ICE, another product of the 9/11 attacks

The September 11, 2001 attacks brought about major social, political, and judicial changes in the United States. It was an unprecedented event and the enormous impact and trauma it caused forced a thorough examination of how the United States operated to prevent terrorism and to ensure a similar tragedy would not happen again. One of the most significant changes was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in March 2003, which followed congressional investigations into the attacks that lasted two years.Something had failed in the system. The terrorists had obtained visas to enter the country and, ultimately, had easily evaded airport passport control. “The failure revealed by the September 11 attacks was that those hijackers were not prevented from entering the country and, subsequently, boarding the planes,” says Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) between 1993 and 2000 during Democratic President Bill Clinton’s administration. Responsibility for issuing visas lay with consular officers under the State Department, but entry into the country was permitted by immigration inspectors.The fact that the terrorists were foreign nationals changed immigration priorities. U.S. immigration control became directly linked to national security and the fight against terrorism. As a result, in the following decade, deportations rose to 2.3 million people compared with 1.6 million expelled in the previous 10 years.Meissner left her post at the INS months before the attacks occurred. While she led it, the INS was part of the Justice Department and was responsible for enforcing immigration laws, patrolling the border, and processing applications for legal status and citizenship. After 9/11, the INS disappeared and its functions were split into three agencies: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), responsible for granting visas and residence permits; Customs and Border Protection (CBP); and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).“There is now far less coordination and coherence in immigration policy — now that these areas have been separated — compared with the era when they depended on a single commissioner; that person could weigh options to determine the best allocation of resources and set priorities that balanced, for example, legal immigration against control and law enforcement functions. From a bureaucratic standpoint, this is much harder to achieve today because the work is split into three separate parts within the Department of Homeland Security,” Meissner says.The split into three agencies meant separate budgets. In an administration like Donald Trump’s, in which the campaign against immigration dominates the presidential agenda, ICE, which is responsible for detentions and deportations, has seen its available funds surge to unprecedented levels, larger than the military budgets of most countries in the world. “The structural change allowed a massive increase in funding for ICE and created an independent law-enforcement apparatus that did not exist before. It laid the groundwork for what exists now,” says Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA law professor and author of several books on immigration in the United States.Thanks to funds approved in 2025 in the budget bill (the Big Beautiful Bill), which provided $170 billion, and to this year’s Reconciliation Act, which supplied an additional $70 billion for the immigration agenda, ICE has been able to multiply the number of agents, open new detention centers, forge partnerships and acquire intelligence programs and equipment to carry out Trump’s goal of effecting the largest deportation in history. “In law-enforcement terms we now have levels of resources that post-9/11-era lawmakers would never have imagined,” says Meissner, who is currently director of the migration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI).That enormous injection of money has also been accompanied by what has been perceived as a license for ICE to operate with impunity. The DHS has so far defended the actions of its immigration agents in the most controversial cases. The department has supported the officials who killed U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January of this year, and also those responsible for the deaths of Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Colombian Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, both of which occurred in July. “They certainly enjoy immunity and, under the second Trump administration, they have been empowered to carry out law-enforcement activities in ways that are incompatible with the professional standards established for police,” Meissner contends.By dividing the INS’s functions into agencies, policing operations were strengthened. “The real problem lies in the separation of ICE and CBP, on the one hand, and USCIS — that is, the service-provision branch — on the other. I believe this structure has allowed both ICE and CBP to expand further, while insufficient funding for USCIS has created an imbalance and led to a prioritization of national security to an extent that, in my view, is excessive,” Motomura says.Applications to adjust immigration status and apply for permanent residency are piling up at USCIS, where cases accumulate for years without resolution.Biometric controlIn the 25 years since 9/11, the United States has not suffered another terrorist attack of that magnitude. The country implemented measures such as biometrics and interactive databases, and the resources devoted to travel management and cooperation, both internationally and among U.S. agencies themselves, have proven effective. However, in the last 18 months the current administration has used national security to detain and deport migrants it has accused of terrorism without providing evidence. The government has used outdated laws, such as the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was only applied in wartime cases, to deport Salvadoran and Venezuelan migrants without due process and has activated the Foreign Terrorist Removal Court, created 30 years ago but never operational.Moreover, it has intimidated people into self-deportation and revoked visa approvals, making it very difficult to enter the United States and deterring the arrival of students and workers who contribute benefits to the country — certainly not the kind of foreigners Congress had in mind when creating the DHS. “We are a country that is safer from international terrorism. Today, security threats in the United States come from within the country, not from abroad; they stem from internal tensions, gun violence and polarized public opinion. These are, therefore, different and novel challenges,” Meissner says.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition