ICE History and Origin
Mexican migrants entering El Centro border control compound in 1954, prior to deportation. (Larry Sharkey/LA Times Archive/UCLA)
The Latest Iteration of Immigrant Repression
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has become a symbol of modern U.S. state violence. Its agents rip apart families, raid homes, and detain migrants in deadly, inhumane conditions. But ICE did not emerge from nowhere, nor is it a deviation from U.S. norms. Rather, it is the latest iteration of a long-standing system of immigration policing rooted in racism, surveillance, and capitalist scapegoating and exploitation. ICE may be relatively new in name, but the infrastructure and ideology it enforces stretches back at least a century. Its trajectory reveals the growing power of the state to repress, detain, and deport unchecked.
The Birth of a Repressive Apparatus
For many years, following the Mexican-American war, there were more emigrations from the US to Latin America than the other way around. However, following the Mexican Revolution of the 1910's, immigration to the U.S. began to surge, benefitting the land-owning agricultural capitalists of the South and Southwest at the expense of the many working class people—the same workers who, guided by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and funded by capitalists looking to "civilize" the west, violently colonized the region following the Mexican-American war and the many Indigenous removal acts of that age.
The United States then laid the institutional foundation for ICE in 1933 with the founding of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and began the campaign of terror we know today. Between the year of its formation and 1935, in collaboration with local police and welfare agencies, it participated in the removal of approximately 400,000 American citizens and legal residents of Mexican ancestry. These civilians were blamed for the failures of capitalism during the Great Depression—widespread hunger, crushing consumer debt, and skyrocketing homelessness—and their treatment would become the model for repressive immigration forces all the way through to the present day.
This campaign, known today as the Mexican Repatriation, was a grotesque performance of scapegoating. While capitalists wrecked the economy through overproduction and speculation, the state directed popular anger toward Mexican workers. Families were dragged from their homes, put on trains, and dumped at the border without due process. California would later pass a symbolic "Apology Act" in 2005, acknowledging the injustice but offering no material recompense. This would become the model for popular forms of liberal "resistance" such as performative "land acknowledgements" while exploiting Indigenous land, and "affirmative action" while upholding violently racist systems like the prison-industrial complex.
With the passing of the Communist Control Act of 1954 (CCA), INS was tasked with deporting political dissidents. This red scare law led to the removal of hundreds—possibly thousands—of legal residents and citizens for their political views. The CCA and the suppressive tactics it legitimized were a precursor to how ICE is now removing legal residents and citizens that are pro-Palestinian organizers.
The Reagan Era
The INS was infused with a new expansion in power with the Reagan administration's Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Among its many provisions, this act introduced the requirement that all employers submit an I-9 form for each employee. Without committing tax fraud, this was an impossibility for the many capitalists that utilize the labor of undocumented workers, especially those in the American South and Southwest. The IRCA also introduced civil and criminal penalties for employers who knowingly hired undocumented workers. Ostensibly designed to discourage "illegal" immigration, in practice the IRCA gave the capitalist ruling class new tools of control: immigrant workers became even more vulnerable to termination, exploitation, and surveillance.
At the same time, the IRCA offered limited amnesty to undocumented people who had arrived before 1982, but this "concession" was conditional and, in truth, intended only to regularize and exploit the labor supply, especially in agriculture. To gain legal status, all residents had to apply within a narrow window and meet burdensome requirements: pay a fee, prove continuous residency, provide detailed employment records, and more. Not out of goodwill, but because agribusiness depended on their labor, farm workers had slightly reduced requirements.
In other words, immigrants were "legalized" only if they proved useful to capital, particularly as a source of cheap, vulnerable labor. This marked the beginning of a regime where immigrant labor is stigmatized, precarious, and hyper-exploited. The underlying message was clear: immigrants could stay only if they served economic interests, and only if the state could surveil and control them.
Clinton's Crackdown
The liberal veneer of the Democratic Party does little to stem the tide of increasing state violence against immigrants. In fact, it accelerates the process. A decade after Reagan, under a Democratic administration, U.S. immigrant repression saw its next major shift in form and expansion of power. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), a punitive overhaul of U.S. immigration law. The IIRIRA dramatically expanded the government's deportation powers, eliminated key legal protections for non-citizens, and mandated detention for wide categories of immigrants, including asylum seekers.
