Trump Has Made ICE the Largest Law Enforcement Agency in the Country

Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 has been a nightmare for immigrants and for the country. The administration’s mass detention and deportation agenda brought forth an onslaught of cruel, violent policies intended to sow fear, suppress dissent, and vilify immigrants. Taking stock of all of Trump’s actions on immigration in 2025 is nearly impossible. This is, of course, by design. The Trump administration’s goal was to “flood the zone” with a flurry of policy changes to overwhelm us. But in spite of its efforts to quash any opposition, activists, organizers, lawyers, journalists, and ordinary people across the country have mounted an incredible resistance to the mass deportation agenda.

A year into Trump’s second term, the White House’s blanket defense of the brutal murder of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis has rattled the nation. Conditions inside detention have deteriorated so much that at least six people have died while in ICE custody since January 3, 2026. (In comparison in 2024 a total of 11 people died in detention). Calls to abolish ICE are once again gaining steam. The years ahead will no doubt continue to be violent (and deadly) for immigrants and those who support them. But this moment presents an opening to build toward dismantling the enforcement apparatus. Reflecting on 2025 through an abolitionist lens is critical as we develop strategies to combat the ongoing mass deportation agenda.

Reflecting on 2025 through an abolitionist lens is critical as we develop strategies to combat the ongoing mass deportation agenda.

Although Trump 2.0 has inaugurated a new era in state and vigilante violence against immigrants, the administration’s actions build on a long history of anti-Black racism, criminalization, and U.S. militarism that have fueled the detention and deportation machine’s growth over time.

In the first half of 2025, a radical new order for the U.S. deportation regime appeared to be on the horizon. A series of stark new policy departures sowed widespread panic and threw affected communities and political opponents into disarray. Terrifying as the administration’s draconian actions were, many of its early measures were defeated by resistance, rejected by the courts, or collapsed due to poor planning.

An early trial balloon occurred in March when ICE began arresting international student activists, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, who had been involved in Palestine solidarity efforts. In their cases the guise of immigration enforcement was used to detain and punish immigrant students for what were essentially thought crimes, sending a chilling message about the limits of free speech. These pretextual detentions dwindled after being challenged in the courts and eliciting ferocious public disapproval.

The guise of immigration enforcement was used to detain and punish immigrant students for what were essentially thought crimes.

The Trump administration also rapidly moved to start detaining immigrants outside the country. At first, interest focused on Guantánamo Bay, where detention capacity would be raised to 30,000, and in an echo of the war on terror, “high-priority criminal aliens” were to be held.

When this plan largely fell through, the offshore experiment continued when Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in the spring to justify transferring over 200 immigrants to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a mega-prison in El Salvador. The administration emphasized false allegations that those sent to CECOT, who were mostly Venezuelan, were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, using innocuous tattoos as supposed evidence.

The unlawful detentions at CECOT were paired with a right-wing media campaign featuring Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and other Republicans in photo ops that evoked the images of U.S. soldiers posing with people tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War.

The transfers to CECOT represented another sensational action used to scare immigrant communities and vilify Venezuelans who have, like Palestinians, been on the receiving end of U.S. foreign policy. Yet the threat of mass deportations to El Salvador and the prospect of incarcerating U.S. citizens at the prison have been stalled by multiple layers of resistance.

The administration has doubled down on third country deportations, where immigrants are sent to countries to which they have no ties.

Despite this, the administration has doubled down on third country deportations, where immigrants are sent to countries to which they have no ties and where they are often subject to detention or other forms of punishment upon their arrival. The Trump administration and State Department have reached out to at least 58 countries, the vast majority of which are on the African continent, to establish transfer agreements for these deportations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this is intentional: “The farther away from America the better, so they can’t come back across the border.”

The small numbers of individuals sent to South Sudan or elsewhere have been vitriolically branded “barbaric criminal illegal aliens.” Yet Orville Etoria, a 63-year-old Jamaican immigrant who had lived in the U.S. for nearly 50 years, poignantly described the experience of being expelled to Eswatini in an interview with The New Yorker: “To be honest, it helped me imagine how the slaves might have felt, going to another land in shackles and chains — that loneliness, that disconnect, that sense of loss.”

