ICE’s own agents asked to leave ICE in 2018. Congress gave it $110 billion instead.

In 2018, nineteen of ICE’s own top agents wrote a letter to their boss asking to be split off from ICE.

These weren’t protesters. They were the special agents in charge of Homeland Security Investigations – the part of ICE that chases child predators, drug cartels, and human traffickers. They told the Secretary of Homeland Security that the ICE name had turned so toxic that local police departments didn’t want to work with them anymore. Their own agency was getting in the way of catching real criminals.

The letter went nowhere.

ICE is younger than you think. Congress created it in 2003, after 9/11, by breaking up the old immigration service and shuffling the pieces into the new Department of Homeland Security. This country enforced immigration law for generations before ICE existed.

It also has two very different jobs stuffed into one agency. HSI investigates crimes – trafficking, child exploitation, cartel money. The other half, called ERO, does the street arrests, the detention, and the deportations. When you see masked agents pulling a man out of his car after a traffic stop, that’s ERO.

Now the money. ICE’s normal budget was about $10 billion a year. In July 2025, Congress handed it $75 billion extra – making it the biggest-funded law enforcement agency in the country. Last month, Congress added roughly $38 billion more for ICE and funded it through the end of the president’s term, on a 214-212 vote.

None of that money came with rules. Democrats asked for three things – body cameras, no masks, and a judge’s signature on a warrant before agents enter a home. It took two protesters getting killed by federal agents in Minneapolis to even force that debate. Republicans said no to all three and passed the money anyway.

That judge’s signature matters more than it sounds. Most ICE arrest warrants aren’t signed by any judge. They’re administrative warrants – forms the agency fills out for itself. ICE writes its own permission slips.

And Memphis knows exactly how this plays out, because we lived it. After the federal task force arrived in September, ICE street arrests in Shelby County went up sixfold. Almost 9 in 10 of the people ICE grabbed off our streets had no criminal conviction. Only 2% of the task force’s immigration arrests were for violent crime. Across Tennessee, ICE has arrested more than 50 kids – 22 of them under age 10. And 2025 was the deadliest year in ICE custody in more than two decades, with 32 people dying.

A country gets to have immigration laws, and it gets to enforce them. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise, and I’m not either. The fight is over whether the people enforcing them follow the same rules we ask of every other cop in America – show your face, show your badge, get a judge to sign the warrant.

I don’t want to start shouting, “Abolish ICE!” because that lands about as well as “Defund the Police!” These are nuanced issues – and these slogans don’t explain the plan – and we need a plan.

The fix is to take ICE apart the same way Congress put it together. Move HSI – the investigators its own agents wanted to protect – into its own agency, which is exactly what those 19 agents asked for in 2018. Then rebuild civil immigration enforcement from scratch, under rules written into the law: judicial warrants, visible faces and badge numbers, body cameras, no arrest quotas, and an independent watchdog with the power to fire people.

None of this is a small fix. It takes the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and a president’s signature. But Congress built ICE with one bill, so Congress can rebuild it with another. And the House controls the money – or it did, until this Congress handed ICE years of funding in advance with no strings attached, on purpose, to escape its own oversight. That move is exactly the kind of self-dealing I’m running against.

The agency’s own agents told us it was broken in 2018. We should have listened to them.

Sources

1. ICE Criminal Investigators Ask to Be Distanced from Detentions, Deportations (Texas Observer)
2. Seeking a split from ICE, agents say crackdown hurts investigations (Washington Post)
3. Trump signs immigration bill with billions for ICE (NPR)
4. How a $75 billion windfall from Congress has insulated ICE (NPR)
5. What’s In the $70 Billion Bill Funding Immigration Enforcement (Time)
6. Immigration Arrests Surge Under Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force (Institute for Public Service Reporting)
7. Just 2% of Immigration Arrests by Memphis Safe Task Force Were for Violent Crime (ProPublica / MLK50)
8. How the Memphis Safe Task Force Threatens Families and Civil Liberties (ACLU of Tennessee)
9. $75 Billion for ICE, Cuts for Citizens (Public Citizen)