Aggressive actions of ICE deepen cracks in US society

Beefed up by US President Donald Trump’s administration to carry out mass deportations, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has deeply divided the United States in recent weeks through its aggressive military-style operations, often performed by armed masked agents in unmarked vehicles, experts and analysts said.

Public anger over the agency’s methods rocketed on Jan 7 after an ICE agent shot dead Renee Good, a US citizen and 37-year-old mother, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time, Good was taking part in a neighborhood patrol organized by local activists to track and monitor ICE activities.

Bystander videos showed ICE officers approaching Good’s SUV as the vehicle appeared to be moving away and forward. Officer Jonathan Ross backed off and fired multiple shots as the SUV started moving.

Hours after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Good used the vehicle as a weapon to hit the officer and characterized Good’s act as “domestic terrorism”.

US President Donald Trump called Good “a professional agitator” who “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense”.

However, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey demanded in crude language that ICE leave the city, and added: “This was a federal agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”

In a Senate session, Steve Cohen, a Democratic Representative from Tennessee and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, called Good’s shooting “clearly unjustified homicide”.

“The American public is not the enemy,” Cohen said. “This is a war against America and against due process and against justice.”

Joe Rogan, a popular podcaster who had endorsed Trump in 2024, said, “To watch someone shoot a US citizen, especially a woman, in the face … it just looked horrific to me”.

Various polls showed that the majority of Americans — about 53 percent — viewed the shooting as unjustified, with only 35 percent viewing it as justified.

However, between the two major political parties — 77 percent of Republicans saw the shooting as justified, while 92 percent of Democrats said it was unjustified.

Homeland Security announced more than two weeks ago the launch of “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever by the agency” — with 2,000 federal agents sent to the Minneapolis area for a crackdown tied to fraud allegations involving Somali residents.

The surge in heavily armed officers from ICE and Border Patrol has since grown to nearly 3,000, dwarfing the ranks of local police officers in the area, The Associated Press reported.

More muscle

ICE, a subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security, has a stated mission is to protect the US from cross-border crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety.

One day into office, Trump declared a national emergency at the US’ southern border, revoked protections that limited enforcement at schools, churches and hospitals, and increased arrest operations.

Soon after, the Trump administration shut down numerous immigration programs started by the previous Biden administration, began worksite raids, and increased operations to arrest and deport illegal immigrants.

In the summer of 2025, ICE received a huge boost from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act with $75 billion allocated for four years until 2029.

In 2025 alone, ICE received approximately $29 billion. About $11.25 billion was allocated to build detention centers across the country with a total of 100,000 to 116,000 beds. Another $7.5 billion was used for hiring new ICE officers, and arresting and deporting individuals.

ICE announced that its force had more than doubled in 2025 to 22,000 from 10,000 a year ago. New recruits, enjoying a $50,000 sign-up bonus, have been hastily deployed on the streets after eight weeks of training.

Charles Foster, an immigration lawyer and founding chair of the Asia Society Texas Center, said the unprecedented amount of funding allowed “ICE to go on a hiring spree by lowering its standards and training”.

Investigations have found that many new recruits have been sent into the field without proper training. Some recruits were deployed before their background checks were completed.

Foster said that the mass deportations have been carried out “in ways never seen or contemplated before”.

“The focus was on deporting ‘the worst of the worst’ criminals, but the vast majority of individuals detained are simply hardworking individuals who have been here, often for decades, with one or more US citizen children and even spouses,” he told China Daily.

“For the most part, even the so-called criminals being arrested and deported are those with prior convictions where the sentence has been served … or (they’ve) simply been charged, but with no conviction,” he said.

Aggressive deportation has led to “a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day”, said a newly released report by the American Immigration Council.

Overall, immigrant arrests increased 600 percent in Trump’s first nine months in office, the report said.

Wrongly detained

Arrests can happen anywhere — home, work, church, court, or school, said some people affected by the ICE operations.

“My brother-in-law was taken away by ICE at the parking lot when he came out of grocery shopping,”Juan (first name only for privacy), a naturalized citizen from Latin America, told China Daily. “I don’t know how they found him.”

The arrest was likely due to a “roving patrol” where ICE agents drive around, stop, question and sometimes arrest people suspected of being in the country unlawfully.

Detentions based on visual assessment sometimes lead to wrongful arrests. More than 170 American citizens had been arrested this year, according to a report by ProPublica released in October 2025.

