ICE Was Built to Go Rogue. Trump Just Took the Leash off.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

So right on cue—for the second week in a row—I’m back at my keyboard making a last-minute edit because federal immigration enforcement has killed another person in Minnesota.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti is dead after being shot by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, and the first thing the Trump administration did—again—was roll out a version of events that asks you to ignore your own eyes. The official line leans on “self-defense,” but video, eyewitness accounts, and even Gov. Tim Walz’s reaction after reviewing footage point in a very different direction. This is the part where I’m supposed to pretend the truth is unknowable, that we all just need to “wait for more information,” while the spin machine gets a head start. I’m going to write about this in fuller detail soon.

I saw that USA Today headline about Renée Good’s father being a Trump fan, and I had the same reaction a lot of you probably did: Wait… so now we’re doing character witness updates for the dead? And that little detail—who her father liked, who he voted for, what bumper stickers were on his car—shouldn’t matter at all. A woman is still dead. An ICE agent still pulled the trigger. But the headline made one thing painfully clear: the way Washington talks about ICE depends on whether the victims can be framed as “acceptable,” “relatable,” or conveniently adjacent to somebody’s political tribe. That’s not public safety. That’s PR triage.

And it got me thinking about the centrist framing I keep hearing: “What ICE is doing right now is really, really bad … but we shouldn’t ‘abolish’ ICE.” I’ve heard versions of it from the center, from cable news types, and—if we’re being honest—from some Democrats who keep treating ICE like it’s a basically normal agency that is merely having a rough patch. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, urged Trump to pull ICE agents out of U.S. cities after the Minneapolis killing, warning that raids were “terrorizing communities” and were dangerous. But even in that posture—condemn the tactics, plead for a pullback—you can still feel the carefulness, the reluctance to say the obvious part out loud: this agency has been a problem on purpose for a long time. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has used the language of “major reform” for ICE and DHS in recent comments, which is at least an acknowledgment that something is deeply wrong—but it also quietly smuggles in the idea that the core thing is fine if we just tweak the knobs.

If you’ve been following me from before Lincoln Square, before I became a Substack bestseller, you already know this about me: I am not a fan of ICE. Never have been. Never will be. I wrote about what ICE did in Los Angeles during Trump’s first term years ago, and I didn’t “discover” the agency’s cruelty in 2026 like it’s a new hobby. I’m consistent on this because ICE has been consistently what it is.

And here’s the piece Democrats—especially the “let’s be reasonable” wing—seem to be having a hard time swallowing: Donald Trump didn’t get into the White House and magically transform a respectable agency into a trash organization. What Trump did was take a trash organization and, through the miracle of Trump magic pixie dust, make it worse—louder, more reckless, more performative, more trigger-happy, more indifferent to consequences. The difference is not that Bush-era ICE was “good” and Trump-era ICE “went rogue.” The difference is that one era wrapped the cruelty in bureaucratic restraint, and the other era treats cruelty like a campaign rally.

So when we talk about ICE’s origins, we have to tell the truth plainly: ICE was founded under George W. Bush. I know a lot of people in Washington don’t love saying that out loud, because next to Trump, Bush gets repackaged as a choir boy—like the only thing he ever did wrong was mispronounce “nuclear” and look confused at a door handle. However, a lot of evil came out of that administration: the catastrophic failures surrounding 9/11, the forever-war machinery that followed, the unnecessary Iraq War that even many of the people who sold it now admit was based on lies or fantasy-grade intelligence, and the cultural permission structure that allowed Middle Easterners, South Asians, Sikhs, and anybody who looked “close enough” to be treated like walking probable cause.

And yes, the public justification was “stopping terrorism.” I’m not naïve about the reality that nation-states have to monitor threats. But the Bush-era “security” posture also functioned as a license to racially profile—with a straight face, in a suit, with a flag pin, and with the kind of polite language that lets cable news hosts nod along like they’re discussing zoning laws.

One of the clearest examples—one that matters for this ICE origin story—is NSEERS: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. This was the “special registration” program created after 9/11 that required certain noncitizen men and boys (ages 16 and up) from designated countries to register, be fingerprinted, photographed, and repeatedly report to the government. It overwhelmingly targeted people from Muslim-majority countries and the broader Middle East/North Africa region. The results were as ugly as you’d expect: tens of thousands complied, thousands were placed into removal proceedings, families were disrupted—and the program became infamous not for catching terrorists, but for sweeping up people on technicalities and targeting communities based on nationality and religion. Even years later, immigrant-rights organizations and civil liberties groups pointed to the same bottom line: NSEERS produced fear and deportations, not meaningful counterterrorism success.

That matters because it’s part of the blueprint. The potential for ICE to become what it is right now was always there. It’s been there from inception. And the truly uncomfortable truth—yes, fact-checking included—is that ICE did not appear in a vacuum where only Republicans signed the paperwork and everybody else was asleep at the wheel. ICE came into existence through the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 passed with bipartisan votes: the Senate passed it 90–9, and the House passed it 295–132. That means some Democrats, in the political climate of the time, gave the greenlight for the DHS mega-structure that ICE would live inside. People can argue about intent, fear, public pressure, and the emotional reality of that moment in American history—and I’ll even grant that plenty of lawmakers were acting out of panic, not malice. But “panic” is not a magic eraser. We’re all coming to terms with the downstream consequences now.

