ICE

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is no longer an immigration agency. In the eight months since inauguration on 20 January 2025, it has been rebuilt into the best-funded federal law-enforcement force in U.S. history, funded beyond every other federal law-enforcement agency combined, and answerable in practice to one man. It has taken roughly 393,000 people, fewer than 14 percent of whom had violent criminal records. Its concentration camps held a record 70,766 people at the January 2026 peak, and people die inside them at the highest rate in over a decade: 52 in the first 500 days, by Human Rights Watch's count.

More than 170 of the people it has held, in the first nine months alone, are U.S. citizens. Citizens of the Navajo Nation and Standing Rock Sioux have been detained with their tribal IDs refused. And in September 2025 the Supreme Court let agents keep stopping people on "apparent ethnicity." This page is the context behind those numbers: what ICE was, what it has been turned into, where its captives are sent, and where the pattern has appeared before, from the secret police of the last century to Britain's Black and Tans and Auxiliaries.

The chapters below are the shortest honest account we can give. The incident-level record, footage, facilities, vehicles, and agents by name, lives at The ICE List, which we maintain with volunteers and treat as this page's Record.

The agency Trump rebuilt

ICE was created in 2003, in the post-9/11 reorganisation that folded immigration enforcement into the security state. For two decades it was violent and contested, and still recognisably a bounded agency. The second Trump administration removed the bounds. The 2025 reconciliation law handed it $75 billion through 2029, $45 billion of it for the construction of new concentration camps. The camp population went from a daily average of 18,315 in FY2021 to 65,765 in FY2026, crossing 70,000 for the first time in January 2026, far past its own funded capacity.

On the back of $30 billion for hiring, ICE launched the largest recruitment surge in its history, cutting training from thirteen weeks to six, dropping the minimum age to eighteen, scrapping the degree requirement, removing the upper age limit, and paying $50,000 signing bonuses. Police-standards experts warned publicly about what that vetting would let through; the Boston Globe documented an officer hired despite red flags who went on to shoot a man in Maine. There is no federal law requiring ICE agents to identify themselves, show badge numbers, wear body cameras, or uncover their faces. California and other states legislated in late 2025 to require identification and restrict masking; those laws are being contested in court, and the fight over them is part of this record.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The personal police

An agency this size, this funded, this unaccountable, answers to whoever commands it, and it is commanded, conspicuously and personally, by the president. Leadership has been pressed from the White House to raise arrest numbers; the administration set a public target of 3,000 arrests a day; the largest operations have been aimed at the sanctuary cities and states that vote against the president; and the raids are staged for the cameras of the administration's own media. Masked agents who refuse to give a name are not an accident of policy but the point of it: force that cannot be identified cannot be held to account, and force that cannot be held to account belongs to the man who directs it, not to the law.

We cover this as what the record shows it to be: the personal police of an authoritarian project. The pattern of that project across the government is tracked in our standing record on the risks to U.S. democracy.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

Major operations

The signature is the named, mass, city-scale operation. Operation Midway Blitz opened in Chicago on 8 September 2025, hundreds of agents across the metro area; DHS said it had made more than 4,200 arrests there by 19 November. Operation Metro Surge followed in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area on 1 December 2025, a deployment of some 3,000 federal agents that expanded statewide into 2026. Both echoed the earlier Los Angeles surge, where Border Patrol joined ICE on the streets. Charlotte and New Orleans, the latter under the name Operation Catahoula Crunch, were named as the next targets. The operational method is constant across them: dawn raids on workplaces and apartment blocks, courthouse arrests of people attending their own hearings, and enforcement at schools, hospitals and churches, with 48 such incidents at sensitive locations on the record. Each named operation, and each city's siege, is filed in The Coverage below and, incident by incident, at The ICE List.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The killings

People are dying at every stage of the machine: shot during arrests and pursuits, dead in the camps from denied medical care, dead in falls fleeing raids. The ICE List documents more than 80 deaths by name, in custody and connected to enforcement operations, and the count keeps rising. Human Rights Watch counted 52 deaths in ICE custody in the first 500 days and found the mortality rate at its highest in more than a decade. These are two different counts with two different scopes, the List's named record of custody-and-operations deaths, and HRW's custody-only tally, and we keep them distinct rather than merge them. Physicians for Human Rights has documented the medical neglect behind the custody deaths. Every death we can verify is recorded by name; a death that reaches no record is the machine working as designed.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The violence record

