 40 percent.
However, Trump still has not reached anywhere near the level of interior removals as the early Obama administration. So far, ICE under President Trump has only managed to deport an average of 0.83 percent of the undocumented immigrant population each year.
What is the #AbolishICE Movement?
Resistance to ICE and to deportation isn’t new. Immigrant groups have been fighting the expansion of immigration enforcement for years.
But public outrage over the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policy, which separated thousands of families, has intensified the skepticism over immigration enforcement. “Abolish ICE” is becoming a catchall rallying cry against draconian immigration policies.
Thus #AbolishICE became popularized by activists in 2018 as a response to these policies, as well as publicized evidence of the inhumane conditions that detained immigrants were being held under.
Why Abolish ICE?
Abuse
Thousands of complaints of physical and sexual abuse, excessive force
Human rights violations such as warantless searches, fabricating evidence, detaining without probable cause
Terrorized Communities
Workplace raids, unmarked vehicles in immigrant neighborhoods, manipulation and deception, targeting longtime residents and children
Inhumane Detention Facilities
No healthcare or hygiene, children kept in cages, no basic living accommodations, for-profit detention centers
Unjust Legal Proceedings
Deporting undocumented immigrants without criminal records, no pathways to citizenship for DACA, expedited and unfair court proceedings
How to Help
Sources
Email Template
My name is [Your Name] and I am a constituent from [Your State].
I am emailing to ask [Senator's Name] to co-sponsor the Keep Families Together Act.
With their vote, [Senator's Name] has the opportunity to stand on the right side of history and the right side of humanity.
The country knows the truth about what is happening right now. The Trump administration's decision to separate children from their parents at the border is heartless, cruel, and will traumatize young people for the rest of their lives.
There is no excuse not to support this bill and we will not forget where [Senator's Name] stands.
I ask again that you please consider co-sponsoring the bill and asking your Senate colleagues to do the same.
Email Template
My name is [Your Name]. The treatment of migrants in detention camps is horrifying, with forced sterilizations, refusal to test migrants for COVID-19, and filthy conditions. We are demanding an investigation and an immediate closing of migrant detention centers. Not doing anything is complicity with ethnic cleansing.