ICE’s Expanding Authority Under Trump

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Alex Ossola (0:25)

Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, January 25th. I'm Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, the Trump administration's immigration tactics have been on display in Minneapolis. Residents have been pushing back, and it's turned the city into a tinderbox. Now, as immigration officers deploy elsewhere in the country, we're honing in on ICE to understand the changing landscape of what agents are allowed to do and potential challenges to that authority.

Earlier this month, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency sent more than 2,000 people to Minneapolis. According to the Department of Homeland Security, immigration agents have arrested 3,000 people with alleged criminal histories who they say were in the US illegally since mid-December, calling the effort, quote, a huge victory for public safety. However, ICE's increased presence and the shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer earlier this month have sparked protests in the city and across the country, adding to clashes between locals and immigration agents that have swept through US cities over the past year. So it had me wondering, what is ICE actually supposed to do? And how has that changed during President Trump's second term? I discuss these and more questions with Michelle Hackman, who covers immigration policy for the Journal. Michelle, it feels like ICE has been around for a long time, but actually the modern iteration of the agency was only created in the early 2000s. How did it come to be and what was its founding mandate?

Michelle Hackman (2:02)

So ICE was founded in 2003 It existed in another form before then, but after 9-11, the government really revamped its law enforcement and particularly its law enforcement around foreigners and allowing foreigners into the country and separated out this agency to really step up deportations and also investigating foreigners who were using the immigration process to commit crimes.

Alex Ossola (2:32)

And how does ICE differ from other border security, for example?

Michelle Hackman (2:36)

ICE's mandate is really specifically to go find people in the country illegally, arrest them and get them out of the country. So it's interesting because they use a lot of the same law enforcement tactics as most other law enforcement agencies, but their mandate is civil. It's not criminal. If you're here in the country illegally, that technically is not a crime. It's actually like a little bit closer, technically speaking, to getting a parking ticket. It's a civil violation. The consequence of it is deportation. But in the government's sort of really sterile legal parlance, deportation is not supposed to be like a criminal punishment.

Alex Ossola (3:15)

Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the tactics, because that's something that really has come into focus a lot since President Trump started his second term. But I'm curious what kind of training ICE agents receive.

Michelle Hackman (3:27)

So the training is evolving as we speak. Traditionally, an ICE officer is supposed to get something like 16 weeks of training, and that includes everything from learning the basics of immigration law, physical training, law enforcement training, how to use a gun, for example, and also learning to speak Spanish. And this administration, because they're trying to bring on so many new ICE agents, they're basically doubling the size of the agency, have really cut down that training. First of all, they completely eliminated the Spanish requirement. They're telling people, it's totally fine. You can just use a phone app to translate your conversations with people. They've cut down everything, even including the firearms training, is shorter than it used to be. And a lot of the training is actually literally now done online.

Alex Ossola (4:14)

It seems like some of that training is evolving based on what agents are allowed to or expected to do. How have we seen that play out?

Michelle Hackman (4:22)

There are several ways. But critics of ICE have always had this sense that it's a little bit of a rogue agency. But I will say as someone watching ICE, in the past, even under the first Trump administration, largely speaking, the way ICE would operate was a little bit closer to a traditional police agency, where they would put in a decent amount of police work before they try to go arrest someone. They do some work to figure out, okay, we know this person is in the country illegally because they have a final deportation order. They have this address on file with the government. We know who they are. We know where they live. So we're going to go try to get them. Now what's happening more and more is the ICE officers is really being driven by the pressure that they're under to arrest lots of people. And so what we're seeing is they're actually using basic profiling tactics to see if they can't find immigrants a little bit more quickly.