ICE, the relentless force behind Trump’s deportation drive

The truce, if there ever was one, is over. The apparent calm that had kept U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) out of the major headlines in recent months has given way to a fierce storm. In the space of just one week, the agency’s whip has come down hard across the United States, leaving four people dead, two of them shot by immigration agents.

Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died after being shot by an agent in Houston on July 7. Colombian national Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was killed by gunfire from another agent in Maine on July 13. That same day, Venezuelan national Jesús Manuel Arenas Silva died while being transferred between detention centers in Georgia. And on July 14, Honduran national Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán was fatally struck by a truck while fleeing an officer in Florida.

“Why was lethal force used on Monday morning, and why did Mr. Durán Guerrero die? The family deserves answers, and the country deserves accountability. We want ICE and government officials to explain why this keeps happening in communities across the country,” said Ryan D. Fecteau, speaker of the Maine House of Representatives.

Fecteau, a Democrat, was the first person to break the news of the 26-year-old’s death. Durán Guerrero was killed when an ICE agent shot him while he was driving to work in Biddeford, a small coastal city in southern Maine. The legislator posted the news on social media, and it spread rapidly, mixing with reports that were still emerging about the death of Salgado Araujo, who had died under similar circumstances just six days earlier.

Gone was the objective publicly stated in the Senate by the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, when he succeeded his predecessor, Kristi Noem, last March. During his confirmation hearing to lead the department overseeing the Trump administration’s anti-immigration campaign, the former Oklahoma senator declared that his goal for the following six months was simple: “That we’re not in the lead story every single day.”

Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at one of its lowest points, following the deaths of U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of immigration agents during protests that spread across Minneapolis in January. Those deaths sparked outrage among much of the public, including within Republican ranks. Thousands of agents had been deployed to Minnesota to carry out large-scale immigration arrests, as they did in other cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans.

In their wake, they left a trail of pain and extraordinary violence, accompanied by dramatic images of agents throwing people to the ground, beating them and forcibly separating them from their loved ones. The result was that the actions of an agency that had been unknown to most Americans just a year earlier became a major political liability

Initial support for Trump’s immigration policy, which helped him win votes in the 2024 election, fell to record lows in February and has remained there ever since. The latest Ipsos/Washington Post poll shows that nearly 60% of Americans disapprove of his handling of immigration. Other factors, including the war with Iran and the high cost of living, have pushed the president’s overall approval rating down to 30%, the same level at which he lost his reelection bid in 2020. In January 2025, his approval rating stood at 47%.

The relative calm that followed Mullin’s arrival was largely due to the changes he sought to introduce at the department. Among them was replacing the high-profile raids in streets and workplaces frequented by migrants, such as the Home Depot parking lots and car washes that Mullin’s predecessor Kristi Noem was particularly fond of targeting, with a strategy focused on pursuing specific individuals.

Incompetent agents

The change in strategy did little to alter the outcome in the cases of Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo. Neither man was the target the agents were searching for. One of the most persistent criticisms of ICE operations has been the lack of professionalism of officers. The roughly 10,000 field agents on staff at the start of Trump’s second term were not enough to carry out his promised mass deportation campaign. As a result, thanks to legislative funding packages and accelerated recruitment drives, the agency more than doubled its workforce in 2025, bringing it to its current number of 22,000 agents.

“The Trump administration rushed 12,000 agents onto our streets without ensuring they were fit to carry a badge and a gun — and Republicans gave this rogue agency vast power and no accountability,” Senate Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a post on X on Friday.

Under Noem’s leadership, ICE sought to attract recruits by offering signing bonuses of up to $50,000, announcing that college degrees were no longer required, and lowering the minimum recruitment age to 18. The agency also shortened training to between six and eight weeks, compared with the previous 72-day basic training programme.

The lack of adequate preparation has been cited as one of the reasons behind abuses committed by agents. In February, former ICE instructor Ryan Schwank submitted a complaint to Congress describing the agency’s training process as “deficient, defective and broken.”

Standard background checks have also reportedly not been carried out consistently. On Friday, it emerged that David Brouillette, the agent who killed Durán Guerrero, had suffered from serious mental health problems since childhood and had been repeatedly accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife and daughters.

Mullin announced that, from 1 July, agents would return to the previous training programme, a measure many don’t believe will be enough to address abuses committed by ICE. According to an Associated Press tally in the absence of official figures, at least 10 people have died in encounters with immigration agents since Trump began his second term.

“We have seen presidential directives about setting quotas; when there is a quota, federal agents face immense pressure to hit that magic, imaginary number and, as a result, go after anyone they believe will help them meet it,” said Fecteau. “It’s a complex problem that ranges from training to senior leadership guidance on how ICE agents should behave and perform their duties.”

The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly pushing to double the number of daily arrests, aiming for 2,000 a day. By late June, 10,000 arrests had been recorded in just five days, according to confidential documents cited by The New York Times. The White House wants more arrests because its deportation campaign has fallen short of expectations. At the start of his term, President Trump demanded the removal of one million people, but by December 2025 the figure had only just surpassed 600,000.

“The real problem is the pressure to do more arrests and do them more quickly. And when there’s relentless pressure to do more, more, more and more, agents make mistakes,” Deborah Fleischaker, ICE’s deputy director of policy during the Biden administration, said this week on CNN.

No body cameras

The DHS has consistently defended its agents in cases involving deaths, but official accounts have often conflicted with those of eyewitnesses. After the deaths of Good and Pretti, the department pledged that agents would wear body cameras while carrying out arrests. Yet this did not happen in either the Durán Guerrero case or the Salgado Araujo case.

“That is totally unacceptable,” Biddeford Mayor Liam LaFountain said in a statement last Wednesday. “In Biddeford our police officers are fully equipped with body cameras. The department’s annual budget is less than $10 million. The fact that ICE is swimming in billions of taxpayer dollars and can’t perform a basic function like properly equipping their people is a severe indictment.”

The DHS has more than enough money to provide body cameras. In June, Congress approved, without Democratic support, an additional $70 billion to finance the administration’s anti-immigration campaign, of which $38 billion was allocated to ICE.

That appropriation came on top of the $170 billion earmarked for the campaign against migrants in the budget legislation, dubbed by the president his “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was passed in July 2025. In total, an astronomical $240 billion will be spent through the end of Trump’s term attempting to achieve the largest deportation in history that he promised.

The push to increase migrant arrests has added another 4,000 detainees to ICE facilities, bringing the current population to 63,000, according to The New York Times. Detainees report inhumane conditions, including inadequate facilities, spoiled food and insufficient access to medical care. As a result, at least 22 people have died in ICE detention centers so far this year. The total is on track to surpass the 33 deaths recorded in 2025, the highest annual figure in more than two decades.

During a speech at a National Police Week memorial event in Washington, Mullin said that his agency’s personnel are “willing to pay the extra sacrifice for us to be safe, and yet, for some reason, ICE has been demonized.”

Many Americans, however, believe there has been no shortage of reasons for that.

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