How ICE evolved from post-9/11 security force to immigration battleground

As Democrats continue to withhold funding from the Department of Homeland Security, former agency leaders say their demand for new guardrails would represent Congress’s most direct interference in the agency’s operations — a shift for a post-9/11 agency that has largely defined its own operations.

John Sandweg, former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and former general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, said Congress sometimes gave instructions to ICE but stayed out of managing its operations.

“There were some mandates from Congress, some through appropriations, some through mandate laws that mandated the creation of this system,” Sandweg said.

Sara Saldaña, the former director of ICE from 2014 to 2017, believes it is unusual for Congress to interfere in how an agency carries out its mission.

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Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers detain a suspect in Houston, on January 28, 2025. (ice)

“Congress has A legitimate role in oversight of the spending of taxpayer dollars, including ICE spending, whether appropriate or not. “It has nothing to do with dictating specific operations or tactics,” Saldaña said, noting that she was not surprised by the attention the agency’s recent tactics have received from lawmakers.

“But Congress doesn’t run anything. They make the laws“.

ICE’s operational independence has led its application to look different over the years since its founding in 2003. Especially in the beginning, this allowed the agency to diverge from its focus, according to Sandweg.. But it’s also that flexibility that he believes has allowed the president Donald Trump To aggressively push immigration enforcement operations.

In response to Trump’s crackdown on ICE and two deadly standoffs between immigration authorities and civilians, Democrats’ demands include ending roving patrols, banning the use of masks and clearly identifying agents.

Democrats say they will not vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE, until these changes are made.

DHS funding expired last weekend.

ICE originally grew out of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 — Bill that created DHS as a whole in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Although the agency and its operations were new, the laws ICE was tasked with enforcing had been on the books long before that.

“We are legal,” Saldaña said. “We were created after 9/11 as part of all this confusion regarding intelligence regarding visa overstays that ended with the bombing of the World Trade Center.”

This law charged DHS with taking over many of the nation’s existing immigration functions: the Border Patrol program, detention and removal, intelligence, and investigations and inspections. But it also came without any operational framework and did not mention ICE by name.

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Smoke billows from the twin towers of the World Trade Center after they collided with two planes hijacked in the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Robert Gero/Getty Images)

In 2004 Spending legislation Lawmakers gave the agency $2.1 billion in funding along with its first directives from Congress.

ICE was asked to allocate $100,000 for public awareness on a child pornography tip line, $500,000 to compensate other federal agencies and their work to recover smuggled illegal aliens, $3 million for enforcement of laws against child labor and a handful of other mandates.

ICE officials at the time wanted to move away from immigration enforcement, explained Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative immigration policy group.

“They wanted to devote resources to child sex trafficking, counterfeit goods, gangs, things like that while not doing routine immigration enforcement,” Vaughan said.

“The former customs officials in charge were saying, ‘Oh yeah, we don’t do this immigration stuff anymore.’ “They wanted to do things that weren’t politically sensitive,” she said.

Sandweg agreed and described culture as a kind of internal conflict that extended back to the Obama years.

“It was a bit of a culture war, wasn’t it?” Sandweg said. “Will it be more focused on immigration, looking at law enforcement at work sites and employers who might be cheating? Or will there be more investigations into banks for not having adequate controls on money laundering and things like that?”

“That second culture took over, the customs culture,” Sandweg recalls.

However, Saldaña disagrees that the agency actually had a focus other than immigration enforcement.

“There was always a clear mandate,” Saldaña said.

“now, Every department It has its own implementation priorities, which it is entitled to do. “So there will be memos, executive orders, etc. to shape the mission,” she added.

But it was frustration with ICE’s operations that ultimately prompted Congress to get more involved.

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Capitol Hill, left, pictured next to ICE agents, right. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images; Aaron Lavinsky/Minnesota Star Tribune)

Frustrated by the lack of implementation, lawmakers began filling in some of the blanks with what they wanted to see. In 2009, for example, Congress passed a mandate that ICE must accommodate at least 34,000 detainee beds. When lawmakers worried that the agency was releasing too many people.

In Vaughan’s view, the agency has only recently been asked to flex its muscles to achieve its original goal.

““There has never been a president before Donald Trump who has publicly valued the mission of immigration enforcement as much as he does,” Vaughan said. “There’s no question that ICE was allowed to do its job the way Congress wrote the laws so they could do it. They’ve never had this kind of support and backing before.”

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Right now, parts of the Department of Homeland Security remain unfunded, as lawmakers grapple over the 10 Democratic demands.

And ICE itself, which received $75 billion in funding when Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill was signed into law in July, is continuing operations amid the crisis. Government shutdown.