Across the country, the people who wear the badge are increasingly standing up and pushing back against Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s lawless, reckless and destructive mass deportation agenda. From police chiefs demanding independent investigations after fatal shootings, to a whistleblower who quit the agency rather than keep teaching cadets to break the law, to sheriffs refusing to hand over their jails to ICE, the message from inside the profession is unmistakable: Trump and Miller’s deportation machine is undermining public trust across the country and must stop. The federal purge machine has grown lawless, unaccountable, and cruel for the local communities that real law professionals have sworn to protect and defend.
Even as those warnings mount, the administration keeps pushing the machine to run faster. Newly released government data show ICE arrests climbed to a record 1,474 per day in the first 11 days of July, up from an already record-setting pace of more than 1,300 a day in June – proof that speed, not accountability, remains the priority.
Here’s what law enforcement itself is saying:
Local Law Enforcement are Demanding Accountability from Fatal ICE Killings that ICE Won’t Provide
- Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare says ICE’s tactics are backfiring on the very goal they claim to serve, warning that “whatever the stated reason for ICE’s tactics over the last two years to reduce crime or whatever it is, it is having a 180-degree opposite effect in Harris County” – making it harder for his office to prosecute violent offenders, including child sexual assault cases, because witnesses are now too afraid to come forward.
- After ICE agents killed 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a Houston traffic stop, Mayor John Whitmire and Police Chief Noe Diaz formally asked the Texas Rangers to conduct an independent investigation, saying it will help to ensure the case would be handled “independently and transparently.”
- Following the Houston shooting and a subsequent fatal ICE shooting in Maine, former acting ICE Director John Sandweg told public radio there are “no more excuses” for ICE’s failure to equip agents with body cameras. He noted bluntly: “It’s not money. ICE has never been better funded.”
- Mendota Heights, Minnesota Police Chief Kelly McCarthy described the fallout from ICE’s Minneapolis-area operations in her own community: “We would have reports of masked men taking people off the streets. We would have kidnapping reports. We wouldn’t be able to tell what was an ICE action from an actual crime.”
- Lieutenant Diane Goldstein (Ret.), Executive Director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, warned that the pattern of unaddressed shootings – Minneapolis, Houston, Maine – shows “what happens when accountability stops serving its intended purpose,” eroding “public confidence in the legitimacy of law enforcement itself.”
A Whistleblower From Inside ICE Says the Agency Is Teaching Agents to Break the Law
- Former ICE attorney and academy instructor Ryan Schwank resigned and testified before Congress that he received “secretive orders” to teach cadets they could enter homes without a judicial warrant. His warning: “ICE is teaching cadets to violate the Constitution.”
- Schwank testified that ICE slashed its academy training program nearly in half, from 584 hours to 240, gutting instruction on constitutional law, lawful arrests, and use of force – even as the agency rushes thousands of new recruits into the field.
Sheriffs Are Refusing to Do ICE’s Dirty Work For Them
- King County, Washington Sheriff Patty Cole-Tindall has drawn a firm line with federal immigration authorities, stating her deputies won’t assist ICE on routine immigration matters without a judge’s signed order in a criminal case.
- Bristol County, Massachusetts Sheriff Paul Heroux is refusing to honor an ICE detainer request, accusing the agency of trying to “bully” and “intimidate” him into breaking state law over what he calls a request, not a requirement. He went further: “If we detained this person, we would be in violation of state and federal law. ICE knows this.”
- In Michigan, Washtenaw County Sheriff Alyshia Dyer declined to sign a 287(g) agreement with ICE, warning that the enforcement surge is leaving residents afraid to report crimes or call police for help — “You’re effectively creating a situation where people are fearful of participating in democracy.” Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson agrees, saying it is “it is eroding the public trust that local law enforcement, county, myself and state law enforcement, try to do every single day.”
The bottom line: When police chiefs demand outside investigations, ICE’s own former leadership and instructors sound the alarm, and sheriffs refuse to cooperate, they’re flashing warning lights from inside the profession itself, signaling that something has gone seriously wrong. Trump and Miller’s deportation machine has become too reckless, too unaccountable, and too lawless for the law enforcement establishment to work with. The law enforcement community is turning its back on ICE. Congressional Republicans funded $240 billion towards this agenda, and they own what it has become.
