The ICE Reformation Trap

In light of atrocities committed by immigration police, most notably the recent killings of Renee Good (by ICE) and Alex Pretti (by CBP), liberal politicians and pundits have begun to speak out. Unfortunately, their criticisms of immigration police often backfire, making productive change more difficult and potentially increasing the power of police to create harm in the future.

This is because many liberal (and even some leftist) rebukes have a self-defeating tendency to blame the harms of immigration policing on a lack of professionalization. Such critiques ignore the long history of failed policing reform, elevate the voices of police and their allies, and marginalize the perspectives of those seeking radical change.

Critics of the police can, and must, do better.

In story after story in legacy media outlets, the harms created by immigration police are blamed on poor training, low-quality recruits, and the failure to follow established police protocol. The proposed solution? An investment of additional resources for more rigorous training, higher standards for recruitment, body-worn cameras, unmasking, and the retooling of protocols, policies, and procedures. Unfortunately, such arguments fail to reckon with the reality that efforts to professionalize police often result in more, not fewer, police harms.

Consider the history of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in the first half of the twentieth century. As Edward Escobar has shown, in the early 1900s corruption was endemic among Los Angeles police officers, who routinely received bribes from illegal alcohol, sex, and gambling businesses. In the 1940s, corruption scandals rocking the city—one reaching as high as the mayor’s office—created external pressure for reform. In response, reformers pressed for the professionalization of the police department. Their work was successful, leading to purges of individual officers thought to be corrupt, higher standards for recruits, more extensive training, higher officer salaries, and more.

But professionalization, rather than decreasing harm caused by the LAPD, actually led to more harm. Chief William Parker, hired in 1950, depicted police as professionals, akin to doctors or lawyers, who should be answerable only to themselves; the chief’s attempts to insulate the LAPD from external control proved successful. Police trainings, meanwhile, promoted a “war on crime” orientation in which aggressive neighborhood patrols sought out Mexican Americans as potential criminal threats to be met with violence.

The notorious Bloody Christmas was in part a result of professionalization. On Christmas Eve of 1951, several police in a bar confronted seven young men—five of them Mexican American—arrested them. One was beaten horribly right away. The remaining six were taken to the police station where approximately fifty police officers, who had been attending the department Christmas party, beat them mercilessly. This and other police atrocities happened not in spite of professionalization but because of it. Police increasingly saw themselves as at war with crime, viewed Mexican Americans as criminals, and came to believe they could commit violence, even illegal violence, with impunity.

The solution? Yet more professionalizing reforms. While some, particularly Mexican American activists and community leaders, called to increase external oversight of the department, Chief Parker impugned these critics as communists and shills for organized crime who were making it harder for police to do their jobs. The report from a grand jury investigation into the Bloody Christmas beatings provided further backing for the professionalist template, blaming the beatings on “management issues,” a lack of “clear cut or well defined zones of responsibility,” and—foreshadowing criticisms of the immigration police today—training characterized as “inadequate.”

The cycle had repeated itself: the LAPD emerged from the Bloody Christmas scandal no less violent than before but more powerful. Indeed, the LAPD’s professionalizing efforts increased its legitimacy nationwide. The department served as a model for similar professionalizing efforts that reshaped policing across the country.

Today, critics of ICE call the agents everything from unprofessional and poorly trained to fat, drug addled, and uneducated. The solution, we are told, is to find better recruits and to turn them into professionals. This narrative locates the harms of immigration policing in individual officers, distracting from larger questions, not least of them: Should thousands of immigration police be patrolling the streets of Minneapolis in the first place?

What is more, this emphasis on professionalization, today as in the past, portrays high-profile incidents of police violence not as moral failures but as proceduralist failures. In this account, the problem is located not in the violence itself but in the procedures that were (or weren’t) followed surrounding the violence. As a result, discussions about the killings of Good and Pretti have become contorted into never-ending debates about whether the police who killed them followed protocol.

