Immigration agents have become Donald Trump’s personal posse

THE FEDERAL government’s assault on Minneapolis continues but, for the past few days, it is Donald Trump’s shock-and-awe campaign to rid America of illegal immigrants that has seemed under siege. Widespread outrage at the killings first of Renee Good and, on January 24th, of Alex Pretti, two American citizens protesting against the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency leading the deportation drive, has put the administration on the back foot. An attack on January 27th on Ilhan Omar, a Democratic congresswoman from Minneapolis and bugbear of the right, further cemented the notion that events in the city were spiralling dangerously out of control.

Mr Trump is worried enough that he has dispatched Tom Homan, his border czar, to take charge of the roughly 3,000 agents who have flooded Minnesota’s biggest city, hunting for undocumented migrants. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol officer in charge of such roving operations, has been banished to his home in California. “Bovino is very good but he is a pretty out there kind of a guy,” Mr Trump told Fox News on January 27th. “In some cases that’s good, maybe it wasn’t good here.” The president also put in an emollient call to Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor, whom his Department of Justice is investigating for conspiring to impede immigration enforcement in the state.

The administration has changed its tune on the shootings, too. Before the particulars of either killing were clear (many details remain fuzzy), officials alleged without evidence that Ms Good was a “terrorist” and Mr Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement”. Now Mr Trump is lamenting the deaths: “Both of them were terrible…It’s so sad,” he told Fox.

Sadly, Ms Good and Mr Pretti are not the first people to be killed by immigration agents swarming Democratic cities. But their deaths were captured on video and, in the blink of an eye, shared around the world. More than half of Americans say they have seen clips of the fatal shootings.

The conclusions they have drawn have depended in part on their politics. For example, just 3% of Democrats think Ms Good was about to run over the ICE agent who shot her, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed, compared with 53% of Republicans. But disquiet over Mr Trump’s mass-deportation drive has been growing steadily. Net approval of his handling of immigration sank into negative territory last year, around the time the DHS, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, ramped up raids in Los Angeles. It continues to fall (see chart 1). For a president who, over the course of 11 years, through three presidential campaigns and two administrations, has made immigration his signature issue, the reversal must be alarming.

Mr Trump has promised to “de-escalate a bit”, but is quick to deny that he is retreating. Over the past year he has not only instructed immigration agencies to be more forceful, he has completely reshaped them, securing a massive rise in their funding and thus their size and capacities. ICE and Border Patrol have come to resemble militias that answer to the president and operate with seeming impunity. The killings in Minneapolis reveal how quickly this evolution has occurred and how deadly its consequences are. The question now is how far Mr Trump will take his paramilitary experiment, given the obvious risks both to public order and to his own popularity.

Both ICE and Border Patrol were put under the control of the newly created DHS after the September 11th terror attacks in 2001. Border Patrol was the bigger agency: as recently as 2022 it had roughly three times as many enforcement officers as ICE, which was charged, among other things, with hunting down illegal immigrants who had left the immediate vicinity of a border. But a force of several thousand officers could never hope to catch the millions of undocumented immigrants living in America. Instead, in keeping with the times, ICE focused on public safety: finding and removing foreign criminals.

Even so, ICE was a political lightning rod. When Barack Obama, a Democratic predecessor of Mr Trump, oversaw an increase in deportations, some left-leaning cities adopted “sanctuary” ordinances, which limited their co-operation with federal immigration enforcement. Those policies proliferated during Mr Trump’s first term. Progressives wanted to “abolish ICE” and the question of whether to dissolve or restructure the agency became a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates in 2020. “Even in times of calm and reason, which this is certainly not, the politicisation of ICE has made it such that half the country is going to hate you no matter what you do,” says a former DHS official.

Mr Trump’s decision to hasten deportations by deploying Border Patrol units, led by Mr Bovino, to help with ICE’s raids has added to the controversy. Its officers are trained to chase smugglers across deserts and mountains, not uphold the civil liberties of protesters. They enjoy greater authority than ordinary police to stop and question people, but only within 100 miles of an international border, which Minneapolis is not. The agency’s most elite squads, called BORTAC teams, resemble military special forces. One of Mr Pretti’s killers was a Border Patrol agent.

