ICE Is Not a Four-Letter Word

ICE has only three letters, yet a good part of American political life now treats it as a four-letter word, the old English-language shorthand for a curse word. Before deciding whether the contempt is earned, it is worth doing something few critics bother to do: read the name out loud.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Every one of those words describes a job that any sovereign country assigns to someone. Congress writes immigration law. Congress writes customs law. A law that nobody enforces is a suggestion, and the agency Congress created in 2003 to enforce both carries that name for a reason.

What the name actually covers

The enforcement half also deals with people who are dangerous by any standard. Of the 271,484 people ICE removed in fiscal year 2024, more than 47,000 had charges or convictions for assault and nearly 2,700 for homicide. Officers who go looking for those people cannot know in advance which door hides a violent felon and which hides a frightened family.

Why zero errors is the wrong standard

A street in Minneapolis or Chicago is the opposite of a controlled environment. Pew estimates the unauthorized population reached about 14 million in 2023, living among roughly 340 million citizens and lawful residents, often in the same households. ICE removed 442,637 people in fiscal year 2025, and it more than doubled its workforce, from about 10,000 to 22,000 officers and agents. Even at 99.9 percent accuracy, an operation of that size produces more than 440 mistakes a year. No police department, hospital or airline operating among real human beings has ever reached zero. Demanding zero of ICE, and condemning the whole agency the first time it falls short, sets a trap rather than a standard.

That does not make errors acceptable. It makes the right standard different: zero avoidable deaths, and relentless reduction of every other kind of error. A wrongful detention that is caught and corrected in hours is a failure the system should keep shrinking. A death that better training, a body camera or a calmer approach would have prevented is a failure the system must not tolerate. Holding ICE to that standard is what serious support for the agency looks like.

The hardest beat in American law enforcement

ICE officers do this work under conditions few police officers face. The Department of Homeland Security counted 647 assaults on ICE personnel between Jan. 20, 2025, and Sept. 20, 2026, against 37 in the comparable earlier period. Independent analysts have questioned how DHS tallies such figures, but the direction is hard to dispute. On July 4, 2025, attackers opened fire on officers at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, and a local police officer was shot in the neck.

Layered on top is a political climate in which some lawmakers liken officers to kidnappers and describe their operations as terror. Activists follow agents from block to block, film them, and sometimes physically obstruct arrests. Peaceful observation is a constitutional right, and it should stay that way. But every confrontation an officer has to manage is one more chance for a split-second judgment to go wrong.

Politicians who cheer ICE have not always served it well either. A federal inspector general found in August 2026 that as HSI agents were reassigned to immigration arrests, the agency's fentanyl seizures fell 39 percent. An ICE used as a political trophy is no better off than an ICE used as a political punching bag. Both shortchange the "customs" half of its name.

Minneapolis, without the noise

Any honest essay on this subject has to address Minneapolis, where two U.S. citizens died during the federal surge in January 2026. In the shooting of Renée Good on Jan. 7, the Justice Department said video evidence cleared the ICE officer involved. Alex Pretti was shot on January 24th by a Border Patrol agent, not an ICE officer, and that case remains under federal investigation. Yet in public memory both became "ICE killings," which says a great deal about how three letters now absorb the blame for everything done in the name of immigration enforcement.

The criticisms worth taking seriously

Syracuse University's TRAC found that about 70 percent of people in ICE detention as of April 4, 2026, had no criminal conviction. Deaths in custody in fiscal year 2026 passed the previous record by mid-April. ProPublica's running count of U.S. citizens detained by immigration agents passed 500 in early October 2026.

These facts call for better screening, faster release of anyone wrongly held, independent review of every death and serious training for thousands of new hires. They do not call for abolishing the agency that also rescues exploited children.

Through the front door

I came to this country in 1982 on a J-1 exchange visa, after consular vetting in Chennai and background checks that reached across three countries. I have written before that legal immigration and border enforcement depend on each other. People who waited their turn have the most reason to want the rules to mean something.

So read the name once more: Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is the name of a necessary institution doing a hard job imperfectly, as every human institution does. Repair what is broken, measure what matters and hold every officer to the standard of zero avoidable harm. But stop treating three letters as a curse word. ICE is not a four-letter word.

Author: Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents.