Does ICE Go Beyond Immigration Enforcement?

ICE emblem on an American flag — Photo: chrisdorney / Shutterstock

The fight over Abdul El-Sayed’s claim that “ICE has nothing to do with immigration” is really a fight over what the agency has become: formally an immigration-enforcement body, functionally a sprawling domestic security apparatus whose tactics and footprint far exceed traditional border control.

Key Points

ICE was created after 9/11 explicitly as a federal immigration-enforcement agency with interior authority to detain and deport.
Its core operational arm, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), is built around arrests, detention, and removals of people accused of civil immigration violations.
Critics like Abdul El-Sayed argue that, in practice, ICE’s broad powers and tactics have turned it into a paramilitary-style domestic force that normalizes aggressive state violence rather than simply enforcing immigration rules.
The dispute is less about ICE’s formal mandate than about whether its behavior, culture, and impact on communities are compatible with ordinary law enforcement in a constitutional democracy.
Understanding this distinction is essential to judging abolition versus reform proposals and to separating campaign rhetoric from the institutional record.

Where Abdul El-Sayed’s Claim Comes From

Abdul El-Sayed has been unusually blunt among mainstream Democratic candidates in his description of ICE. In speeches, interviews, and campaign materials, he calls ICE a “paramilitary force,” “government thugs on our streets,” and an agency that “cannot be reformed, cannot be retrained, and has to be abolished.” In a widely shared line, he declares that ICE is “not about immigration… not about the southern border… [but] about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets.”

Pressed on how he would handle illegal immigration if ICE were abolished, El-Sayed distinguishes between border enforcement and interior policing. He argues that Customs and Border Protection should secure the southern border, while a new, tightly constrained civil agency would handle immigration administration without the militarized posture he associates with ICE.[NBC transcript] He grounds his critique in specific incidents—such as fatal ICE shootings of legal residents he cites on Pod Save America—which he presents as evidence of a culture of impunity and normalized state violence rather than isolated misconduct.[Pod Save America summary]

ICE’s Formal Mission: Immigration Enforcement at Its Core

On the institutional record, El-Sayed’s absolute formulation—“ICE has nothing to do with immigration”—is inaccurate. ICE’s own descriptions, and those of independent explainers, are unequivocal: immigration enforcement is central to what the agency is and does. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states that ICE’s duties are carried out through more than 400 federal statutes and focus on “smart immigration enforcement, humane detention, preventing terrorism, and combating the illegal movement of people and goods.” USAFacts summarizes its mission as preserving American security and public safety “mainly within US borders, by enforcing immigration laws,” primarily by detaining and deporting unauthorized immigrants.

Structurally, ICE is organized around two primary components: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). HSI targets transnational criminal networks—smuggling, trafficking, trade and customs offenses—while ERO is responsible for identifying, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigration violators inside the United States. Law Cornell and GovFacts, among others, make the same point: ERO runs detention centers, executes deportation orders, and manages removal logistics, while HSI handles investigative work. Britannica and DHS both describe ICE as an agency enforcing laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration, but the operational examples they provide—detention, removals, interior arrests—are overwhelmingly immigration-related.

Historically, the Migration Policy Institute notes that ICE was created in 2003, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as part of the new DHS architecture and was “the first-ever agency dedicated exclusively to immigration enforcement,” with a mandate centered on interior enforcement: detention, deportation, and criminal investigations. Quartz reports that roughly 8,000 ICE agents are dedicated to locating, arresting, detaining, and removing undocumented immigrants, while HSI carries the agency’s broader anti-terror and transnational-crime mission. Taken together, these sources show an agency whose formal design and staffing are anchored in immigration enforcement—even if it also touches customs, trade, and security.

How ICE Operates Inside the United States

To understand why critics nonetheless frame ICE as a coercive domestic force, you have to look at how its powers work on the ground. ICE agents have defined legal authority to stop, detain, and arrest people they suspect are in the country unlawfully, often without a warrant in certain contexts. BBC notes that ICE is responsible for enforcing immigration regulations, investigating unauthorized immigration, and facilitating the removal of undocumented individuals from the United States; its agents can use force in making arrests and removals, subject to internal guidelines that are not fully transparent to the public.

Interior enforcement means ICE is not simply a border-patrol agency. The Guardian and Slate emphasize that ICE does not oversee the physical border—that is Customs and Border Protection’s job—but instead focuses on interior enforcement: ERO officers identify, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants who are already living inside the country. That includes arrests at homes, workplaces, courthouses, and hospitals, along with management of a national network of immigration detention facilities. ForumTogether’s fact sheet underscores that ERO oversees adult and family detention, runs deportation flights, and has increasingly focused on interior enforcement in recent years.

Legally, ICE operates in the civil-immigration space. Many of the people it arrests are not accused of crimes beyond unauthorized presence, which is a civil violation under federal law. Yet the tools ICE uses—armed agents, tactical gear, detention centers, rapid transport to remote facilities—look and feel closer to criminal policing or military policing than to a typical civil administrative process such as tax enforcement or licensing. This gap between the civil nature of many offenses and the coercive style of enforcement is a key driver of the “paramilitary” critique.

Paramilitary Versus Administrative: Purpose and Behavior

The sharpest version of El-Sayed’s argument is not about legal mission statements; it is about institutional behavior. From that vantage, ICE’s placement inside DHS, its origin in the post-9/11 security build-out, and its broad authorities create a hybrid identity: officially a law-enforcement agency enforcing immigration and customs law, practically a domestic security force with wide latitude to use violence against largely disenfranchised populations.

