The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argues that “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago targets “criminal illegal aliens terrorising Americans”. But testimony in Judge Sara Ellis’s courtroom in America’s third-largest city on November 5th suggests it is DHS’s own agents who are terrifying people. One after another, protesters said that officers had pointed guns at them and tear-gassed residential streets. Leslie Cortez of Cicero, a Chicago suburb, described filming immigration agents making arrests in the parking lot of a Home Depot. An officer aimed their weapon, she said, after a vehicle carrying detainees had already left. “I could see inside the barrel of the gun,” she told the court.
Immigration agents are doing three things at once, and it can be tricky to disentangle them. First, floating down the Chicago River in boats meant to help with drug seizures is pure deportation theatre: it looks tough but doesn’t result in immigration arrests. Second, federal agents are conducting raids in Home Depot car parks and in Latino neighbourhoods, as they did earlier in the year in Los Angeles. Finally, they are clashing with protesters in unusual places—sleepy neighbourhoods, a college town, at a children’s Halloween parade.
The administration would like to convince Americans that all three activities are in the service of deporting murderers and criminals. Bystanders’ videos of the violence perpetrated by Border Patrol agents contradict that notion. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official leading the operation, has himself been filmed tackling and tear-gassing protesters. During a deposition he described Border Patrol’s use of force in Chicago as “more than exemplary”. It seems designed to set an example. One video shown in court features Mr Bovino telling his agents in Los Angeles earlier this year: “Everybody fucking gets it if they touch you.”
When Donald Trump began his mass-deportation campaign, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that carries out deportations, had limited resources and its agents were used to focusing on finding criminals—not on racking up as many arrests as possible. The administration’s short-term solution has been to divert nearly 15,000 other federal officers—including Border Patrol and FBI agents—from their day jobs to help arrest immigrants in cities. Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff, calls this new behemoth “a Frankenstein task-force”. But what began as a way to increase the pace of deportations has come to look like a national police force, answerable to the president, that is at least as focused on bullying the residents of Democrat-run cities as it is on deporting undocumented migrants.
“You’re not going to arrest illegal immigrants by marching down the street in full battle regalia,” notes a former DHS official. “It’s intended to be an intimidation tactic.” The theatrics may reflect frustration at the difficulty of carrying out the mass deportations promised by the president. Immigration arrests by ICE field offices declined after peaking in June, according to the Deportation Data Project. They may have climbed since then: DHS alleges that its agents have arrested more than 3,000 illegal immigrants since Operation Midway Blitz began in September. Even if that is true, Stephen Miller, an adviser to Mr Trump, hoped to arrest that many people nationally each day.
Phalanxes of federal agents solve another problem for the Trump administration. Law enforcement in America is decentralised. In France, for example, the government can send its national riot police to break up protests. America’s federal cops, such as the FBI, don’t do crowd control and courts have so far blocked Mr Trump’s deployments of National Guard troops to Oregon and Illinois. Anyway, National Guard troops do not have the power to arrest or detain people, thanks to the Posse Comitatus Act, a law from 1878 that prevents soldiers from acting like cops. Federal agents, in contrast, have arrest powers and access to military equipment, and can be sent around the country at the president’s whim.
That force is about to get a lot bigger. The One Big Beautiful Bill included $170bn to beef up immigration enforcement. Much of that money will go to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Border Patrol’s parent agency. Mr Bovino has hinted that New York City is next on his list of targets. But, as it grows, Mr Trump’s mega-police force may reach rural America, too. At a recent protest outside an ICE facility in Durango, Colorado an immigration agent grabbed a protester by her hair, choked her and threw her to the ground. In a video posted to X in September Mr Bovino chirps: “We’re taking this show on the road to a city near you.”
Force, multiplied
Border Patrol agents, in particular, are not well-suited to their new job. They are used to chasing smugglers through the deserts and mountains of the American south-west, not prioritising the constitutional rights of American citizens protesting on city streets. Border Patrol “has long been considered a paramilitary organisation”, explains the former DHS official. Its tactical units resemble SWAT teams and military Special Forces. The result of sending quasi-soldiers to neighbourhoods is chaos and violence. In Los Angeles County, for example, a line of Border Patrol agents blasted open the door of a house with explosives only to find a mother and her two young children inside. They were looking for her boyfriend (he wasn’t home). At least three immigrants have died while attempting to flee federal agents. Several other people have been shot.
