Earlier this month, Congressional Republicans pushed through the passage of their Orwellian titled “Big Beautiful Bill” on a party-line vote. While the massive cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs like SNAP coupled with the unprecedented tax giveaways to billionaires dominated the headlines, this bill also contained a little-noticed provision to provide a whopping $170 billion for President Trump’s immigration agenda, including $75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). To put this in context, this is more money than most countries, including Canada, Italy, and Israel, spend on their military and makes ICE the “highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history.”
Given the rampant lawlessness we have seen from ICE over the past few months, we should all be extremely concerned about what this budget increase will mean for communities across America.
Under Trump, ICE is essentially operating as a lawless paramilitary operation, intended to intimidate Americans—immigrants and citizens alike—with shocking displays of brute force such as the sweep of MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, in which 90 National Guardsmen and dozens of ICE agents, utilizing 17 military Humvees and four tactical vehicles, descended on a mostly empty park, terrifying the few young kids and parents playing together.
We’ve seen the videos. We’ve heard the eyewitness accounts. ICE agents are kidnapping and assaulting people in broad daylight. They are doing so while masked up, refusing to identify themselves, and wearing civilian clothing like jeans and sneakers. They jump out of unmarked vans and tackle, shove, and punch civilians, and frankly, other than the ICE vests or jackets they wear—which have been available for sale on Amazon for $29.99—they often look and act more like gang members than law enforcement agents. Bystanders who have asked for identification or arrest warrants have been assaulted and arrested. Those who seek to film these incidents have been threatened at gunpoint.
Actual police officers follow the law. They wear body cameras and are subject to disciplinary action if they violate the constitutional rights of the civilians they are meant to protect. But this is not the case with ICE agents, who are completely unaccountable and totally out of control. ICE agents have assaulted citizens, elected officials, including members of Congress, and even police officers.
And the reality here is that ICE is making our communities more dangerous, not safer. As podcaster Joe Rogan recently noted, Trump ran on a platform of deporting violent criminals and gang members. In reality, as the right-wing Cato Institute recently found, only 7% of the people being arrested by ICE have ever been convicted of a violent crime. Instead of going after criminals, ICE is targeting peaceful, law abiding immigrants, including those here with permanent residency and student visas, and their families.
Now imagine this same complete contempt for the rule of law and the basic rights of Americans that ICE has demonstrated over the past few months, but with nearly a TENFOLD expansion in funding? We are only a few months into ICE’s systematic mass deportation efforts, and already one in ten Americans (one in five Latinos) knows someone who has been detained or deported. The enormous increase in ICE funding that Republicans just greenlit means that the lawless attacks Californians have been witnessing for months will now be visited on communities across America.
This cannot stand. We must rein in the lawlessness of ICE. That starts by demanding accountability for criminal actions by ICE agents. That’s why I’m leading a letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security to demand answers into the conduct of ICE agents. Americans deserve to know that the federal agents their taxpayer dollars fund are obeying the law and respecting our fundamental rights.
Like so many Americans, I’m the proud son of immigrants. My parents left Korea in search of the promise etched on our Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” These attacks on our immigrant communities are not just an attack on our rule of law, they are also an attack on our most important and cherished American values. And I will continue to fight to protect our Constitution and the constituents I represent.
Dave Min represents California’s 47th congressional district.