Beneath the deaths sits the daily violence: guns drawn on unarmed people and on bystanders filming, beatings during arrests, tear gas in residential streets. More than 170 U.S. citizens, people the agency has no authority over at all, were kicked, dragged, and held for days in ProPublica's documented cases from the first nine months, and ProPublica calls it an undercount. Citizens of the Navajo Nation and Standing Rock Sioux, indigenous to this continent, have been stopped and detained with their tribal identification refused. In September 2025, on its emergency docket and without a signed opinion, the Supreme Court let the roving patrols resume, lifting a lower court's restraining order; Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence treated apparent ethnicity, accent, work and location as permissible factors. The Court did not rule on whether the practice is lawful, and the case is unresolved, but the profiling has continued in the meantime. Assaults and sexual assaults by agents and guards are part of the record, continuing a pattern documented for years in the government's own complaint files obtained under freedom-of-information litigation. Victims are routinely deported before they can testify.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

Where they are sent

The machine does not stop at the camp door. In March 2025 the administration invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a wartime power, to remove more than 200 Venezuelans it alleged were gang members, flying them to El Salvador's CECOT megaprison; the U.S. paid El Salvador about $6 million to hold 238 people for a year. Among them was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father with a court order protecting him from removal to El Salvador, sent there by what the administration itself called an "administrative error", and then, for months, not brought back. Judge James Boasberg found the U.S. had denied those men due process. A federal appeals court blocked the Alien Enemies Act removals for failing to meet the standard for invoking wartime powers, and a Boston judge barred third-country deportations that gave people no chance to argue they would be harmed. The administration has kept sending people to countries they have never lived in. The camps are one end of the machine; disappearance abroad is the other.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The legal and oversight track

The record of accountability is also the record of accountability being dismantled. Courts have repeatedly found against the agency, on due process for the Alien Enemies Act removals, on third-country deportations, on masked warrantless arrests, only for much of it to be stayed on the Supreme Court's emergency docket, without argument or a signed opinion, and left to continue while the merits wait. Inside the government, the offices built to check the agency, the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the immigration detention ombudsman, were gutted early in the administration. Congressional oversight has run into a wall of non-response: House Oversight Democrats built a public tool to document the wrongful detention of U.S. citizens, and a Senate report titled "Unchecked Authority" catalogued the agency's conduct. For a force whose defining feature is that it cannot be held to account, the dismantling of the machinery of accountability is not a side effect. It is the design.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

Historical mirrors: the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries

None of this is a new invention. When Britain needed force in Ireland in 1920 that the law would not supply, it recruited fast, vetted little, paid well, and looked away. Two forces did the work: the Black and Tans, thousands of men rushed into the Royal Irish Constabulary in months, and the Auxiliary Division, a separate corps of ex-officers. Between them, and with the regular RIC, came the reprisals: the sack of Balbriggan, the burning of Cork by the Auxiliaries, the Croke Park massacre. The features repeat wherever a state builds a force loyal to power rather than law: mass recruitment with lowered standards, an irregular arm bolted onto an existing police, anonymity in the streets, collective punishment of communities, and impunity afterwards. The secret police of the last century, from the Gestapo's reliance on denunciation to the Stasi's saturation of daily life, add the informer network and the knock at the door. The century's lesson is that such forces are built quickly and dismantled slowly.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk

The Record, and the resistance

The answer to an unaccountable force is a record it cannot erase. The ICE List documents the incidents, the facilities, the vehicles and the agents, by name where names can be established, with volunteer-verified footage and a public submission pipeline; it is the record layer behind this page. Its incident count is a floor, not a ceiling: it holds only what has been documented and confirmed, which is why the national figures at the top of this page, drawn from ICE's own data and from monitors like TRAC and Human Rights Watch, run far larger than any single tally. Alongside the record stand the litigators, the sanctuary jurisdictions, the rapid-response networks, and the neighbours who film. The chapters above exist so that none of it has to be argued from memory.

Last reviewed 13 August 2026 · Crust News desk