Your dentist may have warned you not to grind your teeth on ice. We are suggesting, as a more productive alternative, to grind your teeth on ICE, which stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Officially, ICE has authority over how undocumented immigrants are detained and deported. But that is just the beginning of the story. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act has dramatically increased the size and reach of ICE. It is important to understand ICE’s trajectory and question where it may be headed.

The Expansion of ICE

First, the new law gives ICE roughly $75 billion over four years on top of its current annual budget of about $10 billion.[1] ICE will very soon have as many agents as the FBI and, in another few years, will become far larger than the FBI. It will also have its own prison system. It will be larger than the FBI, Bureau of Prisons, and the Drug Enforcement Administration combined.[2]

ICE Compared to the FBI

Second, there are many reasons to view ICE as a much less professional law enforcement organization than the FBI. It has not shown a similar commitment to norms of American policing or protections against erroneous arrest and detention. It is overseen not by the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, but by the Department of Homeland Security, which is a security, not a law enforcement, agency.

And it has not earned – or tried to earn – the esteem and reputation that belongs to the FBI, which remains the global gold standard. To illustrate: A notable aspect of ICE’s strategy is to use agents who are masked and unidentifiable, enabling them to hide their abuses and allegedly enabling violent impersonators.[3] At the same time the ongoing politicization of the Trump FBI is resulting in the loss of many of its best agents. By weakening the FBI and greatly expanding DHS, Trump is undercutting the rule of law.

Ice Has Its Own Prisons

Third, ICE is developing a large network of prisons to detain immigrants at great cost. The new detention center in the Everglades, “Alligator Alcatraz,” holds up to a reported 5,000 detainees and is expected to cost $450 million a year a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order to halt further construction for two weeks. According to Michael Tomasky of the Atlantic, “[t]he Trump administration says the new $45 billion will pay for 100,000 beds. So that’s 20 more Alligator Alcatrazes out around the country.”[4]

It is reported that thus far the immigration prisons have terrible conditions including abuse by guards, the lack of due process, access to counsel, and denial of family communication. Another report cites ICE’s intention of using a variety of military bases to house detainees. These prisons will fill up rapidly due to the massive backlog of immigration cases, exacerbated by the firing of immigration judges without cause.[5]

Congressional and Civilian Oversight

ICE very much needs Congressional, judicial, and media oversight. Under the federal law that funds ICE, the agency cannot prevent members of Congress or their employees from making oversight visits to immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens.” Yet, when members of Congress attempt to visit detention centers they face new restrictions intended to block them from oversight. Twelve Democrats recently filed a lawsuit against ICE for barring them from detention facilities.[6] The White House commented that ICE was imposing new limits to protect President Trump’s constitutional authority to carry out immigration policy[7] – another facet of the battle between presidential and congressional authority.

ICE, at its explosive new scale, eroding requirements for reasonable suspicion before arrest and due process afterward; access by detained persons to counsel; congressional oversight; professional practices in law enforcement; and it is using cruelty to instill fear and achieve deterrence. ICE is now unique in our history, and its further evolution must be closely scrutinized by those with power – the Congress and the courts.

How else might ICE be employed and against whom? The Washington Post reports that as of early June, about one-third of ICE detainees have never been charged with a criminal offense. In the context of this unprecedented expansion of ICE, Trump deploys the military to Washington, D.C., ostensibly to get crime under control (in fact, crime is going down in D.C.). He recently threatened to add Chicago, New York and San Francisco to the list of cities where he may take similar action. And Trump is employing the FBI to exact retribution on his perceived enemies, with an early morning search of the home and office of his own former National Security Advisor, John Bolton.

Where all of this may be headed at this juncture is speculation but given what we have seen in the last seven months, it’s not headed to a good place. Lawsuits are being filed, and communities are pushing back. But these actions are unprecedented in our history and frightening in their potential to redefine America’s notions of justice and freedom, and indeed, to redefine America itself. They warrant vigilance.

[1] Whatever it costs, The Economist, July 12, 2025 at 19 (“That is more money than the annual budgets for nine federal law-enforcement agencies combined.”

[2] Michael Tomasky, It Can Happen Here, The New Republic on line, July 7, 2025.

[3] Senators Padilla and Booker introduced the VISIBLE ACT to deal with these problems. See https: www.padilla.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/padilla-booker-unveil -new-bill-to-require-immigration-officers-to-display-clear-identification/; “Men Are Impersonating ICE to Attack Immigrant Women. MAGA Emboldened Them, Ms. Magazine, July 10, 2025, https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10men-impersonating-ice-agents-immigration-customs-attack-women-maga-trump/.

[4] Tomasky, note 3 above.

[5] PBS, July 16, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/17-immigration-court-judges-have-been-fired-by-the-trump-administration-across-10-states-union-says.

[6] Michael Gold, House Democrats Sue ICE for Barring Them from Detention Facilities, Wash. Post, July 31, 2025, on line.

[7] Id.