You Can’t Train Away ICE’s Terror
Investments toward a more trained immigration force will only uphold and legitimize mass deportation, family separation, and state terror.
Video evidence of the brutality of the Department of Homeland Security’s agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, alongside agencies within the Department of Justice such the Drug Enforcement Administration, has become all too familiar imagery in our everyday lives.
Witnessing actions of terror—from neighbors being beaten and forced into unmarked vehicles by masked agents, to children being kidnapped as they are released from school, to observers being murdered—has sparked demands for change. Reformist demands, such as increased training for federal immigration agents, move us farther from, not closer to, dismantling these systems.
Transformative Solutions Versus Reformist Reforms
Since its very recent inception in 2003, funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its agencies has ballooned. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received a budget of $27.8 billion in 2025, and other agencies whose on-the-ground presence support mass detention and deportation, such as Customs and Border Protection, have additionally seen increases alongside specific funding to the Department of Defense for border enforcement.
Transformative change demands have called for ending collaborations between local police and federal immigration agencies, ending 287(g) agreements, implementing and strengthening sanctuary laws, and the defunding and dismantling of ICE and similar agencies. Transformative models recognize the root causes and work to uproot harmful systems in order to invest in community-centered social programs.
A more trained mass deportation system is still a mass deportation system. A more trained agent of family separation is still an agent of family separation.
Reformist, yet system upholding, demands have also emerged, such as calls for improving hiring requirements for agents, increasing training for new hires, and crowd-management training in response to protests. Calls for more training for ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies means more investment in these systems and legitimizing the expansion of the role of the agent.
We saw a parallel of this direction a decade ago with increases in resourcing for local police. With the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives and community demands for transformative solutions to public safety, backlash and reformist demands in response to these calls led to strengthening the infrastructure of these systems of state terror. Thus, if this direction in response to state violence from immigration agencies is followed, transformative change will be severely restrained.
The Policing Parallel and Lessons Learned
After the murders of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice in 2014, and increases in public awareness of the pervasiveness of police killings and racial disparities that target Black people in interactions with police, reformist demands led to increased funding for policing and police training. We saw this trend of increased budgets repeat after the 2020 murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other loved ones by police.
“Solutions” for the problems of policing proposed during this time included increasing community trust in police, improving public perceptions of police, and investing in community policing. These “solutions,” which are removed from historic context, only strengthen systems while placing blame on communities and delegitimizing criticism of systems and transformative demands.
One study examining 15 pre-attack indicator police trainings showed that police are trained to recognize reactions to interactions with police, such as anxiety and arousal, as threats to their safety and justifications for use of force. A 2023 conference of police training exposed “instructors promoting views and tactics that were wildly inappropriate, offensive, discriminatory, harassing, and, in some cases, likely illegal.”
Since 2013, alongside increases in police funding and training, murders by police have only increased year to year. Calls for more police training and increased funding only strengthen the infrastructure of the very systems that we need to dismantle.
The Urgent and Necessary Need to Delegitimize and Dismantle Agencies of State Terror
Everyday community members are being kidnapped, families are being separated, people are dying in immigration detention centers, and community members are being shot at and killed at the hands of DHS. The very existence of ICE requires these events of terror, and its agency collaborators are strengthened by them.
You can’t dismantle a system of harm by increasing its resourcing and legitimizing its existence. Removing the harm means uprooting the source of the harm, not reforming it. A more trained mass deportation system is still a mass deportation system. A more trained agent of family separation is still an agent of family separation. A more trained armed stated terror presence in communities is still armed state terror.
