An Exploration of ICE, Its Power, and What Its Recent Actions Mean for the Future of the United States

By: Adrian Khodavardar

In 2008, Mark Lyttle was detained by immigration authorities despite repeatedly asserting his United States citizenship. ICE records identified him as deportable. He was ultimately expelled to Mexico and left to navigate Central America alone, relying on shelters and strangers to survive. Years later, a federal court found that the government had violated his constitutional rights. Lyttle’s case is extreme, but it is not anomalous. It illustrates how immigration enforcement, when exercised with broad discretion and weak safeguards, can entangle citizens and non-citizens alike in a system with limited avenues for immediate correction.

In recent years, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement has moved from the margins of federal bureaucracy to the centre of national political life. Interior arrests, workplace raids, and coordinated enforcement actions have increased in scale and visibility. These operations now routinely occur far from the border, in residential neighbourhoods, outside courthouses, and at places of employment. As a result, a longstanding but unresolved question has returned with renewed urgency: how much coercive power should a federal enforcement agency wield inside the country, and what mechanisms meaningfully constrain that power?

ICE was created in 2003, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, as part of the Department of Homeland Security. Its mandate fused immigration enforcement with transnational crime investigation, reflecting a post 9/11 security framework that emphasised prevention and control. For much of its early existence, the agency operated with limited public attention. That relative obscurity has faded. Expanded detention funding, renewed emphasis on interior enforcement, and the reactivation and growth of programmes such as 287(g), which allow local police to perform certain immigration functions, have significantly broadened ICE’s reach into domestic life.

This shift is not merely rhetorical. It is structural. Executive policy changes reducing the use of prosecutorial discretion, expanded data sharing between local law enforcement and federal immigration databases, and political pressure to produce visible enforcement outcomes have altered institutional incentives. ICE’s authority has expanded not through a single dramatic act, but through cumulative decisions that prioritise speed, volume, and visibility over restraint.

With that expansion have come persistent concerns about oversight and accountability. ICE operates largely outside municipal control and is insulated from direct democratic feedback. Judicial review is often delayed until after detention has occurred. Internal accountability mechanisms remain opaque. Reports from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General have documented failures in detention oversight, inadequate medical care, and systemic weaknesses in how custody decisions are reviewed. Federal courts have repeatedly addressed cases of mistaken detention, including lawful permanent residents and citizens held for days or weeks before errors were corrected.

The consequences extend beyond undocumented immigrants. When United States citizens and legal residents are detained due to database errors, racial profiling, or misidentification, immigration enforcement begins to function as a parallel system of domestic policing, one in which constitutional protections can be unevenly applied. The distinction between immigration control and ordinary law enforcement blurs. When that line erodes, so does confidence that federal power is meaningfully constrained within the interior of the country.

Supporters of aggressive enforcement argue that such measures are necessary to uphold the rule of law, deter unauthorised migration, and maintain national sovereignty. These arguments are not frivolous. Any state has a legitimate interest in enforcing its laws and controlling its borders. But acknowledging that interest does not resolve the core concern raised by ICE’s current trajectory. The issue is not whether immigration law should be enforced, but whether the methods used establish precedents that weaken civil liberties more broadly. Powers normalised in the immigration context have a long history of migrating into other domains of governance.

What distinguishes the current moment is the political framing of enforcement itself. ICE operations are increasingly presented as symbols of strength and order, amplified through media coverage and political rhetoric. Raids serve communicative as well as administrative purposes. They signal resolve to supporters and deterrence to perceived outsiders. Enforcement becomes spectacle. Executive power is not only exercised. It is performed.

The risks of this approach extend beyond immigration policy. History suggests that authorities justified by security, emergency, or exception tend to expand over time. Once aggressive tactics are normalised in one area, they become easier to deploy elsewhere. The erosion of norms around proportionality, transparency, and civilian protection in immigration enforcement therefore poses a broader challenge to democratic governance.

This expansion has provoked sustained resistance. Protests, litigation, and legislative efforts to limit cooperation with ICE reflect a growing discomfort with unchecked federal authority.

For many Americans, the debate is no longer solely about border control. It is about the kind of state power that operates in their communities, and the limits placed upon it.

ICE’s trajectory now functions as a test of institutional restraint. Congress must decide whether to impose clearer statutory limits and strengthen oversight mechanisms. Courts must continue to enforce constitutional boundaries with urgency rather than deference. The public must determine whether efficiency and spectacle are acceptable substitutes for accountability.

If current trends continue unchecked, the likely outcome is deeper mistrust between communities and the state, along with weakened norms governing the domestic use of force. If reform occurs through clearer limits, stronger oversight, and enforceable protections, it may reaffirm a foundational democratic principle: that accountability is not an obstacle to security, but the condition that makes security legitimate. In that sense, the future of ICE is inseparable from the future of American democracy itself.

Image: CNN