“Americans have been dragged, tackled, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear,” said the report.

Notable arrested citizens include a pregnant woman, over 20 children, and a 79-year-old car wash owner who was knocked to the ground. The elderly man, who had recently had heart surgery, suffered broken ribs in the incident, was held for 12 hours, and wasn’t given medical attention, the report said.

A US Senate subcommittee investigated ICE’s conflict with US citizens and produced a report titled “Unchecked Authority” last December. The report documented more than 20 such cases, and claimed the Trump administration “lawlessly detains citizens based on its own whims”.

Good isn’t the only US citizen killed by ICE.

On the last day of 2025, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed a man who allegedly shot at him with a rifle in California. The deceased man’s family said the man was shooting the rifle into the air to celebrate New Year when he was confronted by the ICE agent.

Detention centers expanded

The mass deportations have led to the rapid expansion of detention centers. The report by the American Immigration Council said that the number of people held in ICE detention rose nearly 75 percent in 2025, climbing from roughly 40,000 at the start of the year to 66,000 by the start of December, the highest level ever recorded.

About 100 new detention facilities were constructed in 2025, according to the report.

The first such tent detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” was opened in Florida. Built in one week, the center held individuals in chain-link cages in harsh conditions with “clouds of mosquitoes”, overflowing toilets, and lights on 24 hours a day.

“For the first time ever, thousands of immigrants arrested in the interior are being detained in hastily constructed tent camps, where conditions are brutal. More people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the last four years combined,” said the report.

A total of 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, a record since 2004. “Many of these deaths are linked to failure to provide adequate medical care,” said the report. Some died by suicide.

With $45 billion allocated for detention operations, the report said that the detention system could more than triple in size over the next four years.

Snatched off streets

Foster said ICE’s enforcement methods are problematic.

“ICE personnel mostly are now dressed for combat, often carrying lethal weapons and almost always masked to protect their identity. In some cases, they are in plainclothes without any identification,” said Foster.

Rogan, the podcaster, said in a recent discussion with Republican Senator Rand Paul: “You don’t want to have militarized people in the streets just roaming around and snatching people up — many of whom turn out to actually be US citizens who just don’t have their papers on them — are we really going to be the Gestapo ‘where are your papers?’ Is that what we have come to?”

Foster said that “public opinion toward ICE and enforcement has gone from favorable to unfavorable, particularly after the controversial shooting of Renee Good”.

Rogan was blunter: “One of the real problems is now ICE are villains. And now people are looking at them like murderous, military people that are on the streets of our city and they’re masked up, which is also a problem.”

ICE operations have been met with resistance and protests from the public. According to a DHS statement, ICE reported 275 assaults in 2025, a huge increase over 19 reported assaults in 2024. In addition, ICE law enforcement officers experienced 66 vehicular attacks in 2025 compared with only two in 2024.

In a CNN poll done after Good’s fatal shooting, 51 percent of US citizens said they believed ICE enforcement actions are making cities less safe, compared with 31 percent who said ICE makes cities safer.

US Congressman Shri Thanedar introduced The Abolish ICE Act on Jan 15.

“The American public wants immigration enforcement and safe borders, but also wants that accomplished in a lawful and humane way,” Foster said.

2.5 million leave

The Department of Homeland Security said in early December that enforcement operations had led to more than 2.5 million illegal aliens leaving the US.

“DHS has deported more than 605,000 illegal aliens and another 1.9 million have self-deported. Since Jan 20, DHS has arrested more than 595,000 illegal aliens,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

“Illegal aliens are hearing our message to leave now. They know if they don’t, we will find them, we will arrest them, and they will never return.”

The Trump administration has employed a “carrot and stick” strategy to motivate people to leave the country.

In May, the administration imposed a daily fine of $1,000 on individuals who received a final removal order. They were also threatened with having their assets, investments and bank accounts seized.

High-profile deportation cases with severe punishments have also scared migrants into leaving voluntarily.

About 240 noncitizens allegedly linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were moved to a high-security prison in El Salvador in March. Immigration lawyers have alleged migrants from Asian countries and Mexico were forcibly deported to South Sudan.

The administration also implemented incentives in May by giving migrants $1,000 to $3,000 in free air fares to the country of their choice if they leave voluntarily.

The American Enterprise Institute estimated that “net migration was between minus 295,000 and minus 10,000 for the year [2025]”and projected a similar pattern for 2026.