ICE Has Always Been Bad. This Is Worse.

By Thor Benson | August 18, 2025 | 10:21am

Photo by Chad Stembridge/Unsplash

Immigration ICE

By now, you’ve probably seen the videos. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, often masked and decked out in tactical gear, breaking car windows, assaulting people, harassing people and more. In the few months since Donald Trump took office, ICE has gone as far as entering schools and hospitals to detain people, and they’ve sometimes arrested parents and left their kids in public without a guardian.

Immigration enforcement has always been fraught with problems, but it does seem like things are worse than ever. The question is: How did ICE get so bad? How did we get here?

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ICE was created in 2003, inside the newly formed Department of Homeland Security. It was preceded by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS. Brianna Nofil, an assistant professor of history at the college of William & Mary who focuses on immigration and incarceration, tells Splinter that immigration enforcement has indeed been bad for a long time.

“Immigration policing is pretty horrifying for many decades before ICE was created,” Nofil said. “ICE is pretty horrifying from its earliest incarnation. I’m always slightly hesitant to make ICE seem too exceptional, because I think much of what they are doing really is a continuation of what the INS was doing.”

Nofil says that basically we’ve long had a problem with immigration policing—for about a century. It was bad before ICE and has been bad since. However, she has noticed some changes since Trump took office, and things do seem to be significantly worse now.

“They were sort of saying they were focusing on removing people who had broken some law that wasn’t just illegal entry,” Nofil said. “I think what is absolutely changing right now is that there is no pretense of that anymore. It has become very clear that the goal is just maximizing the numbers.”

She added that the recent explosion in funding will have a dramatic impact. The massive legislation package championed by Trump and passed narrowly by Congress in July included about $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security, with $75 billion of that specifically going to ICE — unprecedented amounts. Nofil said immigration advocates have been warning for years about how bad ICE was and how much worse things could get, but many of those warnings were not heeded.

“It does feel like the gloves are sort of completely off now,” Nofil said. “It also feels like a lot of chickens have come home to roost.”

ICE is currently trying to recruit a lot more agents to carry out the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and many have noted that they seem willing to hire just about anyone, and they’re offering some major incentives to take a job with the agency. To observers, this push looks increasingly dire.

“I think that the hiring is really scary,” Nofil says. “They have never tried to recruit on this massive of a scale. I don’t know if they’re having trouble recruiting right now or not, but it does feel increasingly desperate.”

Also worrying are the moves by ICE to expand its reach by partnering with local police forces. Nofil said that could have many negative effects and could contribute to the impression that immigration enforcement is reaching every corner of the country.

Nofil called those local collaborations the “most unsettling” aspect of the new version of ICE.

“I think that you just cannot undersell how dramatically that reshapes ICE’s power and their reach and their footprint,” Nofil said.

As with many other issues, experts warned things could get really bad if the wrong person was put in the White House, and not enough was done to make sure that things didn’t spiral out of control if that did happen. There were calls by activists and some Democratic representatives to completely “abolish ICE,” but despite what Republicans say, this was never embraced by Democratic Party leadership. Now, Donald Trump is taking advantage of the fact that things were not done to limit his powers when they could have been done.

“There’s always a lot of blurriness around jurisdiction and immigration law,” Nofil said. “It seems like they have kind of capitalized on a lot of that blurriness.”