And here’s where the centrist nostalgia kicks in. Because a lot of traditional Democrats—and especially the ones who socialize with the Georgetown Republican class—are friends with Bush-world people, or at least friends with the idea of Bush as a “normal” Republican. Some of them long for the days when Bush was the worst Republicans had to offer, because it was easier to argue with that kind of evil. It was evil that still cared about the optics of being seen as evil.

That’s the real difference between Bush and Trump, and frankly between Trump and most Republicans in D.C.: they knew the art of subtlety. Be cruel, but not too obviously cruel. Put in policies that disproportionately hammer brown communities, but also tell them, “Hey, if you’re good and you come the ‘right way,’ you can still be part of the American dream.” Make them audition for their humanity. Make them perform gratitude. Make citizenship feel like a reality show where the prize is not being treated like a threat.

Republicans have said the quiet part out loud for decades when they thought it was politically useful. The quote that gets repeated—often attributed to Reagan—is some version of “Hispanics are Republicans; they just don’t know it yet.” The cleanest way to state this without mangling attribution is: it’s widely credited to Reagan-era Latino outreach lore and often connected to Reagan’s strategist Lionel Sosa recounting the sentiment, even when the exact phrasing and provenance get messy. The point isn’t whether Reagan said it into a microphone with a teleprompter behind him. The point is the strategy it represents: hurt you with policy, flatter you with rhetoric, and then act shocked when you notice you’re bleeding.

Trump doesn’t do subtlety. Trump doesn’t do the “come the right way” pantomime as anything more than a prop. He does domination. He does spectacle. He does the kind of state violence that wants to be filmed because it plays well on the internet. Which brings us back to Renée Good.

When the killing happened in Minneapolis on January 7, the early posture from the Trump administration and its allies leaned into the familiar playbook: treat the victim like a threat, justify the use of force as inevitable, frame the agent as the endangered hero doing a dangerous job. Then the story developed, more reporting came out, and the public outrage didn’t evaporate on schedule. And suddenly we get this pivot: Trump publicly suggesting that ICE agents will “make mistakes.”

“Mistakes.”

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ICE Terrorizes Los Angeles While Trump Cheers From the Sidelines

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Think about how degrading that word is in this context. You “make mistakes” when you forget a meeting, when you send the email to the wrong group chat, when you say “reply all” and instantly regret being born. “Mistakes” is what you call it when you want to emotionally launder what looks, to a lot of reasonable observers, like a killing by an armed federal agent. And the whiplash gets worse when reporting highlights that Trump’s tone softened after learning the victim’s father was a supporter—because that’s the tell. That’s the slip. That’s the part where the humanity of the victim gets weighed on a partisan scale.

Now, to be responsible and factual: prosecutors and investigators determine criminal charges, and we don’t get to skip legal standards just because we’re angry. But we also don’t have to play dumb. The agent who shot Renée Good has been identified in court records and reported by multiple outlets as Jonathan Ross, even as DHS played games with basic transparency and didn’t initially release his name publicly. If Trump wants to be taken with even a modicum of seriousness when he pretends to care about “law and order,” then accountability can’t be optional. Ross’s bodycam and any surveillance footage need to be produced, the chain of command needs to be clear, the rules of engagement need to be on the table, and the jurisdictional turf war needs to stop. Minnesota should be free to run its own investigation without federal political interference. And the optics of the federal government investigating itself while federal officials spin the story in real time is exactly why people don’t trust the process.

And this is where the centrist line—“ICE is doing bad things right now, but we can’t get rid of it”—collapses under the weight of reality. Because ICE has spent years proving it cannot be trusted with power in the very environments where trust is necessary for public safety.

Look at what ICE had to be told by a court not to do in Southern California: stop using deceptive ruses to get into people’s homes, including impersonating local police or other non-federal authorities. That’s not a minor paperwork issue. That’s an agency undermining the credibility of local law enforcement and coercing compliance by exploiting fear—so much so that it became the subject of major litigation and a settlement restricting those tactics. If your operational strategy requires cosplay to function, you’re not doing “security.” You’re doing intimidation.

Look at Chicago and the broader Midwest: ICE ended up under a consent decree after litigation over warrantless arrests and vehicle stops—again, not because activists were bored, but because constitutional boundaries apparently needed to be written in giant letters and taped to the agency’s forehead. The fact that an agency with the power to arrest people can repeatedly stumble into “we needed a federal judge to tell them this isn’t okay” territory is the entire argument against treating ICE like a normal institution that simply needs better branding.

And then there’s the nationwide pattern—workplace raids that detonate communities, separate parents from children, and treat human beings like collateral damage in a political messaging campaign. The 2019 Mississippi poultry-plant raids are still one of the most glaring examples: hundreds of workers detained in a single day, families shattered, kids left waiting, communities traumatized. That wasn’t a “mistake.” That was policy as performance.