One account, for example, platforms a number of “policing experts” who claim that immigration police followed “muddled” “directives,” question whether immigration police should have approached Pretti given that he did not appear to be impeding their work, and muse about what exactly were the “perceptions of the officer who fired.” TheNew York Times editorial board, meanwhile, calls for a thorough investigation into the killings, as though such an investigation might reveal some policy or procedure or circumstance legitimizing the deaths of Good and Pretti. As political scientist Naomi Murakawa has observed, such debates shift attention away from the bare fact of the killings themselves, placing policies, procedures, and protocols front and center—along with, of course, the potentially exculpatory perceptions of police officers. This dynamic was satirized by a recent Onion headline: “Democrats Condemn ICE for Murdering Without Proper Warrants.”

In turn, this narrow focus on the circumstances of the killings leads to a morally bankrupt politics of respectability, in which the character and behavior of the victims are perennially scrutinized as if to scour for reasons that might explain why they were murdered. We are reminded endlessly that Renee Good was a mother, a white woman, and a U.S. citizen, while accounts of the killing of Alex Pretti variously emphasize that he was a white man, a U.S. citizen, a nurse—that, yes, he had a gun, but that he was properly permitted to carry it and hadn’t threatened the immigration police with it, and that they took it away before they shot him; that he had already had a confrontation with immigration police in the past; that negative depictions of him by administration officials and Republican elites are inaccurate. Such accounts place the victims “perpetually on trial,” continually adjudicated as more or less deserving of state-sanctioned death, distracting from the striking fact of government violence itself.

Particularly troubling are the frequent reminders that both Good and Pretti were United States citizens. Certainly it is important to document the ways in which the Trump administration is dismantling citizenship protections against government violence. But a more fundamental issue is whether states should even be allowed to assign varying statuses of citizenship—and, whether having a devalued citizenship designation should make one vulnerable to state violence. This question is especially important given the global phenomenon of statelessness, along with tentative plans of the Trump administration to pursue denaturalization. But in many discussions about the immigration police, this basic technology of state power is simply a taken-for-granted feature of the political landscape. While the victims of government violence are often placed on trial, the government itself rarely is.

The appeal of professionalizing reforms, then, lies in their seductive promise to get it right next time: to enact violence only under a predetermined and legitimate set of circumstances. This promise distracts from a more important question that should be posed of all reforms: Will they increase or reduce the capacity, authority, and scope of policing? More training, after all, means more money for police. A push for higher-quality recruits may require higher officer salaries. And professionalization in practice, as we saw in the case of the LAPD in the first half of the twentieth century, often means the insulation of police from external control.

What is more, when police are highly trained, this very fact can be used to legitimize police killings. In Boston’s neighboring city of Cambridge, for example, a police officer killed a man named Sayed Arif Faisal in January 2023 while Faisal was experiencing an episode of mental illness. In response, community pressure to create a government-run alternative to police grew, as did criticisms of the Cambridge Police Department (CPD). In response, Police Commissioner Christine Elow reportedly defended the police as “progressive, well-trained national leaders in policing” and claimed that Cambridge police “have been at the forefront” of training in deescalation and “fair, impartial policing” since 2012.

Elow’s defense set the tone for what followed. As criticisms of the CPD continued, the city government’s response consisted of yet more professionalizing reforms. The city manager and the city council commissioned a report from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a national consortium of police chiefs; in essence, police were asked to reform police. In its report, PERF praised Cambridge police as “a forward-thinking, trauma-informed, state of the art police department” and recommended, among other things, that the department receive more resources: a new training facility, a firearms range, body cameras, shields, chemical spray, less lethal weapons (if deemed appropriate), and more. In addition, the report recommended, unsurprisingly, more training. Recommendations for external oversight or a decrease in funding, personnel, or any other reductions in capacity or authority of the Cambridge Police Department were nowhere to be found.

