Why Is ICE So Aggressive Now? A Former ICE Chief Explains.
““All of this is unprecedented,” John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director, tells POLITICO Magazine. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a nationwide immigration enforcement effort like this.”
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he noted the Trump administration has revved up the agency’s raid strategy, leading to broad and indiscriminate sweeps to maximize arrests — regardless of people’s criminal record.
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What we have seen is that immigration enforcement has become probably the central priority for all U.S. law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense. This executive order has elevated this to the highest priority. I’ve never seen a whole government effort focused like this, even in the State Department. As a result of that, we’ve never seen an immigration enforcement effort like this. And that manifests itself in a lot of different ways, really quickly.
When you’re at ICE, of course you can run down to a Home Depot parking lot. Any administration could have done this: round the Home Depot parking lot, stop a bunch of day laborers and ID them. In car washes, in places where low-wage workers work, places like that. The reason that historically hasn’t been done, is you just don’t find criminals there. Once in a blue moon you find someone, and we see that the administration highlights when they get someone who has some criminal history. But by and large, your really serious criminal threats don’t do shifts at the local car wash for minimum wage. They’re out making their money, making a living as a criminal.
And so ICE has always focused our operations on getting those individuals — that takes more time, though. You’re taking lists of people who are criminally convicted and you’re identifying them, and then once you identify them, you’re doing research on addresses, and then you’re building a dossier and sending a team out to get them. The Obama administration deported a large number of people, but generally, a very high percentage of them were people who either just crossed the border or people with a serious criminal history.
This administration, though, is taking a different tack. This administration has repurposed the way they’ve operationalized ICE — to go out and get as many people as possible, and that’s why we’re seeing these raids on the car washes and on the Home Depot parking lots. They know they can make a large number of arrests there, and they don’t seem to care whether or not those people pose a threat to public safety. They just say, “If you’re undocumented, you’re a fair target.”
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This administration is going to want to get as many of these new agents out in the field as quickly as possible. Normally, to hire this many people, it would take the agency three, four years.
The problem is that the agency only has the capacity to do so many background checks at once, to interview so many people at once. The training academy can only train so many people at once. It would take years to fully deploy these agents. This administration clearly doesn’t want to wait.
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I spent five years at DHS working on ICE issues. It just wasn’t an issue. None of the officers felt the need to wear masks. I think it’s an unfortunate byproduct of the administration’s policies. This is a very contentious area of law, this idea that we’re not going to discern the difference between migrants who might be committing serious crimes and those who might have real long-term presence in the United States, young children and family members and things of that nature.
I hate that the agents are wearing the masks. I think it is hurting the reputation of the agency, and feeding a lot of these narratives about the agency. But I’m also sympathetic to the agents themselves, who need to protect themselves and their families. Like we just talked about, there are these upticks, these massive upticks in assaults on the agents. These threats against the agents are real, and there’s, unfortunately, a lot of people out there who can’t discern the difference between the administration and the policymakers and the agents themselves. And as a result of that, these agents feel compelled to take steps to protect themselves and their family, and I’m sympathetic to it.
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What’s different is who they’re targeting. Under Obama, under Biden and even to a certain extent, under the first Trump administration, there were priorities. The agents were told, “Focus first on the worst. Worst first. Get the worst bad guys off the street first, we’ll deal with everything else later.” Those rules are gone.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/14/former-ice-director-q-a-00603916