The IIRIRA also incorporated provisions from the proposed Immigration Control and Financial Responsibility Act, specifically those empowering all levels of government—federal, state, and local—to request immigration status checks from the INS (and later the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)) for "any purpose authorized by law.” This effectively deputized local cops as immigration agents and laid the groundwork for today's mass deportation machinery.
Bush, 9/11, and the Surveillance State
After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration responded with a consolidation of power under the banner of national security. In 2001, Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which vastly expanded the surveillance and detention powers of federal agencies. Immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants, were placed under constant scrutiny.
The government began creating watchlists, conducting secret wiretaps, and allowing immigration authorities access to criminal databases without warrants. Residents suspected of "terrorism" could be detained indefinitely without trial, and many were shipped to extralegal torture sites like Guantánamo Bay. These tools of the failed "War on Terror" became the everyday weapons of the U.S.'s war on immigrants.
In the following year, 2002, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, dissolving the INS and replacing it with the DHS. In 2003, ICE was established within the DHS with a specific mission: to hunt down "threats" to national security within U.S. borders.
'08 to Present: Continuity, Not Change
Despite campaign rhetoric, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have upheld the violence of ICE. Under Obama, who rightfully earned the moniker "Deporter-in-Chief," removals of non-citizens reached new highs. His administration expanded Secure Communities, a Bush-era program that linked local police databases to ICE enforcement, leading to mass detentions and the notorious "kids in cages."
Trump inherited that infrastructure and escalated its cruelty. His first term saw the introduction of the Muslim Ban, family separation at the border, and large-scale workplace raids. While deportations in his first term fell below Obama-era levels, that was not for lack of intent. Rather, Trump's order to treat all undocumented immigrants as deportation priorities created massive backlogs in the courts and detention system, which actually slowed the pace of removals. At the same time, his administration launched an assault on asylum and on humanitarian programs, further closing off narrow legal pathways that existed.
Biden walked back the rhetoric but still operated and preserved the machinery. Promising a more "humane" approach, he quietly enforced the same deterrence policies, including the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" program. After Title 42 expired, deportations surged to a 10-year high, and Biden paired selective parole programs with sweeping expulsions under Title 8. The liberal shift in tone concealed continuity in function: micromanaging labor flows, criminalizing migration, and disciplining a "surplus" population to uphold U.S. imperial and capitalist interests.
Now in his second term, Trump is wreaking an indiscriminate campaign of repression. On day one, Trump signed Executive Order 14159 to begin a new campaign of fast-tracking deportations, expanding 287(g) agreements, deploying federal forces, and even seeking to end birthright citizenship. The One Big Beautiful Bill (otherwise known as the One Big Bullshit Bill) was signed into law, which increased immigration and border control funding to the tune of $170 billion. This effectively tripled ICE's budget, making it the largest federal law enforcement entity. As in his first term, arrests and detentions are skyrocketing while the system struggles to process the influx. This escalation is not a break from past regimes, but a culmination of decades-long bipartisan collaboration.
Abolish ICE, DHS, and the Carceral State
ICE is not a rogue agency—it’s an armed hand of capitalist state violence, built and sustained by both parties to control labor and enforce bourgeois borders. ICE's violence is the only possible outcome of a century-long trajectory: from the Mexican Repatriation to Clinton's detention regime, moving forward into post-9/11 surveillance and the evolution of a bipartisan deportation machine of today. Reform has never reined it in. Instead, each wave of "reform" has served only to bolster the state's repressive power in the name of "order" and profit.
This system cannot be fixed. Abolishing ICE is a logical, moral, and necessary demand, but it cannot stop there. The DHS, the legal architecture of criminalization, and the entire carceral state must go with it. These institutions exist solely to protect capital, not people: to demoralize the working class, manage surplus labor, and enforce racial and imperial domination. To truly dismantle them, we must confront the capitalist system that sustains them. In their place, we must build systems rooted in care, mutual aid, and collective freedom rather than punishment, profit, and fear. Anything less means accepting a future of more cages, more raids, and more terror.
These changes can not be introduced through another liberal reformer like Bernie, AOC, or Kamala. These fundamental changes to an archaic, racist, imperialist system can only come from revolution. We must organize and begin declaring those who oppress the workers of all nationalities, stripes, and industries as the enemy of the people, because that is what they are. Those who aid the state in this oppression, and those who profit off of it, are the enemy and we must recognize that and organize around that.