Even when ICE isn’t pulling triggers, the detention apparatus around it has been repeatedly criticized for conditions, oversight failures, and basic violations of standards—problems documented not only by advocacy groups but by inspectors and government accountability reporting over time. And when federal immigration enforcement collides with civil unrest—like what we’ve seen in Minneapolis after Good’s killing and now again after Pretti—reporting has raised serious concerns about aggressive tactics by federal agents and whether they’re even properly trained for crowd control and de-escalation.

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That last point matters for the thing a lot of people keep trying to insist: that ICE is necessary because a nation-state must protect borders and monitor international threats. Fine. I’m not arguing that borders don’t exist. I’m not arguing that governments don’t have legitimate security responsibilities. I’m saying we cannot keep doing that work through ICE. There is too much taint on that acronym, and the record is too consistent to treat it like an unfortunate deviation.

ICE’s own public mission statement describes its role as protecting America through criminal investigations and immigration enforcement tied to national security and public safety. But what ICE has demonstrated—again and again—is that it can’t be trusted to police domestic spaces without escalating, it can’t be trusted to treat communities as anything other than enemy terrain, and it can’t even be trusted to consistently respect constitutional boundaries without court supervision. That’s not a “PR problem.” That’s culture and an institutional identity.

And to the people who keep reaching for the comforting story—“This was fine until Trump corrupted it”—I need you to be serious. Trump didn’t invent the culture that made NSEERS possible. Trump didn’t invent the post-9/11 political atmosphere where entire communities were treated as suspicious by default. Trump didn’t invent the bipartisan appetite for creating enormous security bureaucracies with vague mandates and weak oversight. Trump is not the origin story. Trump is the accelerant. Trump is the part where the already-present cruelty stops pretending it’s embarrassed.

If Bush-era security policy was evil in a suit, Trump-era security policy is evil in merch. Bush did cruelty with a press secretary’s calm voice and a “we regret any inconvenience” email tone. Trump does cruelty like he’s live-streaming it for engagement. But the throughline is the same: the people who get targeted are the same communities, the same neighborhoods, the same “close enough” faces who have to prove they’re not a threat while their rights get treated like optional features.

And that’s why the centrist appeal to “don’t abolish ICE” rings hollow. Because it quietly assumes ICE was once something worth keeping. It wasn’t. The foundation was rotten. The early years were built in a political climate that rewarded profiling and institutionalized suspicion. And the “guardrails” people talk about? Those were never real guardrails. They were manners. They were messaging. They were the illusion of control.

So where does that leave us, right now, in January 2026?

It leaves us watching an administration shift its language in real time—moving from posturing about threats and justifications to shrugging about “mistakes,” while Democrats argue about whether criticizing ICE too harshly might make someone in a donor zip code uncomfortable. It leaves us with an agency whose defenders keep insisting it’s necessary for safety while reporting continues to raise alarms about training, escalation, and accountability in exactly the scenarios where professionalism is supposed to matter most.

And it leaves us with the bigger truth that a lot of people—including some Democrats—don’t want to face: the potential for ICE to become exactly what it is today has always been there. From inception. From design. From the moment we decided that “security” could mean “treat entire nationalities like suspects,” and then built an enforcement machine inside that logic. And now, with Alex Jeffrey Pretti added to the list, it’s getting harder for even the professional fence-sitters to pretend this is a string of unfortunate one-offs instead of the point.

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Before I get to the end, I need to say his name again—because this isn’t a “developing situation,” it’s a developing pattern. Alex Jeffrey Pretti is dead, and I’m beyond tired of watching federal agencies treat human life like a bullet point in a press strategy. I’m tired of the instant reflex to justify, to sanitize, to launder the story before the public even finishes watching the footage. I’m tired of the word games—“incident,” “operation,” “self-defense,” “procedure”—the kind of language that exists for one purpose: to put distance between the public and the violence being done in its name. I’m tired of officials acting offended that people are upset, as if the real problem is our tone instead of the body on the ground. And I’m tired of having to write a new sentence every week that basically translates to: another person is dead, and the government wants you to pretend this is normal. Alex Jeffrey Pretti deserved to go home. His family deserved to never be thrust into this nightmare. He deserved to be more than a name we repeat only after the damage is done. Say his name: Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

We’ve all had that one thing we kept trying to keep alive: the “reliable” car that suddenly needs a new transmission every other month, the “trusty” laptop that sounds like it’s about to achieve liftoff if you open two tabs, the “it’s fine, I can stretch it another year” appliance that turns every repair into a subscription plan. At some point you stop romanticizing it and you admit the obvious: the money you’re pouring into it is more expensive than replacing it. Except in ICE’s case, it was never even good quality to begin with. It didn’t “age poorly.” It started poorly.

And now the bill for pretending otherwise is being paid in fear, in rights violations, in communities living under siege, and in dead bodies we’re told not to get too upset about as long as we can file them under “mistakes.”