How Far Trump’s ICE Can Go?

BySalome Klingler

Feb 22, 2026

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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is operating under a massively expanded mandate and budget during the second administration of President Trump. It is characterised by a record high number of detentions and aggressive nationwide enforcement using a controversial workforce for execution

“E pluribus unum.” From the Great Seal of the United States emerged the idea that unity would be born from plurality. And yet a sense of unease lingers, because upon closer inspection, plurality seems to be tolerated only so long as it remains at a distance.

No one could ignore it. In early January, the news broke without warning: Renée Nicole Good, 37, died during an operation conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency officially tasked with enforcing administrative decisions. The ongoing investigation requires a suspension of legal judgment; any definitive qualification would be premature. But it does not prevent a deeply troubling observation: how can an administrative mission result in a fatal outcome? And more importantly, at what point did such outcomes cease to be exceptional and become almost routine? When the use of lethal force no longer shocks, is it still the event that disturbs us, or the legal framework that allows it?

In truth, Renée Good is not an isolated anomaly. In 2025 alone, more than thirty people have died¹while in detention under ICE’s responsibility. It would be dishonest to present these figures without nuance, since many deaths have medical explanations. But it would be equally dishonest to dismiss them outright, especially given that some cases have been deemed suspicious. This is all the more concerning as inspections of detention facilities have declined while the number of individuals placed in detention has surged². Added to this are deaths that occurred during direct encounters with federal agents in the field. Once again, not all of these cases involve gunfire or established wrongdoing in the absence of a definitive legal qualification. Still, if accumulation is not enough to conclude, it is at least enough to raise questions. When deaths follow one another in the course of administrative missions, it is no longer only the exception that is called into question, but the rule that makes it possible.

This is precisely where the danger lies. By invoking legality to justify practice, the rule neutralises any challenge, simply because it is lawful. Debate is thus extinguished, as the legal framework, meant to serve as a democratic safeguard, turns into an argument from authority.

The question then becomes far more unsettling. Through constant legal justification, has this practice gradually made acceptable what would have been unthinkable yesterday? And if the so-called “mother democracy” allows itself such a drift, how long before it sets a precedent elsewhere? The real danger may not lie in illegality, but in a form of legality so comfortable that it ends up absorbing everything.

The Genesis of ICE

Nothing sheds more light on the present than a return to its origins. So let us recall this point clearly: ICE was born out of September 11³, not out of a debate on immigration or hospitality. It was not conceived as a street-level police force, but as a reinforced administrative agency,

designed at a moment when the border ceased to be a mere line and became a front. In 2003, the American state was not seeking to better organise welcome, but to better control, better monitor, better prevent. From its inception, ICE thus embodied a singular hybrid, positioned halfway between administration and force. And while such a framework may appear understandable in light of the context, it nonetheless remains deeply structuring. For when the governance of the foreigner is first articulated in the language of threat, the issue is no longer merely one of intention, but of the architecture that makes it possible. This is precisely what emerges from an examination of the legal basis on which ICE operates.

On paper, ICE rests on a legal architecture that is perfectly identifiable. The agency acts primarily under the authority of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified in Title 8 of the United States Code⁴, which governs the entry, residence, detention, and removal of non-citizens. Section 1357 of Title 85further grants certain agents the power to question individuals suspected of violating immigration law, to carry out warrantless arrests in specific circumstances, to detain individuals in connection with such violations, and to enforce administrative decisions, including while being armed, under rules established by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

In short, what must be understood here is that ICE, as it exists, does not operate outside the law: its powers are clearly defined by statute. But it is equally important to bear in mind that these powers did not originate with the Trump era; both the agency and its legal foundation long predate it.

ICE in the Era of “Zero Tolerance”

However, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement long predates Trump, it is under his administration that the rupture occurs. In practice, the law itself does not change, but its use does. And this shift is first visible in the numbers. ICE’s workforce more than doubled, rising from approximately 10,000 agents to over 22,000⁶. From this expansion follows, almost mechanically, an increase in checks, arrests, and recourse to administrative detention. Thus, in 2025, more than 56,000 people⁷were placed in detention. With the law remaining formally unchanged, the scale of enforcement has shifted, and with it, the very nature of the practice.

Because more arrests also often mean less targeting. And it is here that the reasoning reaches its culmination: generalisation replaces discernment. Under the so-called “zero tolerance” policy, arrests no longer concern only convicted criminals⁸, but also individuals with no criminal record, holders of green cards, valid visas, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or individuals awaiting regularization⁹.

It is important here to dispel any ambiguity. The point is not to claim that these individuals could never, as a matter of law, fall within ICE’s scope of action. For the most part, they already did so legally¹⁰. The rupture is therefore not normative, but operational. Before the Trump era, ICE’s action rested on an explicit prioritisation of enforcement targets: the agency operated according to a logic of security-based triage. Under the Trump administration, however, that hierarchy collapses. “Zero tolerance” replaces sorting with indistinction: it becomes sufficient to be a migrant, or presumed to be one, to become a target¹¹.

But this is precisely where the problem lies. When a democracy turns everyone into a target, it no longer protects through the law; it threatens through it.

When the law Makes Violence Acceptable

After all, what does a practice have to fear once the law consecrates it? Once stamped as legal, an order becomes almost untouchable. In a democracy founded on the rule of law, legislation is supposed to reflect the will of the people. By extension, what is legal becomes legitimate, and what is legitimate scarcely invites debate. For why hesitate when democracy has already spoken?

And when, by exception, an individual act does come to be contested, the practice itself remains intact. Legal justifications are ready-made, neatly shelved and readily available: self-defence, national security, risk prevention. They change nothing about the facts, but they do much for the narrative. The result is a familiar progression: the unacceptable becomes debatable, the debatable becomes tolerable, and the tolerable no longer calls for reform. The law, meant to frame public action, ultimately comes to excuse it, or even to render it comfortable.

The case of Renée Good offers an almost caricatural illustration of this dynamic. Kristi Noem, then Secretary of Homeland Security, did not seek to examine the facts, but to qualify them immediately. A homicide was reframed as a case of self-defence, soon elevated through references to an act of “domestic terrorism12.” The facts did not change; the vocabulary did. And with it, the debate; legally reframed, politically cooled, democratically neutralised. What was once unacceptable thus gradually slips into the realm of the acceptable, or, at the very least, the thinkable.

The Trump Effect: Violence Made Exportable

De facto, by proceeding in this way, the executive does more than defend a given action: it shifts the very framework within which that action becomes thinkable. What once belonged to the realm of exception now enters that of the normal, if not the necessary. It is precisely this discursive shift that contributes to the displacement of the Overton window. The use of administrative violence, once politically costly, becomes not only defensible but legitimate.

Yet one of the most pernicious aspects lies elsewhere. It is already troubling that such a shift should produce its effects at the level of a single country; it would be even more so were it to be reproduced across several. For if one democracy normalises the use of administrative violence, how long before this framework is taken up by other states? And above all, how long before it serves as a point of reference for democracies that have long looked to the United States?

What unfolds today in the United States often finds an echo in Europe a few years later. The concern, then, lies less in the event itself than in a contagion effect, within a European context already deeply polarised around migration issues. And even if ICE’s practices were never to be transposed wholesale onto the European stage, the outcome would remain no less troubling. In acting as he has, Trump has shifted the thresholds of acceptability, opening the way to ever more coercive policies, rendered potentially tolerable precisely because they appear less brutal than those implemented across the Atlantic.

Title Image Courtesy: ABC

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the views of the Government of India and the Defence Research and Studies.