Although the absolute number of people being detained offshore or deported to other countries is relatively small, it is important that we challenge these practices for what they portend.

While the Trump administration excels in creating terrifying spectacles, the most significant development of this last year, and one that builds on decades of bipartisan support for immigration enforcement, was the passage of the massive funding bill in July. Congress’s budget reconciliation bill, which allocated an additional $170 billion for immigration enforcement over four years, was an ominous milestone in the history of U.S. immigration policy and the Trump administration’s aspiring fascism. This funding makes ICE the largest law enforcement agency in the country, with a bigger budget than the Bureau of Prisons, FBI, and most militaries in the world. If ICE’s expansion plans are realized, the immigration detention system will triple in size — detaining 120,000-150,000 people at any given time, mirroring the scale of Japanese American internment during WWII.

If ICE’s expansion plans are realized, the immigration detention system will triple in size — detaining 120,000-150,000 people at any given time, mirroring the scale of Japanese American internment.

For years, ICE’s ability to arrest and detain immigrants depended heavily on local police collaborations. Sheriffs’ departments rounded up immigrants, making county jails a gateway to the deportation process. This local dimension was key to building up the immigration enforcement machine. Conversely, sanctuary policy effectively curtailed ICE’s use of local law enforcement in some parts of the country, bringing deportations down.

Now Trump is attempting to create his own occupying army for resistant localities. Initially this took the form of National Guard troops that — along with ICE agents — descended on Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, carrying out military-style raids utilizing tear gas and stun grenades. But after the bill passed, ICE had more resources. In a matter of months, the number of ICE agents doubled from 10,000 to 22,000.

Now, as we are seeing in Minneapolis, where anti-Black racism and bogus fraud charges against the Somali community have driven right-wing attacks, ICE is using indiscriminate force against immigrants, their supporters, and even uninvolved onlookers. Renee Nicole Good’s murder was a preview of what’s to come if ICE continues to lay siege to our communities.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. As Harvard professor Theda Skocpol put it regarding ICE’s expansion and its potential to become a more centralized federal police force: “The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”

But it’s worth remembering that the Democrats have long enabled this spiraling enforcement agenda. Last time there was a major effort toward comprehensive immigration reform in 2013 under Obama, the proposed Senate bill only passed after a $46 billion border surge amendment was added at the last minute. With citizenship on the table, the Democrats were willing to make any deal, no matter how harmful it was. Their devil’s bargain of accepting more border militarization and more criminalization only served to further dehumanize immigrant communities. The pre-Trump tradition of bipartisan support for immigration enforcement and the Democrats’ failure to challenge the scapegoating and demonization of immigrants has opened the door to the paramilitarization of American life.

Since Trump took office, immigration detention has expanded by 83 percent with 73,000 people currently detained each day.

The growing infrastructure for detention and deportation remains the greatest threat to immigrant communities. Detention facilitates deportation, and having more bed capacity means ICE can arrest and deport more people. Since Trump took office, immigration detention has expanded by 83 percent with 73,000 people currently detained each day. ICE has increased the use of private prisons and county jails, converted federal and state prisons and military bases into camps, and is proposing to lock up another 80,000 people using warehouses. Another prison boom is taking place, and as we’ve seen with the rise in mass incarceration over time, it is much harder to bring down these systems once they are built.

It has been a terrifying start to the year. Yet the resistance to the mass deportation agenda is palpable. Roughly 1,000 actions took place across the country the weekend after Good’s death. Local communities are building neighborhood defense networks. From California to Florida, activists are challenging detention expansion through local and state level strategies: blocking zoning permits, filing environmental justice litigation, pushing state legislators, and organizing locally. In small towns in Georgia and New Hampshire, residents have resisted proposed warehouses for detention. A coalition of grassroots and national groups secured a victory when Avelo Airlines decided to end its contract with ICE. Support for ICE has gone down considerably. In a recent YouGov poll, 52 percent of people said they disapprove of how the agency is operating.

The momentum against ICE presents an opportunity for building abolitionist power against the system. It could also help open space for making the case against the broader prison-industrial complex that helped grow the detention and deportation system in the first place.