ICE Is Lawless. Time To Put It on a Leash.

Juan Ciscomani, our representative in Congress, has an opportunity to make ICE agents accountable for their actions. Will he take it?

Renee Good was shot by Jonathan Ross at 9:37 a.m. on January 7.  At 9:42 a neighbor who is a physician begged ICE agents who surrounded her car to let him examine her and render help. Agents said no. Paramedics arrived shortly before 10:00 a.m. and determined that she still had a pulse [Source: ABC News].

In other words, a triggered ICE agent put three bullets in a female US citizen who told him seconds earlier that she was not angry at him. Those who surrounded the car and denied access to a doctor ensured she would die. The agency that acts like this needs oversight and accountability.

The mission of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is to conduct criminal investigations, enforce immigration laws, preserve national security, and protect public safety. The agency was born in 2003 as a part of government reorganization after September 11, 2001. While arrests and deportations were always part of the agency’s work, the agents originally prioritized people charged with serious crimes or those who recently crossed the border. Our economy needed workers who would work hard for little money, and so most people who crossed the border, found work, and lived quietly weren’t targeted.

The organization started growing in 2017 as its focus shifted from criminal cases to more aggressive tactics against illegal immigrants. Its agents were involved with family separations as a part of the policy that aimed to prosecute all adults who crossed the southern border without inspection. When ICE apprehended a family with children, the parents were arrested and the children were forcibly taken away and sent to other states. Let’s not forget that no effort was made at that time to keep track of family relationships, leaving parents without knowledge of where their children could be, and that even years later, more than 3,000 children were not reunited with their parents. These actions stopped after a wave of public protests, but the pattern of traumatizing certain groups of people was set [Source: American Immigration Council].

After the 20th of January 2025, ICE was again put in front of immigration enforcement in a very public way. Arrests of workers on farms and in meat processing plants became more common. The agents broke into cars and homes, destroying property of illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and US citizens alike. ICE arrested and quickly transferred hundreds of Venezuelans to a torture prison in El Salvador on a flimsy claim of Tren De Aragua gang association. Several news organizations, including “ProPublica” and  “The Texas Tribune”, investigated this claim and found that most of the deportees had no criminal records and no connections to gang activity.

The list of ICE atrocities did not stop Juan Ciscomani from supporting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that was moving through Congress in May and June 2025. The bill contains $28 billion for ICE that includes a new push for total surveillance of communities with artificial intelligence, more guns, and more agents. The agency expanded its hiring effort before the bill passage, but with the new funds available at the start of the fiscal year in October, it accelerated the push with the new ads featuring images of white settlers and related white nationalist messaging. To meet the staffing goals, the agency has lowered the minimum age of recruits from 21 to 18, is offering a $50,000 sign-on bonus, and has relaxed physical fitness standards. At the same time, training has been shortened from 12 weeks to 47 days [Source: Military.com]. With the aggressive hiring push, the quality of the new recruits is under question. Some cannot pass a background or drug test, about a third cannot pass physical fitness tests, and some have failed the final exam, an open book test [Source: Independent].

In case you were wondering, here is what ICE physical fitness test looks like:

1. Sit ups: 32 sit-ups in 1 minute or less
2. Push Ups: 22 push-ups in 1 minute or less
3. Sprint: 220-yard sprint in 47.73 seconds or less
4. Run: 1.5-mile run in 14 minutes 25 seconds or less

While ICE has been enjoying a new flow of money, it continued honing its skills at terrorizing the general population. In September, ICE raided a Hyundai battery plant under construction and arrested hundreds of Korean workers [Source: CBS News]. The same month saw a raid at an apartment building in Chicago, where even children were handcuffed [Source: ProPublica].

Armed with new fresh recruits, ICE deployed to Minneapolis, which brought us to the killing of Renee Good. We now see the spectacle for what it is: gangs of unfit and unintelligent masked men armed with guns and a belief in absolute immunity of their actions terrorize anyone who doesn’t fit their racist model of “Legacy Americans”. They feel free to pepper spray into cars of families unlucky enough to drive by the site of their actions; to block access to medical help for people affected by chemical irritants; to arrest cooks at a Mexican restaurant where they just ate lunch; to kidnap non-white teenagers working at Target before releasing them, bloodied and crying, a few miles away; to attack bystanders recording their actions, and to smear them as terrorists. They are incentivized to arrest American citizens; every arrest counts towards their 3,000 arrests-a-day quota [Source: The Wall Street Journal]. The ICE force dwarfs Minneapolis police: 3,000 ICE agents vs. 600 police officers.  The administration signaled that their next push will be to Phoenix, or any other city that the administration wants to put under its boot.

The current funding for Department of Homeland Security runs out on January 30. While the ICE budget is contained in the OBBBA, the actual funding still needs to be approved by Congress. As a condition of approval, the funding bill should include the following:

• No qualified immunity for ICE agents
• Require agents to wear visible ID tags and prohibit them from covering their faces
• Prohibit ICE from entering premises and arresting people without judicial warrants
• Restore the minimum age and training duration to the previous standards
• Remove the daily arrest quota system

Congress has an opportunity to curb the lawlessness of ICE activities if it chooses to act. Representative Ciscomani is in a unique position to demonstrate his commitment to his constituents. He should vote NO on any funding bill that does not restrict the daily acts of outrage by ICE agents.