<p>-
- Meet the new national police force</p>
<p>Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNNJuly 9, 2025 at 2:00 AM</p>
<p>US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents attend a pre-enforcement meeting in Chicago on January 26. - Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg/Getty Images</p>
<p>A version of this story appeared in CNN's What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.</p>
<p>The agency of mask-wearing officers who aren't afraid to smash windows, detain lawmakers and pluck nonviolent undocumented immigrants off the street is about to become the best-funded federal police force.</p>
<p>Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already been acting with impunity during President Donald Trump's second term.</p>
<p>Get used to ICE</p>
<p>Video of agents on horseback and in armored personnel vehicles in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles is striking both for its demonstration of militarized power and for the total inability of the city's Mayor Karen Bass to do anything about it.</p>
<p>"They need to leave and they need to leave right now," she told reporters on the scene Monday.</p>
<p>But Trump administration officials feel no need to listen to local authorities in a city like Los Angeles.</p>
<p>"Better get used to us now, because this going to be normal very soon," El Centro Border Patrol Sector Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News on Monday, responding to Bass.</p>
<p>That new normal may come as a shock to Americans unused to a federal national police force operating inside the country.</p>
<p>The megabill Trump signed last week will elevate ICE in the American consciousness and on American streets.</p>
<p>A flood of cash</p>
<p>ICE will have more funding in the coming years than any other federal law enforcement agency, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at pro-immigrant American Immigration Council.</p>
<p>The new law allocates $75 billion for ICE through 2029 to order as many as 10,000 new agents and to build detention facilities for more than 100,000 additional people.</p>
<p>"It makes ICE a higher-funded law enforcement agency than the entire FBI, ATF, DEA, US Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons combined," Reichlin-Melnick explained, after averaging that $75 billion across the next four years, more than doubling ICE's budget in each of those years.</p>
<p>A new part of American life</p>
<p>With all that money and the OK to hire new agents, ICE will become even more visible.</p>
<p>"Most people in the United States are going to experience immigration enforcement for the first time in their lives," predicted David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.</p>
<p>The spectacle will be the point</p>
<p>The future Bier foresees looks like this:</p>
<p>"US citizens being interrogated on the streets about their citizenships; ICE agents in apartment buildings knocking down doors; National Guard troops on the streets blocking traffic. At your workplace, your home, your neighborhood, your park, in a very visible way and intentionally so," he said.</p>
<p>Making raids and actions as visible as possible may be designed to scare immigrants out of the country and deter anyone who might otherwise come.</p>
<p>Bier also anticipates a "mad dash to spend all of this money in the next three years," before the next presidential election.</p>
<p>No longer primarily targeting violent criminals</p>
<p>Already, the pace and intensity of ICE's actions have increased</p>
<p>There was a major spike in the number of ICE arrests in June, to more than 34,000, according to data compiled by the Syracuse University immigration researcher Austin Kocher. At the same time, the number of detentions has risen to more than 50,000.</p>
<p>The profile of the detained population has also changed, according to Kocher. When Trump took office, most detainees had a criminal conviction. Now, a third of detainees may have only a civil immigration violation.</p>
<p>And most of the arrests are taking place inside the country rather than at the border, according to Kocher.</p>
<p>Corners will have to be cut</p>
<p>As ICE begins a hiring and construction frenzy, look for mistakes to be made, according to Garrett Graff, who has written about a similar effort to quickly tighten border security with new border agents after 9/11. At that time, agencies, including ICE, were reorganized under the now-massive Department of Homeland Security.</p>
<p>"What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented," he wrote in his Doomsday Scenario newsletter. "Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well."</p>
<p>There were ultimately stories about corruption and agents recruited by drug cartels.</p>
<p>Now there could be "a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January," Graff wrote.</p>
<p>ICE agents operate outside of the normal judicial system</p>
<p>Immigration enforcement is not criminal law enforcement, which means agents don't have to adhere to the standards of FBI agents or local law enforcement.</p>
<p>"You get an agency which is primarily oriented at non-citizens, but also authorized to arrest citizens at the same time for certain violations of law," Reichlin-Melnick said.</p>
<p>ICE agents have also operated intentionally in anonymity, an adjustment for anyone who expects law enforcement to identify themselves.</p>
<p>The masks frequently worn by agents make ICE seem like the type of secret police that operates in authoritarian regimes. But they are apparently meant to protect agents from doxxing.</p>
<p>"I'm sorry if people are offended by them wearing masks, but I'm not going to let my officers and agents go out there and put their lives on the line, and their family on the line, because people don't like what immigration enforcement is," said ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons during a press conference in Boston in June.</p>
<p>Plain clothes officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement stand in a hallway outside an immigration courtroom at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York on June 6. - Yuki Iwamura/AP</p>
<p>Trump officials also seem ready to arrest local officials if it comes to that. Border czar Tom Homan said anyone, including local and state elected officials, could be arrested by ICE.</p>
<p>"You can protest if you want; you have that First Amendment right," he told CNN's Kaitlan Collins in June. "But when you cross the line of putting your hands on an ICE officer, impeding our enforcement operations, knowingly harboring and concealing illegal alien, that's a crime."</p>
<p>ICE will also begin looking to detain and deport people who committed no crime. Entering the US illegally is a civil offense, which is certainly deportable. But the Trump administration has also moved to remove the legal status of literally millions of migrants, according to Bier.</p>
<p>It has moved to revoke temporary protective status for multiple groups of migrants from Central and South America, including Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.</p>
<p>The Trump administration is now primed to turbocharge efforts to denaturalize, or take citizenship away from, people who immigrated legally to the US.</p>
<p>Bier said the administration will continue looking for new groups to deport.</p>
<p>"The idea that they will ever be satisfied with the number of deportations I think is just preposterous," he said.</p>
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<p>- Meet the new national police force</p> <p>Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNNJuly 9, 2025 at 2:0...
