What A Day - A Brief History of ICE

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Immigration and Customs Enforcement isn't some storied government agency from the 19th century. ICE was invented back in 2003 — but now it has a multi-billion-dollar budget and many officers who are undertrained at best. So, how did we get here? To find out, we spoke to Garrett Graff. He's a historian and journalist who has covered federal law enforcement for 20 years.And in headlines, President Donald Trump threatens fresh tariffs on America's NATO allies over Greenland, the Pentagon ordered 1,500 National Guard troops to prepare for possible deployment to Minnesota, and a seat on Trump's Board of Peace reportedly has a $1 billion price tag.Show Notes: Check out Garrett's work – https://www.garrettgraff.com/Call Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Monday, January 19th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day. The show that has learned that Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-Durimer, allegedly keeps a massive stash of alcohol in her office and has committed, quote, travel fraud, as in making her staff invent trips for her to go on so she can hang out with her friends. The White House is called the allegations baseless, but as a deep supporter of members of the Trump administration not doing their actual jobs, this show has no choice. put to stand with our Secretary of Labor. On today's show, President Donald Trump continues to die on the strangest of hills, threatening fresh tariff's on our NATO allies over Greenland. And the Gaza Peace Board is here, but at what cost?

Hint. It's a billion dollars. But let's start with immigration and customs enforcement. Like we said last week, ICE isn't very popular right now, and elected officials have noticed. Case in point. last January, Arizona Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego co-sponsored the Lake and Riley Act, which required ICE to detain and deport undocumented immigrants who commit theft, burglary, larceny, or shoplifting offenses.

In a statement about his support for the bill, he said, quote, we must give law enforcement the means to take action when illegal immigrants break the law. But on CNN's State of the Union Sunday, Senator Gallego sounded a little different on the subject. I think ICE needs to be totally torn down. It has to be, you know, created in the image of what people want, right? And what does that look like? From my experience running in Arizona in a very hard, hard state when it comes immigration, immigration issues, people want immigration enforcement that goes after criminals, right?

And focuses on criminals. And immigration enforcement is actually focused on security and not the goon squad that has come from Stephen Miller and Donald Trump. But I wanted to know, what is I supposed to be? See, immigration and customs enforcement isn't some storied government agency. from the 19th century. Ice was invented when I was in high school back in 2003. Hell, the movie Legally Blonde is older than ICE. But now it has a multi-billion dollar budget and incentives for agents. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE officers get rewarded for making arrests even if the people they detain are later released. And many of those officers are, to put it mildly, undertrained at best.

It's no wonder that abolish ICE is an increasingly popular sentiment. So to explain where ICE came from and how it became the agency we know today, I spoke to Garrett Graff. He's a historian and journalist who has covered federal law enforcement for 20 years. Garrett, welcome back to what today? Always a pleasure to talk to you. Let's start at the beginning. How did the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which we know as ICE, begin? Because contrary to what seems to be popular belief, they weren't always around. ICE was born out of the massive reshuffling of the U.S. government that took place in the wake of 9-11, as we began to reckon with the series of intelligence failures that took place that led up to those attacks by Al Qaeda, came to understand how many parts of the government just weren't working correctly,

that information wasn't getting to where it was supposed to be, that authorities were dispersed across all sorts of government cabinet departments and different agencies. And so when DHS was formed, it was this massive new cabinet department that pulled different parts from all over the rest of government and reshuffled a lot of them. Before 9-11, immigration was overseeing by an agency known as INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Justice Department. And so ICE was created out of two divisions from INS, the so-called deportation officers who became a half of ICE that is known as ERO in 4,000. and removal operations. And then the special agents, the investigators from INS, who were combined with the special agent investigators from the U.S. Customs Service, into a new part of ICE that was called

HSI, Homeland Security Investigations. So just to be very specific, what was ICE's intended purpose when it was created? Like if you were in an elevator with an ICE officer in 2004, what's their elevator pitch as to what it is? You have to understand that ICE was one part of this reshuffling. So, INS and the U.S. Customs Service is also being broken apart in other ways to form the other major border and immigration agency known now as CBP, Customs and Border Protection. So that brings together the green uniforms of the Border Patrol, which again had been part of the Department of Justice, as well as the blue uniforms of what used to be the customs inspectors, the people who would meet you at the airport, who would deal with, you know, seaports and airports and land crossings. And so the thinking was that we were sort of creating two distinct immigration. and border agencies.

