To many progressives, ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is synonymous with President Donald Trump’s brutal and cruel immigration regime.
But to hardliners in the Trump administration bent on carrying out mass deportation, ICE has actually been something of a disappointment.
So they’re increasingly turning to another agency that they view as willing to go faster and harder: the Border Patrol.
Border Patrol agents have already played a major role in the administration’s highly visible and controversial operations in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago over the summer and fall, patrolling residential areas in militarized fashion, and using tactics like tear gas. “A majority of the viral videos you see online are Border Patrol agents,” rather than ICE agents, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin posted on X.
Administration hardliners evidently like what they’ve seen. In a late October “purge,” several leaders of ICE field offices were removed from their posts, with some to be replaced by Border Patrol officials instead.
Some ICE officials, and others sympathetic to their perspective, aren’t thrilled about this, and their anonymously-sourced grievances have spilled out in the press. “Since Border Patrol came to LA in June, we’ve lost our focus, going too hard, too fast, with limited prioritization,” one official complained to Fox News. Another said that “ICE is arresting criminal aliens,” while Border Patrol is “hitting Home Depots and car washes.”
Behind the tension is a fundamental difference in the two agencies’ approaches — one that has major implications for what will unfold in cities going forward.
The typical ICE approach is to have some idea of who is being targeted in advance of an enforcement operation — say, particular names, or a workplace. They get specific information that someone is in the country illegally, or that a workplace is employing people illegally, and then they try to make arrests.
By contrast, the approach of the Border Patrol — stemming from their work at the border — is more akin to going in and trying to impose order on a hostile area. It often involves spotting and questioning people they deem suspicious, or people they inevitably have little information about. (The term “cowboy” frequently comes up when Border Patrol is discussed.)
What we’ve seen in Los Angeles and Chicago in recent months is the Trump administration increasingly using these Border Patrol tactics in American cities. Rather than acting on specific information about targets in advance, they just go to places where they think unauthorized immigrants are and question people they deem suspicious.
This is being done because White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and other hardliners think the typical ICE approach of figuring out who you’re targeting in advance takes too long and isn’t producing enough arrests. They want their crackdown, and they want it now. And the apparent effort to bring a Border Patrol mindset to ICE means we should expect many more scenes of chaos and aggression on city streets going forward.
The internal Trump administration tensions that have led to the Border Patrol’s empowerment
Miller wants to make mass deportation happen, and he’s obsessed with the numbers. He said on Fox News in May that “we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day,” which would mean over 1 million arrests a year.
DOJ lawyers have since claimed in court that this quota is not official administration policy, but the stories of Miller berating officials to make ever more arrests are legion.
One such grilling occurred in May, when Miller summoned ICE officials to Washington and posed them a question that would prove extremely consequential.
Why, he asked, aren’t you at Home Depot?
Miller was voicing frustration with the ICE approach of first, identifying people or businesses to target, and then going to arrest them. That took too long and wasn’t achieving the numbers he wanted. He wanted them, instead, to basically go to where unauthorized immigrants work, live, or congregate — and just go try to grab people.
There’s a tension between this approach and the desire expressed by Trump and others to prioritize deporting the “worst of the worst” — unauthorized immigrants who have committed crimes. Investigating, identifying, and apprehending dangerous criminals takes time. Grabbing brown-skinned Spanish-speaking people off the street, by contrast, is a quicker way to get arrest numbers up, even if it looks a lot like racial profiling.
Miller’s new priorities have been carried out by ICE and Border Patrol, as well as personnel from other agencies who have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement.
But Border Patrol took to them with a particular flair, especially in the Los Angeles and Chicago operations overseen by Gregory Bovino. In dealing with protesters and carrying out operations, Bovino embraced tools like tear gas — including, in at least one recent case, throwing a tear gas canister personally. His militarized exploits have been heavily featured in the administration’s social media propaganda videos, often set to peppy music, that the online MAGA base eats up.
In early October, Bovino’s teams conducted what may be the most shocking and controversial operation yet: a nighttime raid of an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore, in which what seemed to be everyone in the building — including US citizens — was detained for hours. (They have claimed they had information that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua used the building.)
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her top adviser Corey Lewandowski have reportedly become enamored of the Bovino and Border Patrol approach. At the same time, they’ve soured on White House Border Czar Tom Homan, who is more aligned with ICE’s way of thinking. Homan has faced criticism after an August report that he accepted $50,000 in cash in a Cava bag last year, but according to New York magazine, Noem’s relationship with him had already deteriorated because she thought he was going on TV more than her.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol was making arrest after arrest — by October, it had made more arrests during the Chicago operation than ICE had, per CBS News. All this appears to have convinced administration higher-ups that ICE needs more of what Border Patrol has. So we should expect more and more scenes of tense, militarized confrontations in American cities going forward.
Can the Border Patrol approach make mass deportation happen?
Yet whether all this will meaningfully increase deportations is a different question.
Mass deportation is an immense logistical challenge with three main stages. At each stage, there are resource constraints, practical difficulties, and legal roadblocks that the Trump administration is trying to surmount.
The first stage is arresting unauthorized immigrants. The administration has been expanding the number of personnel who can make arrests (through hiring new people and reassigning people from other agencies), while trying to get existing personnel to arrest more (including with these Border Patrol operations in cities).
The second stage is detention — the arrested people must be held somewhere. But detention capacity is limited, so conditions have been overcrowded, and some arrested people have been released out of necessity. (The GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” devoted billions to expanding detention capacity, but implementation has not been so easy, The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reports.)
The final stage is deportation, and getting there often requires approval from backlogged immigration courts, as well as diplomatic consent from another country to accept the deportee — oh, and you need a plane too.
This is the most challenging bottleneck to surmount, but the administration has been trying to do it in various ways, including by circumventing the court system in some cases, or by threatening people that if they don’t agree to be deported, they’ll be sent to some country where they’ve never been.
Border Patrol’s tactics can arrest more people, but by themselves, they won’t necessarily speed up deportations. Then again, they might have at least some impact — by sending the message that the US has become an ugly, unwelcoming, and dangerous place to immigrants, and therefore scaring people enough to leave.
