Nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has become the administration’s primary political weapon — not to solve problems, but to manufacture fear, provoke outrage and stage an illusion of control. This isn’t a crisis response. It’s crisis construction.
The president’s team vowed to target gang members, murderers and rapists, but we’re not just rounding up violent offenders. We’re arresting working parents, students, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens, to create made-for-TV crackdowns.
I served as chief of staff at Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Joe Biden and spent over a decade working in homeland security. I knew that national security requires focusing on threats — not turning law enforcement into a spectacle. Despite President Trump’s promises to go after the “worst of the worst,” in the past few months the administration has deported a preschooler who is a U.S. citizen and who has stage 4 kidney cancer and his family. A raid on a Hyundai plant where South Korean nationals were rounded up triggered an international incident and threatened future investment in Georgia. Those scenes appear to be part of a deliberate strategy of political theater.
Over the next three years, detention space will be multiplied. Due process will likely be further sidelined. The broken legal immigration system won’t be fixed — it will be abandoned.
The One Big Beautiful Bill signed in July will inject agencies at every level — federal, state and local — with funding for immigration enforcement. That will entrench removal as the singular goal of our law enforcement at every level of government, while focusing away from terrorism, transnational crime, cyberattacks and foreign adversaries.
Federal, state and local law enforcement are already being deputized to support ICE endeavors.
Nearly 14,500 law enforcement agents have been pulled off their investigations to do civil immigration work, including agents taken off the border. Nearly 3,000 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were reassigned to civil immigration enforcement, instead of focusing on their mission of national security and public safety. This is allowing fentanyl traffickers, child predators and foreign intelligence threats to operate with less scrutiny. Federal prosecutions for drug violations have dropped significantly.
In Chicago, a recent federal raid turned an apartment complex into a battlefield. A helicopter hovered overhead as agents stormed in, zip tying American children and parading them, in pajamas and crying, into the street. The result of that raid? Another neighborhood terrorized — another community pushed farther from trusting law enforcement. No cartel leader was arrested. No terrorist cell was disrupted.
When immigration enforcement is conducted this way it has consequences for all of law enforcement, and in turn, all public safety. This is where our national security dollars are going. This is how we’re choosing to spend our limited operational bandwidth. How does this make us safer?
Under President Trump, every raid, every news conference, every viral image is part of a larger operation — not of enforcement, but manipulation. The resistance these tactics create are useful for the administration and help justify escalation.
Federal agents, many of whom signed up to protect the nation, are essentially being used as props, and I worry that, as the political tides turn, political appointees will be able to scapegoat them and then discard them. The proud men and women who enforce our immigration laws saw this during the previous Trump administration — the posturing, the betrayal, the blame dumped on officers who were directed to carry out operations (like family separation) in a way that instills distrust in law enforcement.
We need immigration enforcement — but it must be humane, targeted and precise. This country deserves an approach that prioritizes national security, protects communities and upholds due process. ICE officers are capable of that mission. Placing the formidable power of ICE — with its vast authority and reach — in the hands of political opportunists who neither fully comprehend nor respect that its mission is a volatile and dangerous combination, turning a critical national security tool into a blunt political weapon.
When law enforcement is forced into partisan roles, it stops serving the public. And when the public loses trust in law enforcement, the whole system begins to fail. The blueprint is: Create chaos. Blame the chaos. Then offer yourself as the cure.
This plan is already underway. The question now is if the rest of us will keep pretending this is law and order.
Jason P. Houser is a former ICE chief of staff, Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official, Afghanistan combat veteran, and U.S. Cyber Command liaison to Israel and Europe.
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