Even though the ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) police force has been around since the Homeland Security Act of 2002, they have recently gained a massive amount of public scrutiny. Today, we’ll be diving into the reasons for this scrutiny and discussing how much of it is justified.
As of last year, there were around 10,000 ICE agents. They did not come into contact with the average American and their involvement was pretty much limited to illegal immigration work and the occasional illegal imported plant or animal.
Illegal immigration has always been an issue. I take the stance that the majority of these people are good, honest people just looking for a better life, but for the sake of our country’s safety and infrastructure, it’s necessary for us to provide a path for them to come here the legal way. Legal immigration benefits our country immensely, and it keeps our boys at ICE free to arrest and deport only the real criminals, instead of an innocent family of four.
When Biden became president, illegal border crossings spiked from 400k a year to 2.2 million a year. This is because there were a lot of changes made to our immigration policy that were meant to help refugees seeking asylum, but the paperwork was fumbled, and it led pretty much anyone who claimed to be oppressed by their home country be granted access to ours.
Obviously, this was an issue and needed to be corrected.
In response, last year Trump expanded funding for ICE by over 800% with his Big Beautiful Bill, and started recruiting for them to enter the streets of our cities to arrest and deport what was advertised to be only the illegal immigrants who were violent criminals.
In the past year, ICE numbers have more than doubled to meet Trump’s goals, which is concerning when you consider the training time necessary to be in a law enforcement agency. Normal police department training periods are usually between 3-7 months, because there are so many things to learn before it’s safe for you to face the public armed with a gun.
The new ICE training program is now only 42-47 days long, with the incentive to get as many boots on the ground as fast as possible. Then two weeks ago, JD Vance stated that the ICE police force has “absolute immunity” to act in American cities. This is a recipe for disaster. I wouldn’t want an untrained police force on the streets in our area either. Especially not one who could commit crimes and not be held accountable.
Now, on to Minneapolis.
Late last year, Trump sent these new ICE agents to several major cities with a quota of 3000 arrests per day.
On December 26, YouTube Nick Shirley posted a video that I’m sure most of you have seen by now exposing the fraud in Minnesota daycares by Somalian immigrants. This YouTuber is claiming that the daycares don’t actually exist and that the immigrants are receiving money from the government to care for the children who don’t actually attend.
The video itself was riddled with inconsistencies, such as the daycare being closed for the day at the time he visited, and claiming that there’s no kids there because the woman at the front desk wouldn’t admit him, a man unrelated to any of the kids, to the room to see the children. But, nonetheless, it spread like wildfire and caught the attention of Trump just days later.
Trump, in reaction to an unproven YouTube video, paused all federal funding for childcare for five states, causing a lot of problems for small business owners in childcare. Then he sent 2000 more ICE agents to Minnesota.
The governor of Minnesota has maintained that they are investigating if there is any truth to this matter privately and that the Somalian immigrants who own daycares are legal immigrants, so ICE does not have the jurisdiction to arrest them, and they have asked ICE to leave their streets because they claim that ICE is doing more harm than good there.
And they’re not wrong.
There is footage of the untrained ICE agents making bad decisions in Minneapolis all over social media. There is a video of a pastor stopping to pray for ICE and them responding by shooting him in the head with a rubber bullet. There are several of ICE assaulting people, pushing them to the ground, taking their phones away, and pepper spraying them. It’s easy to see why the public are protesting their misconduct. We would be reacting the same way if outsiders came in and began terrorizing our parish.
Regular police barely have the mental restraint to handle angry protestors peacefully, much less these brand new ICE agents. But protesting is part of our First Amendment rights, and it’s important that people be allowed to practice it. Sure, people shouldn’t harm property, but that’s worth an arrest, not the death penalty.
Now, instead of admitting that they cut corners in training these agents and that they are now a danger to society, the federal government is doubling down on the choices they make, spinning the narrative to sound like the ICE agents were in the right. In the most recent shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti, Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino described him as approaching ICE with a 9mm handgun, claiming he “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
Then the videos come out, and he is only holding a phone and trying to help another protestor up who was pushed down by ICE. His protesting might have been a problem to them in the past, but at the time of his death he was disarmed, on his knees, and was shot in the back.
It would be okay for the government to admit that some ICE officers made a mistake and hold them accountable for an isolated incident like this, while still supporting their work overall. But we should not accept our government blatantly lying to us and claiming him to be a domestic terrorist to cover up their shortcomings.
We also do not need to let this become the government’s reason to take away our 2nd Amendment rights. Some government officials have suggested due to this incident that people should not have the right to legally bear arms at a protest, which would go against our 2nd amendment rights. It is an extremely hypocritical take for them to declare that Kyle Rittenhouse was within his rights to carry a gun at a protest, but Alex Pretti wasn’t. I will always oppose any side, left or right, if they try to take away our gun rights.
Because of the biased reporting on this and other situations, we need to be wary of anything we see on the news until we have the evidence in our hands.
Again I would like to clarify that I am not opposed to ICE existing, and I respect our law enforcement enough to state that the corners being cut in ICE training is an insult to our law enforcement providers who have worked hard for their positions and are held accountable to a higher standard than the public. Unless our government admits they made a mistake in taking any available warm bodies and sending them into the field with guns and minimal training, more tragedies will happen. It’s time to hold people accountable and call for a change to how ICE is currently operating without moral restrictions.
Taryn Ogletree is a local small business owner and author with previous experience of several years in finance.