ICE: Authority Without Jurisdiction

ICE does not have general law enforcement authority over the public. They are not supposed to engage resident citizens under any circumstances. That is not a hot take. That is the law. Their job is civil immigration enforcement, not criminal policing. As the American Immigration Council explains, “ICE officers do not have the same broad authority as state or local police officers to enforce criminal laws unrelated to immigration” (American Immigration Council).

When ICE engages citizens, they are operating outside their job duties and beyond their jurisdiction. This is not speculative. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General has found “inconsistent training and understanding among ICE officers regarding arrest authority,” leading to predictable overreach (United States, DHS OIG 2). When an agency does not even internally understand its limits, violations are not accidents …they are outcomes.

Civil liberties organizations have documented ICE and other DHS components detaining or interfering with US citizens during protests despite lacking clear legal authority. The ACLU has warned that federal agents were “operating in a legal gray zone with little transparency or accountability,” particularly when deployed against protesters rather than immigrants (American Civil Liberties Union).

If a dog catcher tried to arrest a drug dealer, we would all understand immediately that something had gone sideways. Not because drug dealers deserve sympathy, but because authority matters. Jurisdiction matters. You do not get to just decide you are law enforcement today.

ICE detaining protesters is the same thing, except the dog catcher in this scenario has military grade weapons, tactical gear, armored vehicles, and political insulation. Federal oversight agencies have documented DHS agencies’ access to armored vehicles and tactical equipment designed for combat-style operations (United States, Government Accountability Office). The Brennan Center for Justice has described this trend as “the steady militarization of federal law enforcement agencies that were never intended to operate like domestic military forces” (Brennan Center for Justice).

What makes this moment different from ordinary bureaucratic overreach is that the executive branch is letting it happen. Encouraging it, even. There is no meaningful internal brake being applied. ICE is being allowed to operate as if legal limits are optional suggestions instead of hard boundaries. When an agency learns it will not be punished for illegal behavior, that behavior becomes normalized.

This is why people reach for historical language that makes others uncomfortable. Not because they are ignorant or unserious, but because history gives us a clear pattern for what unchecked enforcement power looks like. When loyalty to the executive replaces loyalty to the law, law enforcement becomes an enforcement arm.

Calling ICE what people are calling them is not about shock value. It is about function. When an agency with no authority over citizens starts detaining them anyway, backed by overwhelming force and executive blessing, that is not law enforcement. That is intimidation. That is occupation logic.

Here is the part that rarely makes it into cable news chyrons. ICE is not built like a professional police force. There is no universally standardized training academy the way people imagine when they hear the phrase federal agent. DHS inspectors have found “uneven training, weak oversight, and confusion about arrest authority across ICE field offices” (United States, DHS OIG 4). There are also no meaningful education requirements. No degree required. No legal background required. No demonstrated understanding of constitutional law required.

That is not accidental. ICE was told to grow fast. And when you are told to grow fast, you do not get picky. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University has documented ICE’s rapid expansion and hiring practices, showing how aggressive growth coincided with lower standards and increased enforcement errors (TRAC Immigration).

So now we have an armed federal force with minimal training requirements, minimal education standards, unclear legal grounding, and maximum political protection. Then everyone acts surprised when things go sideways.

People ask why ICE agents look reckless, aggressive, and detached from legal reality. This is why. They are not trained to think like public servants accountable to the public. They are trained to execute directives and assume someone else has handled the legality. That is how plausible deniability gets built into a system.

And when citizens push back, when protesters get detained, when journalists get shoved, the conversation immediately slides into vibes. Were they disruptive. Did they provoke it. Should they have complied. All of that misses the point. The only question that matters is whether the agency doing the detaining had the authority to do it. In these cases, they did not (American Immigration Council; American Civil Liberties Union).

This is not radical. This is basic civics. Federal agencies have defined roles. When those roles expand without legislative authorization, you are no longer dealing with the rule of law. You are dealing with executive will.

I have spent years in criminology, law, and reentry spaces watching how this plays out. Agencies justify illegal behavior after the fact. Courts move slowly. Accountability arrives late, if it arrives at all. By then, the damage is done and the precedent is set.

What scares me is not just ICE acting illegally. What scares me is how quickly people are being trained to accept it. To shrug and say someone has to keep order. To forget that order without legality is just force with better branding.

Once you normalize an agency acting outside its authority, you do not get to choose where that stops. You do not get to confine it to immigrants, or protesters, or whoever feels disposable this week. Power expands. It always does.

ICE is not the police. They do not have the authority. They never did. Pretending otherwise is how we end up looking back later, asking how it got this far, while insisting there were no warnings.

There were.

We just chose not to listen.

Works Cited

www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/federal-agents-are-interfering-with-protesters.

American Immigration Council. “ICE’s Arrest Authority: A Legal Overview.” American Immigration Council, 2020, www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/ice-arrest-authority.

Brennan Center for Justice. “The Militarization of Law Enforcement.” Brennan Center for Justice, 2017, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/militarization-law-enforcement.

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), Syracuse University. “ICE Enforcement and Hiring Trends.” TRAC Immigration, trac.syr.edu/immigration/.

United States, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General. ICE Needs to Improve Oversight of Its Arrest and Detention Authority. OIG-17-51, Apr. 2017, www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2017/OIG-17-51-Apr17.pdf.

United States, Government Accountability Office. DHS Acquisitions of Tactical Equipment and Resources. GAO-20-710, 2020, www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-710.