I was a lawyer for Ice. Mass deportations don’t make us safer | Veronica Cardenas

4 hours ago 2

This month marks 22 years since the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).

Created in the wake of 9/11 under the guise of national security, Ice was supposed to target real threats. Instead, it has become a machine of mass surveillance, indiscriminate arrests and fear-based enforcement that does little to keep us safer. Over the years, the harshest post-9/11 policies were rolled back after proving ineffective. But today, we are watching history repeat itself.

The resurgence of Donald Trump’s immigration policies signals a dangerous return to a failed strategy – one that prioritizes public spectacle over public safety, conflates civil violations with criminal threats, and emboldens vigilantes to police immigration status as if it were their duty.

I saw this firsthand in my 13 years as an assistant chief counsel for Ice. The US immigration system was not designed to grant due process or ensure fairness; instead, it was built to prioritize deportation as a fallback when criminal prosecutions weren’t politically desirable or feasible.

History has shown us that mass immigration enforcement does not make us safer. The George W Bush administration’s post-9/11 surveillance programs, such as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), failed to prevent terrorism and instead fueled racial profiling. The Bush administration implemented Operation Streamline to criminally prosecute border crossers en masse and clogged federal courts with non-violent immigration cases. It wasted resources on prosecuting asylum seekers instead of targeting real security threats. These policies were ultimately scrapped because they didn’t work. Yet today, we see them creeping back to “Make America Safe Again”.

Ice has used social media to turn non-citizens’ arrests into entertainment. Mugshot-style images of detained immigrants flood Ice’s feeds, lumping civil violators like visa overstays alongside serious offenders like drug smugglers. The message is clear: to Ice, all non-citizens are criminals. But this isn’t law enforcement – it’s propaganda designed to stoke fear and justify an indiscriminate dragnet that ensnares even those with no criminal record at all. By deliberately blurring the lines between civil and criminal violations, Ice fuels the false narrative that non-citizens are inherently dangerous. In reality, nearly half of those arrested have no criminal record – but Ice is betting the public won’t care to check the facts.

Beyond social media theatrics, Trump’s decision to rescind the 2011 Sensitive Locations Memorandum marks a dangerous return to unchecked immigration enforcement. The memorandum required supervisory approval or pressing circumstances before authorities conducted arrests, searches, or surveillance in schools, hospitals, places of worship, and other locations. It was implemented to balance immigration enforcement with basic human rights – ensuring that fear of deportation wouldn’t prevent people from seeking medical care, sending their children to school, or practicing their faith. But now, with the border czar, Tom Homan, openly declaring that non-citizens “should be afraid”, immigration has strayed from recognizing those human rights – shifting instead to a strategy of fear in every aspect of daily life, pushing non-citizens into the shadows and leaving them vulnerable to exploitation. And we’re already seeing the consequences.

Take the case of 11-year-old Jocelynn Rojo Carranza, who died by suicide after classmates threatened to report her family to Ice. Her death is a reminder that Trump’s immigration agenda doesn’t just empower officers to enforce the law – it emboldens ordinary people to act as enforcers themselves. By stripping away critical safeguards like the Sensitive Locations Memorandum, the government is sanctioning a culture of fear where teachers, neighbors and even classmates feel justified in weaponizing deportation. This turns immigration status into a tool of exclusion – one that doesn’t just separate families but erodes the very institutions meant to serve and protect communities.

This reckless, fear-based approach isn’t just emboldening vigilantes in our communities – it’s dismantling federal law enforcement as we know it. Trump’s executive order Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats claims to bolster security, yet in reality, it guts agencies like the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). It pulls resources away from critical missions and redirects them towards sweeping immigration crackdowns. Studies show precision-based enforcement effectively removes threats, while blanket policing wastes resources and weakens public safety. Instead of strengthening national security, Trump’s order scatters critical law enforcement assets, pulling them away from counter-terrorism, drug trafficking and violent crimes. By casting an indiscriminate net, his approach makes it harder, not easier, to catch real threats, like searching for a needle in a haystack while torching the entire field.

We’ve seen this playbook before: policies that dehumanize, divide and erode public trust. But history doesn’t have to repeat itself. We know these policies don’t work. The question now isn’t just how much damage they will do – it’s whether we will stop them before it’s too late.