Protests in the USA | "We are removing criminals"
At the center of the protests of the past few days has been the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is causing fear and terror in many working-class neighborhoods across the United States with its raids on immigrants. Following the arrest of several dozen migrants in Los Angeles, several hundred demonstrators initially gathered peacefully in front of a detention center last Friday. When anti-riot units later fired tear gas and rubber bullets from the building against the protesters, the unrest ignited. However, compared to the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, it has so far remained very limited.
The immigration deportation agency ICE was established in 2002 after the attacks in New York as part of the Homeland Security Act, which drastically expanded the state's control and surveillance capabilities. Unlike regular immigration authorities, ICE's mission is to "protect national security" and combat "transnational crime." Migration, crime, and terrorism were thus deliberately established as a coherent set of issues when the agency was founded. The ICE website states: "The mission of ICE is to protect America from transnational crime and illegal immigration that threaten national security and public safety."
Accordingly, the agency, which employs 20,000 people and currently has an annual budget of nine billion dollars, is not responsible for immigration issues, but rather for investigative and police functions. While the "Criminal Alien Program," for example, is tasked with developing strategies "to improve the ability to apprehend and remove aliens from the United States," the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division handles the raids that have now triggered the riots. The ERO's motto could have come from a right-wing extremist party platform: "We remove criminals from our communities," the unit's self-description states boldly.
Even though ICE was founded under Republican President George Bush Jr. (2001 to 2009), the Obama administration expanded the agency over the next eight years. A 2017 study by the Migration Policy Institute found that in the last year of Obama's presidency, the Department of Homeland Security arrested 530,250 migrants and deported 344,354 - which earned Obama the title of "Deporter in Chief" among non-governmental organizations. While Obama did increase spending on the deportation agency and reduce the number of deportations in the border area (so-called returns) , the number of deportations ( removals) carried out by ICE increased significantly under the Democratic president: from two million people during Bush's eight-year presidency to three million under Obama .
Overall, the number of people hunted by ICE, i.e., migrants without legal residency, is estimated at almost 14 million. Interestingly, this number initially remained constant between 2010 and 2024 despite changes in government, but then rose significantly from 2020 onward. The fact that illegal migration increased under the Republican Trump administration indicates that migration movements can be explained less by government policy than by economic factors. Experts attribute the increase from 2020 onward primarily to the coronavirus pandemic, which triggered mass impoverishment in many Latin American societies.
The deportation system with its privately operated prisons is a multi-billion dollar business for some companies.
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During Trump's first presidency, ICE blatantly used practices designed to terrorize those affected. The most notorious example was the detention of underage children, who – as the British BBC reported – were locked in cages without their parents . Although such measures were discontinued under Democrat Joe Biden in 2021, little else changed in the agency's practices. At the end of 2024 , ICE proudly announced that it had broken the record numbers achieved under Trump in 2024 , Biden's final year in office. It is also noteworthy that daily ICE removals in the first few months of 2025 were lower under Donald Trump than under his predecessor, Biden .
The fact that deportations aren't taking place on an even larger scale is apparently also due to the limited capacity of detention centers. The Trump administration is currently extremely active in this area. A large portion of the "detention centers" where arrested migrants are housed pending deportation are operated by private companies such as Geo Group and Core Civic. The Florida-based Geo Group operates not only prisons but also psychiatric hospitals, while Tennessee-based Core Civic received a €1 billion contract from the Obama administration in 2016 to build detention centers.
The profit-driven nature of these companies ensures that cuts are made at every turn at the expense of the detainees. Non-governmental organizations report catastrophic medical and food supplies. In fact, nine migrants have died in detention centers since Trump took office alone.
Silky Shah of the non-governmental organization "Detention Watch Network" sees a paradigm shift in deportation policy similar to that of 2002. In an interview with the broadcaster Democracy Now, Shah reported that Donald Trump's budget proposal proposes an additional $45 billion for the deportation system, "13 times more than the current budget." These plans are extremely lucrative for the companies involved. The private operators are subject to little oversight over how they use the government funds.
According to Shah, detainees in immigration detention are subjected to even greater harassment than in many prisons. For example, detainees often "disappear": As punishment for unruly behavior, they are transferred to other, distant immigration detention centers without their families being informed of their whereabouts.
Unfortunately, Shah said, political resistance is unlikely. While some Democratic lawmakers have begun visiting detention centers and thus raising public awareness, overall, Democrats have capitulated on the issue. "Kamala Harris campaigned on the pretext that she was tougher than Trump."
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