And that CBP was going to be all of the enforcement at the border, this unified border security agency, and that ICE was going to be the unified customs and immigration enforcement agency for the interior of the United States, that they were going to be in charge of people who were in the United States illegally already over the border, that they were going to be the people doing the smuggling, investigations, they were going to be the people doing sort of complex transnational crime investigations

and that you would sort of have two agencies, one watching the borders, one watching everything inside the country. I want to ask a question that I think a lot of people are wondering about. On a spectrum from a local police officer to a member of the United States military, where do ICE and CBP agents fall? And more specifically, what authority does each type of agent have to enforce the law? especially with regard to American citizens. So ERO officers, sort of the people that were now getting unfortunately used to running around America's major cities and breaking car windows, they have incredibly limited authority.

They are not police in the way that they wear, you know, big tactical vests that say police in large letters on them. They have the ability to enforce a narrow segment of immigration law, and they can make arrests for crimes that are federal crimes that are committed in front of them, but that they are not HSI special agents who actually have the ability and the power to go out and investigate federal crimes that they don't witness. So they are not legally allowed to be forcibly removing Americans from their cars, for example. example. No, in theory. But I think that this gets at one of the other challenges that we are witnessing right now, which is border patrol and ICE are just not trained for the work that they're doing on America's streets right now. They are used to working in this very narrow sphere of border enforcement and immigration enforcement, which have very different responsibilities

for civil rights and civil liberties and due process. On an average day, doing an average task, your average state or local law enforcement officer is far more experienced in investigating crime, enforcing crime, and dealing with civilians than your average ICE officer or CBP, agent. To that point, there's been a ton of reporting about flaws in ISIS recruitment and training processes. Just last Wednesday, NBC News reported that an AI tool mistakenly flagged many

applicants with no law enforcement experience as law enforcement officers because they used the word officer in their application, which means they were only required to complete four weeks of online training instead of the eight weeks of in-person training where they would have learned how to do things like handle a gun. You've reported on the agency's flaws in depth. We've talked before. about who's getting recruited to work for ICE. They're not great. So my question is, is this what ICE wants? Do they want to just flood the zone with the kind of people who would take four weeks of

training because they've basically been told that they can run rampant over American cities? I think the better way to look at it is this is exactly what Stephen Miller wants, that the Trump White House is getting what it is paying for in the terror campaign. that is being waged against American cities right now, particularly democratic cities, particularly democratic states. And that that pressure is coming down from the top and spreading out across DHS, spreading out across ice,

spreading out to these agents in the field. And part of that is also you have seen this tremendous shift in the last year, really since May of 2025, in the tactics that ICE pursues. For the last 20 years, as we've been discussing, ICE has existed and sort of been out there on a day-to-day basis, arresting and deporting people who are in the country illegally. And the way that they did that was they relied on what was called prosecutorial discretion.

They understood that every day in America, were more people eligible to be deported than they had ICE officers available to deport. And so they wanted to make sure that they were using those precious federal resources to get the most return on the investment in ICE. And so they focused on the actual worst of the worst. People with either what were called, you know, final orders of deportation, people who had exhausted the total due process available to them and were, you know, now really, really, really in the country illegally, or people who had criminal records, you know, the murderers, the rapists, the gang members, the drug dealers, the people that we sort of hear the Trump administration talking about all

the time. But that kind of focus and that kind of work is incredibly manpower intensive. You know, you would have teams of agents who might spend, you know, days or even weeks, working to find an arrest and deport a single person. And so last May, when Stephen Miller made this quota that he denies as a quota, that ICE needs to be making 3,000 arrests a day in order to hit the sort of roughly 1 million people a year mark that they have arbitrarily set, ICE and CBP couldn't rely on that manpower-intensive discretionary process. to meet that quota.

And so that is what led to that very rapid switch in tactics that we saw last spring that was basically like ice sweeping people of color up off the streets indiscriminately, SWAT gear wearing border patrol agents rolling into Home Depot parking lots like they were about to invade Fallujah to arrest a bunch of day laborers. So one of the biggest differences between ICE sort of a year ago and now is effectively an ICE officer would wake up in the morning knowing the name of their target for the day. And now they are rolling out in these heavily

armored convoys, not knowing if the people that they are kidnapping off the streets of America are even in the country illegally. I think my last question for you is we, now know that ICE agents are, to your point, often overstepping their authority. But I think we've seen horribly that there is little recourse for even American citizens. So if an ICE agent asks you to get out of your vehicle or screams at you to do so or wants to come into your house or wants to see your documentation, even if you're an American citizen, how can Americans protect themselves? I wish I could give you a clear answer to that. And there are, and constitutional answers that I could give you.

But to me, the most troubling aspect of what we are watching unfold right now is there is no advice that I can give either an immigrant in the country legally, an undocumented person, or a U.S. citizen that can adequately guarantee protection from an assault by ICE officers right now. that what we are watching, I think, is a national police riot by CBP and ICE officers without any due regard for civil rights, constitutional protections, or traditional civil liberties. Garrett, as always, thank you so much for joining me, even though I am very scared. Always a pleasure, Jane. That was my conversation with historian and journalist Garrett Graf.

