Michelle Hackman

So ICE was founded in 2003.

It existed in another form before then, but after 9-11, the government really revamped its sort of law enforcement and particularly its law enforcement around foreigners and allowing foreigners into the country.

And separated out this agency to really step up deportations and also investigating foreigners who were using the immigration process to commit crimes.

ICE's mandate is really specifically to go find people in the country illegally, arrest them, and get them out of the country.

So it's interesting because they use a lot of the same law enforcement tactics as most other law enforcement agencies, but their mandate is civil.

It's not criminal.

If you're here in the country illegally, that technically is not a crime.

It's actually like a little bit closer, technically speaking, to getting a parking ticket.

It's a civil violation of

The consequence of it is deportation.

But in the government's sort of really sterile legal parlance, deportation is not supposed to be like a criminal punishment.

So the training is evolving as we speak.

Traditionally, an ICE officer is supposed to get something like 16 weeks of training, and that includes everything from

learning the basics of immigration law, physical training, law enforcement training, how to use a gun, for example, and also learning to speak Spanish.

And this administration, because they're trying to bring on so many new ICE agents, they're

Thank you so much for having me.

There are several ways, but critics of ICE have always had this sense that it's a little bit of a rogue agency.

But I will say, as someone watching ICE—

In the past, even under the first Trump administration, largely speaking, the way ICE would operate was a little bit closer to a traditional police agency where they would put in a decent amount of police work before they try to go arrest someone.

They do some work to figure out, OK, we know this person is in the country illegally because they have a final deportation order.