Critics point to several features. First, detention: ICE manages a vast network of detention facilities, many run by private contractors, where migrants can be held for prolonged periods pending removal. While this article’s evidence set does not include inspector-general reports or systematic abuse audits, numerous external investigations (outside the provided citations) have documented poor conditions and due-process concerns. Second, visibility: immigration raids, tactical gear, and high-profile arrests in communities that otherwise rarely see federal armed agents contribute to the sense that ICE normalizes militarized presence in everyday life.

Third, political responsiveness: Quartz notes that ICE’s enforcement framework changes with each administration, shaped by presidential executive actions and policy memos. Under some administrations, prioritization narrows to serious criminals; under others, “any removable alien” becomes fair game. That flexibility, critics argue, allows political leadership to turn immigration enforcement into an instrument of broader ideological or electoral agendas—targeting particular communities, amplifying fear, or staging high-visibility raids for symbolic effect.

None of the institutional summaries in this evidence set refute the possibility that ICE’s enforcement style is unusually aggressive or security-focused compared with other civil agencies; they simply describe its powers and mission in neutral terms. Nor do they supply internal training manuals, use-of-force doctrines, or body-camera records that would demonstrate either that ICE is behaving like ordinary law enforcement or that it has crossed into paramilitary territory.[Side A, points 9–10; Side B, points 8, 12] This evidentiary gap leaves room for sharply divergent interpretations based on ideology, lived experience, and trust in federal institutions.

Why “Nothing to Do With Immigration” Overreaches

From an evidentiary standpoint, the strongest part of El-Sayed’s critique concerns behavior, culture, and impact: he is on solid ground arguing that ICE has used immigration as a premise for aggressive, sometimes deadly enforcement; that its remit and tactics go far beyond border control; and that its placement inside a post-9/11 security framework blurs the line between civil administration and militarized policing. Those claims are consistent with both official mission descriptions and mainstream explanations of how ICE functions.

The weakest part is his absolute phrasing. Official DHS materials, USAFacts, Britannica, and multiple legal explainers all anchor ICE’s identity in immigration enforcement. ICE enforces removal orders, runs detention centers, executes immigration arrests, and investigates immigration-related crime; much of its staffing and budget are dedicated to those tasks. Saying that ICE has “nothing to do with immigration” is plainly contradicted by these records. A more accurate statement would be that ICE’s immigration mandate has been fused with a broader security posture that, in practice, prioritizes control and punishment over fair and humane administration.

In other words, immigration is both the formal mission and the operational focal point of ICE, but the way that mission is pursued is what makes the agency controversial. Critics argue that ICE uses immigration law as a lever to deploy state violence and normalize fear among targeted communities; defenders see it as a necessary enforcement tool to uphold the integrity of the immigration system and national security. Both sides, however, tacitly accept that immigration enforcement is central; the disagreement lies in how that enforcement is conducted and to what ends.

Abolition Versus Reform: What the Evidence Supports

El-Sayed’s abolition stance positions ICE as irredeemable and calls for replacing it with a new civil agency that enforces immigration law without militarized tactics.[Pod Save America summary; Hook Global summary] Others in his race support keeping ICE but “forcing it back toward its stated mission” through oversight, funding leverage, and stricter accountability—essentially arguing that the problem is deviation from the mission, not the mission itself.

The existing evidence base—the mix of institutional summaries and critical commentary—strongly supports three conclusions. First, ICE is an immigration-enforcement agency by design: abolishing it would mean dismantling the current infrastructure of interior immigration enforcement, detention, and removal, not merely renaming it. Second, the agency has unusually broad authorities and a security-inflected culture that make its operations feel more like paramilitary policing than like routine civil administration, especially in the communities most affected. Third, there is insufficient publicly cited primary-source documentation in this record (internal directives, use-of-force data, division-level workload audits) to prove decisively whether abolition is necessary or whether deep structural reform could realign ICE with constitutional norms.

For voters and policymakers, the key analytic move is to separate rhetoric from structure. When a candidate says “ICE has nothing to do with immigration,” the literal claim is false, but the underlying critique—that immigration enforcement has been subordinated to a broader project of domestic security and control—is not easily dismissed. The choice between abolition and reform ultimately turns on judgments about whether a post-9/11 security-born agency with this mission, culture, and toolset can be fundamentally repurposed, or whether, as El-Sayed insists, the only honest path is to end it and build something different in its place.

How to Think About ICE Going Forward

For an informed citizen, the most productive way to engage this debate is to keep two lenses in view at once. Through the first, ICE is what its statutes and org charts say it is: a federal law-enforcement agency under DHS that enforces immigration and customs laws, runs detention and removal, and investigates transnational crime. Through the second, ICE is what its presence in your community feels like: armed agents, detention buses, raids, and the credible threat of sudden removal for neighbors and co-workers whose legal status is precarious.

Any serious conversation about immigration policy needs to accept the first lens as fact and interrogate the second lens as politics and ethics. That means demanding primary-source transparency—workload audits, use-of-force records, detention conditions, internal training materials—and evaluating whether the enforcement we have matches the constitutional democracy we claim to be. Only then can claims like El-Sayed’s be judged not just as campaign rhetoric, but against a full picture of how immigration enforcement in the United States actually works.