We'll get to more of the news in a moment. But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The new year doesn't require a new you. Maybe I just less burdened you. Therapy can help more easily identify what's holding you back

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Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for DeleteMe. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to join DeleteMe.com slash Wad and use promo code Wad to check out. The only way to get 20% off is to go to join DeleteMe.com slash Wad and enter code Wad at checkout. That's joinedleatme.com slash Wad, code Watt. Here's what else we're following today. Headalines. What is the national emergency that justifies these new slate of tariffs? The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is

defending President Trump's efforts to take over Greenland for national security purposes and all that. Spoiler alert, he's not doing a very good job. On Saturday, Trump's a Trump's. threatened a new tariff on a slew of European countries. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. Why? For standing in the way of Trump's desire to acquire Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. Trump said the 10% tariff would be imposed February 1st and would increase to 25% by June. He wrote on True Social, quote, This tariff will be due and payable until such time as a deal is reached for the complete and total purchase of Greenland, which is stupid.

European leaders, unsurprisingly, pushed back in a joint statement on Sunday. The eight countries said they're standing in solidarity with Denmark and Greenland, writing, quote, tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. So will Trump get his way by threatening our allies? Besson was optimistic when speaking with NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press on Sunday. The president, as far as I have heard, has not taken military force off the table. if the United States were to take Greenland by force, how would that be different than Russia's annexation of Crimea?

Look, I believe that the Europeans will understand that this is best for Greenland, best for Europe, and best for the United States. Reminder, pretty much nobody wants this. Last week, we told you about the Trump administration's plan to move the Gaza ceasefire into a second phase, one that involves turning over day-to-day operations to a technocratic committee.

In addition, the territory will be placed under the oversight of a new quote, Board of Peace. Now we're learning what it may cost to sit on that board. According to documents reviewed by Bloomberg, countries seeking a permanent seat on the Board of Peace must cough up $1 billion in cash for a three-year term. Member states would be able to vote on decisions,

but the final decision rests solely with the chairman. And the chairman is, you guessed it, President Trump. For a billion dollars you get to cosplay in Trump's global peacekeeping fetish-slash-fantasy. where everyone can vote, but only his actually counts. Isn't this supposed to be about Gaza? Turns out, the charter doesn't even mention it at all. That's made critics mighty suspicious

that this is more about creating a U.S.-led pay-to-play alternative to the United Nations. The money raised would reportedly be used to fund Gaza's reconstruction. But according to Bloomberg, the charter, quote, appears to suggest that Trump himself would control the money, so seems unlikely at best. Violent crime is down. Shootings are down.

Carjackings are down in virtually every category and virtually every neighborhood in the city. You know what's causing more chaos? Having these thousands of ice agents and border control and apparently military even potentially on our streets. Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frye responded to news that U.S. troops may be heading to a city on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. Over the weekend, multiple news outlets reported that the Pentagon ordered 1,500 troops to, to prepare for possible deployment to Minnesota, where protesters have been clashing with federal immigration agents for more than a week. This is after President Trump threatened last week to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law that allows the president to send military or national guard members

into American cities to act as law enforcement. Typically, it's used when a state requests it, because local law enforcement is in over its head. Or when states are refusing to comply with federal laws, like after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. But of course, Trump doesn't care about any of that. Back in October, he said nearly 50% of presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act. To be clear, he is wrong. It's only been used 30 times by about a third of presidents. That said, we know math isn't the president's strong suit.

America was built one home at a time. I believe that. Because the American dream was never just an idea. It was a front door, a set of keys, a place where families built their future. If you thought President Trump suddenly took over a voice, overwork for a Fannie Mae ad, think again. The narration is actually an AI-generated clone of Trump's voice released with the Trump administration's approval. It pitches a all-new Fannie Mae as the protector of the American Dream, part of a broader push to look busy on housing affordability.

What does this all mean? Why is the president doing this? I don't know. We live in hell. 287 days until the midterms, people. And if Trump's cool with loaning out his voice, well, why don't we give it a shot? So here's our AI-Trump. Jane, you were right about everything. Can I be part of the Wad Squad? No, okay. I am a terrible person. Wow, he really gets it.

Thanks, AI, Trump. And that's the news. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how one of my favorite King quotes

is from his letter from a Birmingham jail in 1963. We must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and I don't often do this here, but it felt appropriate today to give you a longer section of his writing. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God.

And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the four. of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy

from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. Indeed. What a day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Four and Chris Alport. Our producer is Caitlin Blummer. Our video editor is Joseph Tutra.

Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had a production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Matt Burke. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of News and Politics is Adrian Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Cantor. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.