How ICE Targets Migrants

DiasporaImperialismActivismPrincipled AdvocacyOpinionAnalysisU.S. RepressionPalestine
Written By Palestine Diaspora Movement

After 9/11, the United States reorganized parts of the federal government to treat migration as a national-security problem. In 2002, The Homeland Security Act collapsed immigration and customs functions into the new Department of Homeland Security; ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) began operating in 2003 as the DHS investigative and enforcement arm to oversee immigration, customs, and “counter-terrorism” missions. This institutional move reframed immigration enforcement as part of the security state rather than a civil regulatory system and laid the groundwork for large-scale systems of surveillance, detention, and exclusion.

ICE conducts workplace and community raids to locate, arrest, and remove people the agency identifies as unauthorized. Raids range from “silent” I-9 audits and targeted searches to large coordinated workplace and residential operations; such raids frequently entangle entire communities. Activists document racialized patterns in whom agents detain, revealing an enforcement model that treats certain bodies – Latino, Black, Muslim, and Arab people – as inherently suspicious and therefore disposable.

ICE transfers detainees to detention centers, many run by private contractors. People are often held in administrative detention without criminal convictions, sometimes for long periods, under conditions repeatedly documented as abusive. Reports have identified medical neglect, sexual abuse allegations, and cases of detainees going missing. These conditions worsen for marginalized groups like women and children. This indefinite administrative detention is a system that strips human beings of autonomy and dignity, mirroring other forms of detention used to control and break populations, similar to the ones in Palestine.

ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) carry out deportations and removals. Deportation policy has become progressively militarized and expanded regardless of administrations, producing mass expulsions and family separations that disproportionately impact Latino communities and other migrant groups. Deportation fosters social cleansing which tries to erase people from the national landscape under the guise of “law and order.”

ICE increasingly relies on biometric databases, data-mining tools, and commercial platforms to identify, track, and locate migrants. Private analytics and sharing across agencies enable automated targeting and faster escalation from identification to detention. The use of powerful data tools like Palantir links policing, immigration enforcement, and surveillance in ways that raise deep concerns about civil liberties and racialized control. Entire communities become legible to the state only as data points to be monitored, flagged, and removed. This same system has operated in Palestine for decades. 

ICE works alongside CBP (Customs and Border Protection), the Border Patrol, and even military deployments or state National Guard activations to harden borders. The result is the normalization of military presence in border regions and interior enforcement operations. Official policy documents show how “hardening” policies attempt to justify treating human movement as a military threat rather than a humanitarian reality. The zionist settler colony uses these same tactics to prevent movement of Palestinians.

Although ICE’s mandate is “immigration enforcement,” the agency’s tactics and priorities consistently and disproportionately impact Latino communities (including families, farmworkers, and day-laborers), Black migrants, and Muslim and Arab communities. When enforcement is framed as “counterterrorism” or “threat mitigation,” these groups become targets of systemic suspicion. Raids, biometrics, aggressive detention, and public securitization campaigns intensify harms for communities already subjected to racial profiling and surveillance. This perpetuates a system that normalizes the dehumanization of racialized migrants.

There is a documented history of exchanges, trainings, and technology transfers between U.S. law-enforcement/military/security agencies and “Israeli” occupation forces. These exchanges include border management techniques, surveillance doctrine, crowd-control tactics, technology sharing, and population-control approaches. Through these networks, tools refined through “Isreali” occupation and military administration become embedded in U.S. domestic enforcement, and vice versa.

Both systems employ administrative detention and indefinite detention without charge. ICE’s civil administrative detention and their use of long holds, restricted legal access, and expedited removals parallels “Israeli” administrative detention in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. There, detainees may be held without charge for long periods amid rampant human-rights violations. In both cases, “security” becomes the justification for detaining people outside normal legal processes, ignoring basic protections and treating entire populations as inherently criminal.

Both systems also use militarized checkpoints and border infrastructure. The hardening of U.S. border spaces through barriers, checkpoints, and militarized policing resembles “Israel’s” network of checkpoints, walls, and controlled passages that regulate Palestinian movement and fragment Palestinian life. In both settings, these infrastructures choke daily existence, limit freedom of movement, and function as tools of social and political domination.

They also share biometric tracking and corporate surveillance practices. The same private companies and biometric platforms used in U.S. migration enforcement operate in the surveillance and targeting of Palestinians. This technological overlap and doctrinal exchange create a loop: tools tested on one marginalized population are exported to control another.

These tactics extend into narratives of “threat” that justify displacement and control. Both systems invoke claims of terrorism, disorder, or “invasion” to rationalize mass removals, surveillance, and punitive infrastructures. Under these narratives, innocent people are securitized, stripped of individuality, and rendered less than fully human.

ICE’s expansion and the occupation’s structure are not merely separate policy choices. They are expressions of the same governing logic. Both systems identify targeted populations as threats, justify administrative power over their lives, and deploy surveillance, detention, and militarized force to control or expel them. At their core, both rely on the systematic dehumanization of marginalized peoples to sustain their authority.

Call to action: Stand with migrants and Palestinians by rejecting every system that cages, surveils, and expels people under the false language of “security.” Demand the dismantling of the borders, occupations, and institutions that dehumanize entire communities and fight for a world where all people can move, live, and belong with dignity and freedom.

 
Palestine Diaspora Movement

Palestine Diaspora Movement is a Muslim youth-led global collective of Palestinian diaspora and allies, united by our shared history of displacement and the ongoing liberation struggle. We are committed to amplifying the Palestinian cause, advocating for the right of return, and challenging the forces of occupation and colonization. We center the people on the ground in Palestine to serve the homeland in a principled way. Our movement leverages the power of social media and grassroots activism to educate, mobilize, and create meaningful change in political, social, and economic realms, standing in solidarity with all oppressed and indigenous peoples.

https://www.palestinediasporamovement.com
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