One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Shadow Immigration Forces Threaten Police Reforms
As immigration raids sweep across the country, many of us are watching ICE and CBP agents act like a shadow police force. Agents appear free to harass anyone who happens to have the wrong skin color or accent. They are allowed to smash windows and tear down doors; beat, tear gas and shoot at any who are in their orbit; and whisk people away in unmarked cars–all while masked, nameless and badgeless. The people they kidnap can then be funneled away into deadly detention centers shielded from public view and oversight.
Many have questioned what law enforcement can do to reign in the horrors. But anyone who has been working in the criminal justice space knows that this is likely the wrong question. Collaboration agreements between immigration and law enforcement agencies–287(g) agreements–have surged under the current administration. Trump has revived a section of 287(g) that was suspended in 2012 to address concerns of racial profiling and civil rights violations, so now law enforcement can be deputized for immigration enforcement, and are being rewarded handsomely for doing so. More so than curbing ICE abuses, many police departments are choosing to participate.
And so the question that must be asked–and what we attempt to grapple with in this newsletter–is how these increased collaborations will impact the carceral system. As we explore below, a likely answer is that many hard-won reforms to make the carceral system fairer, more humane, and more accountable are now at risk. The barbarity of one system feeds into that of the other: maintaining an immigration system that operates without oversight or restraint by design only provides a pathway for policing, prosecution, imprisonment to occur in the shadows.
The Supreme Court is Reinterpreting the Constitution to Accommodate ICE, Opening the Floodgates to Race-Based Harassment.
This September, a 6-3 Supreme Court ruled that ICE could constitutionally make race-based stops–a decision that only Justice Kavanaugh could put pen to paper to defend. Race, language, or employment– any of those could form a reasonable suspicion that the person was here undocumented.
And if the ICE agent was wrong? No harm no foul, Kavanaugh wrote, a wrongly stopped person could walk away unscathed and even sue in civil court under the Fourth Amendment (a remedy he has made virtually unavailable in a different line of jurisprudence).
As Chris Geidner recently recounted, “Kavanaugh stops” look much like you would have guessed: ICE agents are indiscriminately stopping people who they believe look Latinx, and those stops are not so peaceful. One agent threatened to unleash a dog on a U.S. born citizen. ICE zip-tied and told another U.S. Citizen she “didn’t look like a Greeley.” Brave citizens have captured numerous incidents of ICE and CBP harassing people as they walk to their cars and go about their lives.
These stops are abhorrent. It is also fanciful to think “Kavanaugh stops” will not bleed into policing. There is no obvious limit to Kavanaugh’s ruling – if you can stop someone based on race in the immigration context, why is the policing context different? And if we dismiss violent ICE encounters as just “brief inconvenience[s],” what are we greenlighting for law enforcement?
This problem does not end with stops. As immigration and law enforcement agencies work more closely together–and their different missions become increasingly intertwined–courts will have to grapple with how to hold police accountable to their significantly more stringent rules of conduct. What happens when police officers are working alongside an agency with superpowers that allow them to evade limitations on surveillance, use of force, and warrants?
We Are Being Desensitized to Accountability and Transparency.
We are all now familiar with the terrifying disguises used by ICE and CBP. Every day, there is a new video showing a group of agents in masks, sometimes not even in uniform, yanking screaming people out of courthouses or off the street. These stops are often indistinguishable from a kidnapping.
Disguised and masked agents stand in sharp contrast to what people see in most police departments, where law enforcement does not utilize masks and is required to have badges and some way to identify themselves. Unlike ICE agents, a lot of police officers are outfitted with body worn cameras.
But many of those measures to increase officer transparency and accountability are the fruits of reform. Not long ago, police departments across the country relied on ICE-like tactics of their own–units of plainclothed officers who similarly jumped out of unmarked cars and were often masked, with obscured badges. That practice has only ever been abandoned in light of complaints about civil rights violations and violent, sometimes deadly, encounters.
Attempts to conceal ICE agents’ identities also mirror longstanding battles for police officers to do the same. But any progress on that front is imperiled if ICE’s nameless, masked terror is allowed to continue. It is not hard to imagine that those departments, many of whom are already deeply embedded with ICE already, will start adopting ICE’s arguments and policies for remaining anonymous and nontransparent.
A Humanitarian Nightmare Engulfs ICE Detention Centers.
The already notoriously appalling conditions at ICE holding facilities and detention centers have only intensified in the past ten months as immigration detention hits a record-breaking high across the country. The horror stories mount: starvation; disease; chronic overcrowding, and widespread physical and sexual abuse make 2025 the deadliest year to be trapped in such facilities. As one federal judge in Illinois noted, they have “really become a prison.”
Indeed, American jails and prisons have passed along their lethal violence, rot, and exploitation to immigration detention facilities. But ICE facilities also risk exporting their own atrocities to jails and prisons.
Immigration facilities–operating in the shadows with inherently less oversight, regulations, and available relief than carceral facilities–are not only pushing the boundaries for what cruelties this country is willing to accept in either context, but are actually trampling on prison reforms by reinvigorating the foundational building blocks of mass incarceration:
Expanding Jails and Prisons. DHS’s hunger for bed space has all but reversed the years-long push to shrink jail and prison real estate. Indeed, nearly a third of those detained by ICE have been placed in jails and prisons instead of ICE facilities. That has sometimes meant reopening shuttered jails and prisons–many of which were previously shut down for human rights violations. That has also meant straining currently opened jails and prisons, to the point of egregious human rights violations.
Reinvigorating Economic Dependence on Incarceration. Just as jail and prison populations are dropping and some locales have soured on prison towns, the economic reliance on incarceration is re-emerging in different form: detention towns. And small towns in states ranging from Kansas to Wyoming to Tennessee are once again having to fight to free themselves from the grip of yet another prison economy.
Heroes Are Refusing to Be Silenced.
As the line between immigration enforcement and law enforcement blur, making both enterprises more powerful and less accountable, we would like to celebrate our storytellers–the reporters who are braving professional and even bodily risks to document the horrors: big news shops like 404 Media, ProPublica, UnicornRiot, and The Marshall Project, but also local press like the Chicago journalists who had to sue to stop ICE from shooting, gassing, and beating them as their cameras clicked.
We also salute “Buzz,” a veteran who fights fascism with the all-mighty weapon of his electric scooter.
And the courage that resounds in stories like this–people like Jemmy Jiminez Rosa, who have dared to share their accounts of surviving ICE encounters; journalists like Sarah Wilder, who are committed to tell those stories beautifully; and attorneys like Todd Pomerleau, who fought in Ms. Rosa’s case but who is also now trying to build an army of fighters for the many cases ahead. Atrocities abound, but there are heroes everywhere we look.