The Trump administration has taken these agencies and supercharged them. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July, included a whopping $170bn for immigration enforcement—more than most countries spend on their armed forces. ICE has more than doubled in size over the past year, hiring 12,000 new deportation officers. It is still expanding, enticing new recruits with signing bonuses and help with student-loan repayment.

DHS seems to want to hire political partisans. Both ICE and Border Patrol, for instance, were recruiting in December at AmericaFest, an avowedly Trumpy right-wing conference. ICE’s recruiting portal says “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out. You do not need an undergraduate degree.” Several ICE recruitment posts on social media include dog-whistles such as “Which way, American man?” (an allusion to a white supremacist book) and “Destroy the flood” (a slogan from a video game about invasive parasitic aliens).

New recruits are rushed through training in 42 days. Many of them are former cops and veterans, but some will never have held a gun before, says a former ICE official. In contrast, says Alex del Carmen, a criminologist who helps train police officers, it can take up to a year for local cops to be deemed street-ready.

At one level, the deployment of these neophytes is working. Government figures analysed by the Deportation Data Project show that weekly deportations following an ICE arrest more than quadrupled in the first nine months of Mr Trump’s term, to 6,000 a week. “Street arrests”, as opposed to ICE collecting illegal aliens from jails, have rocketed (see chart 2).

Yet the killings of Ms Good and Mr Pretti indicate the excessive force agents are using. At least 32 people died in ICE custody last year, the highest number since 2004. An autopsy report released in January showed that Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban migrant held at Fort Bliss in Texas, was killed by his jailers. ICE had previously said he had committed suicide.

Even as it deploys ill-prepared agents, DHS has gutted internal oversight bodies. Julie Plavsic was forced to retire last year when Mr Trump all but eradicated the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. She describes how former staffers shared feelings of “horror and disgrace and disbelief” after the killings of Ms Good and Mr Pretti. “All of this is unprecedented,” she adds.

In fact, America has a long history of frontier lawmen who operate with lots of discretion and little oversight. In 1918 a group led by Texas Rangers massacred 15 unarmed residents of a remote village and then lied and said the victims had died in a shoot-out. In 1894 Grover Cleveland sent the army and US Marshals to Chicago to manhandle striking railroad workers, over the objections of Illinois’s governor. Their deployment provoked urban unrest, which the Marshals were ill-equipped to handle: at least 30 people were killed.

The authorities in America have also sometimes used private militias for violent repression. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries politicians watched as industrialists hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to break strikes by force. For almost a century most southern Democrats were content to let the Ku Klux Klan terrorise and lynch black citizens.

But none of these groups were anywhere near as big or as well-equipped and organised as today’s swelling immigration-enforcement agencies. The expansion of ICE and Border Patrol also marks a striking change for America in that the president is normally relatively impotent in matters of domestic law-enforcement, with the police under the supervision of local politicians and domestic deployment of the army severely restricted by law.

Indeed, the explosive growth of immigration-enforcement agencies seemingly answerable only to Mr Trump has prompted agitated critics to assert that he is creating a paramilitary to cow his political enemies and perhaps even to help rig the midterm elections in November. Mr Trump once urged a mob to storm the Capitol to try to overturn the result of an election he lost, after all. This year, the argument runs, he could claim that immigrants are trying to vote illegally, post menacing ICE agents at polling stations and so frighten Democrat-supporting ethnic minorities into staying at home.

It is true that would-be authoritarians often try to strengthen their grip on power by creating forces answerable only to themselves. These have several common characteristics. First, to encourage loyalty, they are usually paid well. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which reports directly to the supreme leader, has a far larger budget than the regular army and its officers run lucrative, coercive business empires on the side.

Second, whereas regular military forces are supposed to be politically neutral, at least in democracies, unorthodox ones may be fiercely partisan. India’s Hindu-nationalist paramilitary groups (who tend to carry sticks rather than guns) are open about their support for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Third, a strongman’s pet force is often allowed to break the law. In Venezuela it is illegal to kidnap and torture dissidents, or to stand outside polling stations shooting bullets in the air to intimidate voters, but motorbike gangs known as colectivos that are sponsored by the regime have done so without fear of arrest.

