Who’s the Real Threat to Democracy?

There’s no shortage of opinions about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) — its purpose, its methods, and even its very existence. But it’s worth stepping back and examining the agency through the lens of the U.S. Constitution.  To begin, the word immigration doesn’t even appear in our founding charter. What does appear is Article I, Section 8, Clause 4, which gives Congress the power “to establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.”

In the early 1800s, states often passed their own immigration-related laws, especially in seaport states like New York and Massachusetts. These included head taxes on arriving passengers, quarantine requirements, and the exclusion of “paupers” or “undesirables.” At that time, the federal government concerned itself only with naturalization (citizenship), not immigration itself.  That changed when the Supreme Court began striking down state immigration laws. In Henderson v. Mayor of New York (1875), New York attempted to tax incoming ship passengers. The Court struck down the law, ruling that states could not interfere with foreign commerce or international relations — powers reserved to Congress.

Soon after, in Chy Lung v. Freeman (1875), California tried to exclude Chinese women as “lewd” or “undesirable.” Again, the Court ruled that immigration implicates relations with foreign nations and must be under federal control. The rationale was simple: if states could admit or exclude foreigners on their own, it could embarrass the nation in foreign relations. Together, these cases established immigration as a federal matter.

Today, the Supremacy Clause (Article VI) ensures that federal immigration law overrides conflicting state laws. The substance of that law resides in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952, which sets out the nuts and bolts: who may enter the U.S. (visas, green cards, asylum, refugees), the grounds for inadmissibility or deportation, work authorization, and the process of naturalization.  Meanwhile, in the wake of 9/11, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, creating I.C.E. to consolidate several law-enforcement functions previously scattered across different agencies. Its mission is to enforce federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.

I.C.E. has two main operational divisions:

1. Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO): empowered to identify, arrest, detain, and remove individuals who violate immigration law.

2. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI): tasked with investigating transnational crimes such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, cybercrime, child exploitation, money laundering, intellectual-property theft, and terrorism-related offenses.

Only by ignoring the structure of our government could one deny that I.C.E.’s mission rests on firm constitutional and statutory ground.  Yet many on the political Left, including some members of Congress and state governors, choose to disregard these legal underpinnings.  Instead, they demonize the agency — branding its officers as fascists, Nazis, or “secret police.”

This tactic is not new.  It reflects a familiar pattern: repeat a distortion loudly and often enough, with media amplification, and you can seize control of the narrative.

A telling precedent came in 1998, when the Democratic Party and its media allies recast Monica Lewinsky — a 22-year-old intern — as a “homewrecker” who had “seduced” the President of the United States. Late-night comedians and the legacy press treated her as a punchline, while the actual perpetrator — the most powerful man in the world — was softened into merely “reckless” or “weak-willed.”  Rarely was he called what he was: predatory.  That narrative rewrite, at Lewinsky’s expense, was political damage control at its most ruthless.

The same playbook is visible today.  Organized protests — complete with printed placards, coordinated messaging, and media framing — are passed off as “spontaneous.”  But when such demonstrations escalate into rooftop snipers, bomb threats, assaults, Molotov cocktails, doxxing of I.C.E. officers, and ambushes, the line between free speech and lawlessness is crossed.  At the same time, I.C.E. officers face a staggering increase in assaults — nearly 700% in recent years — fueled in part by rhetoric from political leaders.  Representative Pramila Jayapal has gone so far as to call I.C.E. a “terrorist force.” Others — including Governors Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker, and Senator Chris Van Hollen — either echo or enable such framing.

So the question must be asked: does this dangerous distortion trickle down from political elites, or does it bubble up from activist groups like Antifa, BLM, and those consumed by Trump Derangement Syndrome?  Either way, maligning I.C.E. for carrying out its constitutional duty doesn’t just weaken the agency. It undermines the rule of law itself.