1. United States
2. N.J.
3. Letter

A $28 billion annual ICE budget is not about immigration. It is the budget of a domestic force that operates with extraordinary power and insufficient accountability to American citizens. Unemployment is rising. If $28 billion were dedicated to job training and placement, it could dramatically strengthen a precarious economy that shows signed of a bubble. Instead, widespread financial desperation becomes a convenient foundation for expanding recruitment into an agency increasingly associated with harm to fellow citizens. You’re broke? No else is hiring, but ICE is. This system occurs under a poorly masked campaign that frames dissent as hostility and treats political opponents as enemies of the state. With repeated public incidents suggesting immunity from severe misconduct on domestic soil, combined with extraordinarily high financial compensation tied to this authority, the administration is effectively enabling the very crimes it cites to justify ICE’s necessity. The Department of Justice has demonstrated an unwillingness to apply objective ethical discretion to the criminal behavior of what functions as a federally protected and politically targeting army, behavior that most American police officers neither condone nor practice. Local and state police generally operate with visible accountability and identifiable responsibility. ICE does not and the administration has made clear that this is their intent. Bipartisan leadership is urgently needed to restore constitutional checks and balances and to prevent executive overreach. When evaluated outside of politically insulated, algorithmically amplified echo chambers, many of which are demonstrably influenced by foreign-sponsored propaganda, the Department of Justice has shown a clear inability or unwillingness to regulate ICE with constitutional accountability to American citizens. Congress should, with bipartisan support, reallocate a significant portion of the ICE budget toward full transparency, enforced by an independent congressional oversight body with the resources to maintain absolutely transparency into any and all ICE operations and personnel. ICE has demonstrated that without meaningful accountability for protecting basic constitutional rights, it will continue to cause unnecessary harm, including the loss of American lives. It is time for Congress to uphold its constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances against an executive branch operating without sufficient restraint.