On November 1st, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement published on their official account a picture of their most recent graduates in “immigration enforcement.” The image is captioned: “The next generation of American heroes is ready to make a community near you safer!”
All of their faces were blurred.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have expanded their operations at an explosive rate in the past few months. President Donald Trump has been making good on his campaign promise, and as of February 12th of 2026, there are 68,289 migrants reportedly in detention, according to NBC News. On October 27th, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed to have deported 527,000 individuals. Their efforts have reaped considerable rewards, as ICE has boasted of an increase in budget: In the 2025 fiscal year they might have been allocated $10 billion, but the Big Beautiful Bill granted approximately $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security, including an additional $75 billion solely for ICE, making them, according to CBS News, “the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.”
Aside from considerable resources, the Trump administration authorized ICE to target schools, courthouses, weddings, hospitals, and churches — areas that were previously deemed as “sensitive locations.” More than that, ICE doesn’t need a judicial warrant to make an arrest. According to their website, ICE only needs “reasonable suspicion” that someone is an “illegal alien” before detaining or arresting them. This has led to an increase in accusations that the agents are engaging in racial profiling — in Southern California, for instance, a judge forbade the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, from detaining people solely on the basis of their race, language, or occupation. However, the Supreme Court reversed this ruling some months later. As such, ICE’s roaming patrols continue.
In June 2025, in Santa Ana, California, there was a sudden flood of ICE agents conducting arrests and roaming the streets. Citizens, according to J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam of ProPublica, frantically called the city’s emergency response service, speaking of masked men in plainclothes, snatching and tossing people in unmarked cars. “Residents,” they write, “described what they were seeing as kidnappings.” This isn’t something entirely uncommon — ICE agents are not required to wear uniforms, and it was only on October 10th of 2025 that a Chicago judge ruled that if they aren’t undercover, they had to wear badges or IDs. Complicating matters even further, ICE agents typically use unmarked vans, as according to Ximena Bustillo of NPR, ICE spokesperson indicated to her that since identification and government plates on vehicles would interfere with ICE’s “critical duties”, they are exempted by federal law from doing such.
So, there’s no true way to learn the agent’s identities. And even if those two largely significant facts were known, there isn’t any way for someone to log an official complaint against them. In early 2025, the Trump administration attempted to shut down key DHS oversight bodies — the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman — only stopping in response to a lawsuit brought by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights non-profit organization, the Urban Justice Center, and the Southern Border Communities Coalition. Even so, the offices are functionally gutted. According to the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, all three offices experienced significant staffing cuts, raising “significant concerns about the government’s capacity to meaningfully investigate complaints.”
What happens when a series of armed, masked people with no oversight are roaming the streets with government-sanctioned authority to take people to undisclosed secondary locations? Nothing good.
According to a report by CNN, ICE impersonators are on the rise. While ICE impersonators have always existed — as is the nature of opportunists — more of them have been reported during Trump’s second term in 2025 than in the 16 years prior. The level of violence has increased as well. While before they were largely financial scam artists, intending to shake down immigrants of cash in exchange for not being deported, many criminals are now capitalizing on the sudden swell of power granted to ICE agents and have begun kidnapping and harming people, especially women.
In North Carolina, a man reportedly posing as law enforcement, threatened to deport an immigrant woman before raping her. A Maryland man accosted a Latina woman, flashed a fake badge, and threatened to deport her if she didn’t get in his car. He sexually assaulted her. While in New York, a man allegedly masquerading as an ICE agent decked a woman in broad daylight, and tried to rape her before stealing her phone and purse. In response to these chilling cases, the Democratic Women’s Caucus penned a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, demanding her to take action in the wake of these cases. Lawmakers have introduced legislation to combat these horrifying events, requiring agents to identify themselves — or at the very least, to not wear masks. The DHS has roundly condemned all of these calls, insisting that ICE agents being masked protects them from being assaulted or doxxed online. According to NBC News, the DHS claims that assaults on ICE officers have increased 1,000%, and threats to agents are up 8,000%. Tellingly, DHS didn’t provide raw data to NBC News.
Even so, it’s not necessarily the impersonators who are harming women. Women in detention centers are left to languish in inhumane conditions, lacking even the most basic of services such as a bathroom separate from men. Sexual assault allegations, serious pregnancy complications and suicide attempts are the most commonly reported issues from ICE facilities, according to Héctor Ríos Morales of LatinTimes. Women are one of the most vulnerable populations in detention centers, and yet ICE refuses to disclose statistics about interned individuals that differentiate on the basis of gender. Fear has spread beyond detention walls; immigrant women now avoid reaching for help in abusive situations, be it to a police station or to obtain medical treatment. Legislation such as “Preventing Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act” only further worsens this fear, as according to advocacy groups, it makes it harder for survivors to leave abusive situations, leaving them vulnerable to, once again, deportation.
The Department of Homeland Security claims that these measures are necessary to reduce illegal border entry. They state that their actions are vital to maintaining public safety. However, where does the line between rightful authority and intimidation blur? The combination of anonymity, lack of oversight, and terror creates the perfect storm for violence, especially sexually-charged violence.
In January 2026, an ICE agent in Minnesota was caught following a hand-cuffed individual — believed by some to be a woman — into a portable toilet, while another waited in a vehicle nearby. The Department of Homeland Security alleged that the person in custody was a man, and once again, that it was necessary to enforce public safety.
More recently, Renée Good was shot in her car by an agent of ICE. This time, the Department of Homeland Security claimed it was self-defense. Her killer, Jonathan Ross, called Good a “f*cking b*tch,” as her body was cooling.
Not nearly a week after, a video surfaced on the social media platform known as BlueSky, depicting ICE agents breaking a woman’s car window, forcibly removing her from her car, and cutting her seatbelt as she shouted that she was disabled. She had been on her way to a doctor’s appointment.
A pregnant woman pinned to the ground in the middle of the icy streets of Minneapolis. A mother pushed to the floor in front of her children in a courthouse. A childcare worker dragged and abducted in front of parents and children.
The violence wrought by ICE is not constrained to the detention centers. Not anymore. It’s become increasingly difficult to accept the brutality wrought as part of the swift and merciless hand of justice.
When enforcement becomes indistinguishable from threat, women’s bodies are often the first battleground. As long as accountability remains absent from the agency’s modus operandi, ICE’s graduation photo will stand not for security, but for fear.