The overall message seemed to be that CPD’s killing of Faisal must be legitimate, because the department was so well trained and well resourced—yet at the same time, to the extent that CPD’s response to Faisal could have been improved, this was because the department needed still more training and resources. Like the LAPD after Bloody Christmas, Cambridge police emerged from professionalized reform more powerful than they had been before they killed Faisal. In response to continued criticism, they could now point to additional professionalizing reforms they intended to implement as well as the praise of a national consortium of police “experts.”

Indeed, on August 1, 2025, Cambridge police confronted another man of color experiencing a mental health crisis. According to a detailed account of the events, accompanied by extensive video and audio evidence, the police shot him with so-called “less lethal” weapons but failed to reach him before he was able to enter his apartment. CPD responded by targeting the apartment building with chemical weapons, which entered the ventilation system, affecting all residents of the building, including a one-year-old child, an elderly person, and someone with asthma. Police refused to tell occupants of the building that they had deployed chemical agents against them despite the demands and pleas of people nearby. One of the supposedly best-trained, most progressive, most cutting-edge police departments in the nation had dealt out racialized violence once again.

The histories of police professionalization in Los Angeles and Cambridge, separated by decades and thousands of miles, nonetheless follow the same pattern. It is what political scientist Yanilda María González terms “strategic policy substitution,” in which police departments promote reforms over which they have control while undermining proposals that would reduce their authority, such as proposals to increase the external oversight and control of police departments. “The story of professionalization,” as David Correia and Tyler Wall argue, is a “redemptive narrative in which police advocates admit past faults and corruption in order to rescue the police institution.”

Instead of hoping that immigration police will be professionalized into benevolent institutions, we would do better to join more meaningful resistance, which is active, energetic, and growing. For example, the Twin Cities Sunrise Movement (TCSM), recently profiled in Jacobin, is described by organizer Aru Shiney-Jay as follows:

We’ve hit a density in Minneapolis where over 4 percent of every single neighborhood is in a Signal chat at the neighborhood level—and it might be higher, because those are just the Signal chats we’re centrally tracking. In St Paul, there’s a neighborhood called Frogtown. It’s heavily Hmong. Every day, we create a rapid response Signal chat for people actively patrolling in Frogtown, and every day by 11 a.m., that chat hits its limit of a thousand people—which is to say that, at any given moment in one neighborhood, there are a thousand people out patrolling.

In addition to these patrols, TCSM has also mobilized pillars of civil society in Minneapolis to exert leverage over weak points in the immigration police’s operations. For example, the organization has subjected local hotels used by immigration police to noise demonstrations that last through the night, review-bombing campaigns, and mass booking and canceling of reservations. The movement is also pressuring the city council to cancel the liquor licenses of hotels where immigration police stay. Such efforts already succeeded in getting one hotel to refuse to rent rooms to immigration police.

Rental cars are another key component of immigration police operations. Recognizing this, TCSM has organized mass booking and canceling of reservations of rental car agencies as well, and it is considering organizing cars to block the entrances of agencies that rent to immigration police so that no one can enter or exit.

Meanwhile, volunteers delivering groceries to people whose presence in this country has been illegalized have found themselves approached by immigration police. As a result, the organization has adapted, counseling them to record addresses for grocery delivery not digitally but on small pieces of paper; if confronted by immigration police, they can eat the paper. Coupled with massive, nationwide protests and general strikes, such efforts engage wide swaths of people, impede the operations of immigration police, accumulate victories, and build power.

In addition to these tangible actions, we would also do well to embrace broader theories of change and transformative visions. Even those who consider themselves to be conversant with prison abolition are often less familiar with the work of detention abolitionists, deportation abolitionists, and those who seek to abolish borders altogether. We need to map out these horizons of change instead of debating which policy tweak, proceduralist change, or training session will reform immigration police—or any other branch of the police. As community organizer Harsha Walia writes, “The freedom to stay and the freedom to move are revolutionary corollaries refusing imperial bordered sovereignties, with home as our shared horizon.”

_{Image: Maria Kovalets / Unsplash}

Contributors

Spencer Piston Spencer Piston is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• border patrol
• ICE
• immigration
• police accountability
• police violence
• policing
• reformist reforms