Faq

  • U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a law enforcement agency tasked with two broad missions: to enforce civil immigration violations in the interior of the country, and to investigate transnational crimes.2 It is housed within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), both of which were established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. DHS’s primary mission was to “prevent terrorist attacks within the United States” and “reduce the vulnerability of the United States to terrorism.”3 Moving the enforcement of civil immigration infractions—in other words, the act of living in our country without documentation—under the umbrella of counterterrorism sent a clear message: immigrants were to be viewed and treated as a threat to our country’s security.

    ICE has never been required to prioritize the arrest and removal of noncitizens who have been found guilty of committing terrorism-related or violent offenses. The agency’s priorities are set by the president, who maintains near-total control over ICE’s direction and operations.

  • 1. Peter Markowitz, After ICE: A New Humane & Effective Immigration Enforcement Paradigm, 55 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 89, 90, 104 (2020); see also One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Pub. L. 119-21, 139 Stat. 72, §§ 90003(a), 90007, 100052 (2005) (appropriating $29.85 billion to ICE, $45 billion for increasing immigration detention capacity, and a $10 billion DHS slush fund “to safeguard the borders of the United States”).

    2. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, https://www.ice.gov/about-ice (last accessed Sept. 17, 2025).

    3. 6 U.S.C. § 111(a)-(b).

  • Immigrants who face removal proceedings in immigration report can be released on recognizance or bond, placed under surveillance, or detained.4 While some immigrants are subject to mandatory detention by statute,5 in general the arresting immigration authority has broad discretion to decide whether to release or detain, with the President having significant control over these agencies’ detention policies and practices. The United States has the world’s largest immigration detention system.6 Many of these facilities are located in remote areas, far from the immigrants’ families and legal support.7 The vast majority of detained immigrants are being held in for-profit private prisons.8 CoreCivic, Inc. and GEO Group, Inc. are the two largest for-profit prison companies. Together, they manage more than half of all private prisons in the country, including immigration and non-immigration detention. 9 They also own prison transport and immigrant and prisoner surveillance companies. Private prisons have contributed millions of dollars to Trump and to primarily Republican candidates for office, and they spend millions on lobbying.10 Immigration detention is supposed to be civil, not punitive. But detainees, including children, are typically held in secured prison facilities, forced to adhere to prison-like rules, and subject to solitary confinement as punishment for in-facility infractions. Children are supposed to be afforded special protections, but these protections too often fail and they are subject to conditions of severe abuse and neglect. And because these purportedly are civil detention facilities, courts give them the benefit of the doubt: if the agency in charge of the facility can claim that the restrictions serve a “rational purpose,” courts will find that the conditions of confinement, however inhumane, are not punitive.11 Currently, more than 70% of the more than 58,000 people currently detained have no criminal convictions. Of the remaining 30%, most have committed only minor offenses.12 These numbers will get worse. ICE and other immigration agencies are denying immigrants bond hearings,13 and Trump is rapidly expanding detention facility capacity, using $45 billion from Congress to build new facilities to house more than 100,000 immigrants per day, including children and families.14

  • 1. Peter Markowitz, After ICE: A New Humane & Effective Immigration Enforcement Paradigm, 55 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 89, 90, 104 (2020); see also One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Pub. L. 119-21, 139 Stat. 72, §§ 90003(a), 90007, 100052 (2005) (appropriating $29.85 billion to ICE, $45 billion for increasing immigration detention capacity, and a $10 billion DHS slush fund “to safeguard the borders of the United States”).

    2. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, https://www.ice.gov/about-ice (last accessed Sept. 17, 2025). 3 6 U.S.C. § 111(a)-(b).

  • No. In the first 10 years after September 11, although removals of immigrants had increased significantly, the removal of terrorists, serious criminals, and national security threats declined. 46 Deportations were up, but only of immigrants responsible solely for civil infractions (being in the country without documentation) or minor infractions (like traffic violations). The pattern continues through Trump’s second term. Though Trump and his senior officials repeatedly claim that they are targeting “violent criminals,” they are not. Between October 2024 and June 2025, 65% of ICE arrests were of individuals with no criminal convictions; more than 93% of ICE arrests were of individuals without any violent offense conviction.47 In fact, ICE has cut back on fugitive operations—the pursuit of undocumented individuals accused of serious crimes who have fled law enforcement—in favor of mass arrests at workplaces, community meeting places, even immigration offices.48

    The strategy of mass arrest, imprisonment, and removal of immigrants who have only committed civil immigration offenses or minor criminal infraction also has undermined the security and stability of communities across the country, in which immigrants, documented and undocumented, play vitally important roles. It also has led to widespread civil rights violations of citizens and documented immigrants, from the harassment of indigenous Americans to the deportation of American children, from the arrest of ICE protesters to the stripping of visas and kidnapping of outspoken students.

    Any system that places an army of unchecked power in the hands of the executive, with broad authority to set its policies to serve his own agenda, is vulnerable to anti-democratic abuse. Moreover, any system that defines entire communities, ethnicities, and cultures as the enemy is antithetical to the functioning of a democracy. The encroachment on our rights will not stop at immigrants, their families, or their neighborhoods. But even if it did, ICE would still represent a serious threat to our democratic ideals, values, and institutions.

  • 1. Peter Markowitz, After ICE: A New Humane & Effective Immigration Enforcement Paradigm, 55 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 89, 90, 104 (2020); see also One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Pub. L. 119-21, 139 Stat. 72, §§ 90003(a), 90007, 100052 (2005) (appropriating $29.85 billion to ICE, $45 billion for increasing immigration detention capacity, and a $10 billion DHS slush fund “to safeguard the borders of the United States”).

    2. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, https://www.ice.gov/about-ice (last accessed Sept. 17, 2025).

    3. 6 U.S.C. § 111(a)-(b).

  • No. Experts in the field have long proposed alternatives to an enforcementand detention-centric approach to immigration.49 This includes shifting to a process that prioritizes compliance instead of punishment. ICE is only 22 years old; and immigration detention, while older than that, has a shameful past and only began to accelerate in the mid-1990s. The United States has long grappled with the complex questions of immigration without relying on an agency and institution that fundamentally is at odds with our democratic values.

  • 49. See AM. IMMIGRATION COUNCIL, ALTERNATIVES TO IMMIGRATION DETENTION: AN OVERVIEW (July 11, 2023), http://bit.ly/48Bhs7V; Markowitz, supra note 1, at 97-98; César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Abolishing Immigration Prisons, 97 B.U. L. REV. 245, 292 (2017).