In October DHS announced that the heads of several ICE field offices would be replaced with Border Patrol officials. The move seems to confirm that Mr Trump enjoys Mr Bovino’s theatrics and machismo. Career ICE officials, on the other hand, are used to planning targeted raids and prioritising criminals. Consider Tom Homan, a former acting head of ICE and Mr Trump’s border czar. His rhetoric is inflammatory, yet colleagues who worked with him in Democratic and Republican administrations say he was always focused on going after “the worst of the worst”. He seems to have been sidelined. “I don’t think anyone has ever accused ICE of being overly cautious,” says John Sandweg, who led the agency briefly under Barack Obama. “But the appeal of the Border Patrol to the administration is that they are even more aggressive than ICE in terms of: stop people first, and sort it out later.”
Top: The Broadview ICE Facility, Illinois. Bottom: ICE agents carry out an operation in Chicago's Little Village area.
Image: Mega Agency, Getty Images
The larger role of Border Patrol is also partly due to the agency’s size. Congress showered CBP with money in the years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. Border Patrol boasts nearly 20,000 agents, while ICE’s enforcement division employs roughly 6,000 officers.
ICE will not be Border Patrol’s little brother for long. DHS wants to hire 10,000 deportation officers by the end of the year, and is offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and help with student loans to those who make the cut. “America has been invaded by criminals and predators,” the recruiting website says, under a picture of Uncle Sam. “We need YOU to get them out.” Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, says the department has received more than 175,000 applications and has offered jobs to 18,000. Adding the ICE newbies to the existing hotch-potch of agents means that more than 30,000 federal officers could be involved in immigration enforcement in American cities, nearly as many as the number of cops in New York City’s police department, the largest in the country. That does not include the officers from more than 1,100 state and local police forces that have signed on to help ICE.
Such hiring surges in law enforcement can increase the risk of violence. There is a long list of police departments and agencies that were given a lot of money to staff up, says Gil Kerlikowske, a former CBP commissioner. “They all have horror stories.” CBP is one of them. The number of Border Patrol agents roughly doubled between 2003 and 2013 as immigration became more intertwined with national security. The Government Accountability Office, a congressional watchdog, found that there were more than 2,000 arrests for officer misconduct between 2005 and 2012. DHS officials at the time warned that drug gangs were trying to infiltrate the agency. They succeeded. During that eight-year stretch 125 agents were convicted of corrupt acts, including drug- and people-smuggling.
The administration’s message to federal agents is that their aggression is justified and their actions beyond reproach. Usually investigations of excessive force are handled by internal government watchdogs, but Mr Trump has tried to shut down many of them. A lawsuit prevented DHS from abolishing offices that investigate potential civil-rights violations and detention-centre conditions. But it seems safe to say that oversight won’t be a priority. “To all ICE officers,” Mr Miller said on Fox News, “you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” Steve Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, warns that rhetoric is dangerous “both because he’s wrong and because they’re not going to know that he’s wrong”.
The Supremacy Clause of the constitution, which lays out America’s federal system, makes it tricky—but not impossible—for local prosecutors to charge federal agents for crimes they commit while doing their jobs. The case law is sparse, and more recently federal judges have tended to decide for themselves whether an agent acted reasonably, rather than allowing a jury to weigh in. But local officials seem ready to try. The police chief in Durango, where the protester was put in a chokehold, has asked state investigators to explore whether criminal charges may be warranted.
In Chicago, Judge Ellis is trying to rein in federal agents. On November 6th the Obama appointee ordered officers to restrict their use of force against protesters and journalists unless it is “objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat”. She said Mr Bovino had lied under oath when he claimed he had been hit in the head with a rock, in order to justify tear-gassing protesters. He now has to wear a body camera. Before giving her ruling from the bench, she read an excerpt of a poem by Carl Sandburg: “I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer.” Two days later a convoy of heavily armed agents in camouflage rode through Little Village, the heart of Mexican Chicago. Their weapons were drawn. ■