Fourth, leaders who sponsor the irregular use of force nearly always claim it is to protect the public. Rodrigo Duterte won the presidency of the Philippines by promising to “forget the laws on human rights” when fighting drug dealers. He urged the police to “fatten all the fish” of Manila Bay with the corpses of criminals to make the streets safe again.

Clearly, although America is a far cry from all these places, with vastly stronger institutions, there are some echoes in ICE’s deployment, from $50,000 sign-up bonuses to the claim (since watered down) of J.D. Vance, the vice-president, that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” from prosecution for how they carry out their jobs. Ivan Briscoe of Crisis Group, an NGO, cites three warning signs that states are succumbing to paramilitarism. One is when governments start to rely on armed force as a first resort, rather than the last. Another is when internal disciplinary mechanisms cease to function properly. A final red flag is when forces looking for bad guys treat local civilians “as support networks of the enemy”, perhaps because polarising politicians describe them as such.

Again, this list carries awkward echoes of events in Minnesota. But the alarmists ignore the fact that not all arms of the state are at Mr Trump’s beck and call. The courts may eventually curtail ICE’s worst excesses. Local governments are probably even less inclined to co-operate with the federal one on immigration as a result of recent events. Democrats in Congress are threatening a government shutdown unless ICE is curbed. The persistent peaceful protests and civil disobedience of Minnesotans have, if anything, been energised by the brutal tactics of immigration agents.

Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that, however it ends, ICE’s victimisation of Democratic-leaning cities like Minneapolis is more about politics than stemming illegal immigration. If the intention were truly to maximise deportations, ICE would target states and cities with large undocumented populations. But in 2023, the most recent year for which estimates are available, Pew Research Centre reckoned that Minnesota was home to only about 130,000 illegal immigrants, putting it 24th out of the 50 states. Just 10,000 unauthorised migrants are thought to live in Maine, where DHS is running “Operation Catch of the Day”. “We have now turned from professional policing to politics,” says Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

There is little truth to the claim that ICE is hunting down “the worst of the worst”. In fact, it is becoming far less discriminating: when Joe Biden left office, 62% of those it arrested were convicted criminals; by November that proportion had fallen to 30%. Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr Trump’s immigration policy, has pushed the agency to meet arrest quotas to boost deportations. That has led to the detention of lots of seemingly harmless pensioners and even children, as well as people who turn out to have been present in America entirely legally.

Over the past year Mr Homan has also suggested that ICE must resort to street raids because Democratic cities will not let it into their jails. On January 25th Mr Trump called on Congress to ban such policies. Yet at least some sanctuary states allow local officials to co-operate with immigration agents when an individual has been convicted of grave crimes. What is more, Minnesota does not have state sanctuary laws, although Minneapolis does not comply with ICE requests to detain immigrants already in local custody.

A more obvious interpretation of ICE’s focus on left-leaning cities is that the administration hopes to provoke protesters to violence, thereby justifying the deployment of federal agents and strengthening the case for a crackdown. For months Mr Miller has referred to protesters who are impeding immigration agents as “insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists”, perhaps laying the groundwork for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to secure the authority to deploy the army at home. .

Mr Trump has flirted with the idea since his first term. He has consistently used the spectre of a national emergency or perceived threats to the state to claim extraordinary powers. That, after all, is the basis of most of his tariffs. And last year he claimed that America had been “invaded” by a Venezuelan gang as a pretext for invoking an eighteenth-century law that gave him greater power to deport foreigners living in America.

But if the idea is to rally voters who are worried about law and order and paint Democrats as defenders of criminals, the campaign in Minneapolis appears to be backfiring. Right after Mr Pretti’s death, more Americans supported than opposed ICE’s abolition, according to YouGov, including 47% of independents. Mr Trump’s recent change of tone may only be a feint but, politically speaking, a sincere shift might serve him better. ■