ICE and Border Patrol Don’t Operate the Same Way
NEWS | 26 November 2025
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. For much of ICE’s 22-year history, the agency aimed to operate with relative discretion: Officers handled administrative tasks and carried out deportations in what they thought of as targeted campaigns. Now, amid the White House’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the Department of Homeland Security is resorting to more indiscriminate methods, flooding the streets in certain cities across the country. DHS insists that it is focused on undocumented immigrants with criminal records, but some of its reported arrests—of U.S. citizens, of those without criminal convictions—prove otherwise. The administration recently tapped Border Patrol, known for its paramilitary-style culture, to lead more raids, and its teams have taken an even more aggressive approach. Border Patrol agents are expected to soon deploy to parts of Louisiana and Mississippi in an operation reportedly called “Swamp Sweep”—similar to the “Charlotte’s Web” operation that agents carried out in Charlotte, North Carolina, where more than 250 people were arrested. In today’s Daily, my colleague Nick Miroff joins me for a conversation about his recent reporting on ICE’s new era of rapid expansion—and Border Patrol’s role in that transformation. Will Gottsegen: How does the Department of Homeland Security choose which cities to target for operations such as the ones in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Charlotte? New Orleans is reportedly up next. Nick Miroff: The administration enlisted the Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino to lead the operations in Los Angeles and Chicago. His teams of agents have been conducting their own raids parallel to ICE and have been chastised by a federal judge for excessive force. But we don’t know why those cities were picked. L.A. and Chicago, obviously, had symbolic value to the administration: They’re big, blue sanctuary cities that are Democratic Party strongholds, and they have a ton of immigrants and immigration activists ready to resist. So to the extent that the administration is thinking about these targets as producers of social-media content and political narratives, L.A. and Chicago were obvious places to deploy Bovino. Why did the administration pick Charlotte and New Orleans? Again, it’s difficult to know, but Charlotte is in Bovino’s home state, and New Orleans is where Bovino was chief patrol agent a few years ago. Will: There appears to be public confusion about who’s actually heading up the Trump administration’s broader immigration efforts: ICE or Border Patrol. How has that confusion affected these two agencies? Has it helped or hindered their work? Nick: I can tell you that ICE doesn’t like being blamed for Border Patrol operations that they see as needlessly confrontational and provocative, aside from being indiscriminate. (One ICE veteran told me, dismissively, that the Border Patrol agents are doing “area control,” in contrast with the “targeted enforcement” that ICE practices.) But I think most people have no idea which agency is arresting their relatives and raiding their neighborhoods. They’re all federal agents going around in masks and unmarked rental cars. Will: You’ve explained that face masks are now a “standard accessory” for ICE in a way that they didn’t used to be. What have you heard from ICE officers about why they wear face coverings while they make arrests? Nick: ICE is operating right now in a way that it never has—its agents are much more out in the street and in public. Activists are rightly pointing out that these arrests more closely resemble kidnappings. One officer told me, We know that masks look bad, that they hurt public trust and the agency’s image. But we can’t tell somebody not to wear a mask if they want to wear one, because we don’t want to be responsible later if that person is doxxed or attacked. There are plenty of officers who are now masking out of habit or who say that they’re doing it to protect their family, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually received threats. Will: You wrote over the summer that morale among ICE agents was low. Is that still the case? Nick: It’s even more the case now, because the Trump administration has fired or reassigned some ICE field-office directors and replaced them with Border Patrol commanders. I think a lot of veteran ICE officers are both burned out and pretty demoralized by what they’ve seen over the course of the past eight or nine months. They also have a great deal of apprehension about the new officers who are working alongside them—whether or not they’ve been sufficiently trained, whether or not they’ll be competent. There are certainly some officers who are ideologically on board with the administration and excited about what they’re doing. But I think for many of them, the hours have been grueling, the demands from the White House have been incessant, and they’re constantly being told that they’re failing because they’re not hitting these arbitrary goals requested by officials, including the Trump-administration adviser Stephen Miller. Will: Miller said that he wants ICE to be making 3,000 arrests a day. How is ICE thinking about digital surveillance in light of this goal? Nick: ICE and the Trump administration more broadly are thinking about leveraging the technological efficiencies that make deportation work easier and more automated, by gathering phone data and trying to get access to government databases—even IRS tax records—that have the addresses and other identifying information for people who have come into America recently. That is a big difference between the way ICE operates and the way Border Patrol operates. ICE is, by and large, coming up with lists of people whom it wants to arrest, and then going out and trying to do that. In many cases, that involves some degree of research, because activists have coached people to not open their door for ICE; officers now have to figure out when their target is going to work and look for opportunities to intercept that person on the street. Border Patrol has a far more indiscriminate approach to enforcing immigration law and is responsible for mistakenly arresting a lot of the U.S. citizens who have been picked up during immigration operations. Border Patrol officers are going to areas—they are swarming Home Depots, for example, and anybody who’s at Home Depot is a suspect. They’re going to question everybody there and, in some cases, arrest the wrong people. Related: Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Today’s News Kyiv informed the Trump administration that it will sign the U.S.-backed peace proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, and an official said that President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes to meet with President Donald Trump soon to negotiate final points, although Moscow has signaled resistance to the amended terms of the proposal. Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham—a critic of COVID-19 vaccines who previously halted statewide vaccination campaigns—has been appointed principal deputy director of the CDC. Brazil’s supreme court ordered former President Jair Bolsonaro to begin serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting to hold on to power after losing the country’s most recent election. Evening Read Universal Images Group / Getty Enough With the Brussels Sprouts Already By Gilad Edelman Brussels sprouts are played out. Kale was a mistake. This winter, embrace cabbage. Affordable, delicious, and astoundingly versatile, it has much more to offer than its reputation suggests. It is a cliché of food writing to refer to a vegetable as “humble”—the humble carrot, the humble potato—but in the case of cabbage, the cliché is apt. Mark Twain wrote that “cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” Lewis Carroll’s walrus and carpenter discuss topics so unalike from one another that they talk of “cabbages—and kings.” Cabbage, a staple of peasant cuisine across Eurasia, is not merely humble, but the very symbol of humility. Read the full article. More From The Atlantic Culture Break Brent Hofacker/Shutterstock/The Atlantic Eat. In 2014, Megan Garber wrote about how to engineer the optimally delicious Thanksgiving plate. Explore. Make culture weird again, W. David Marx argues. Play our daily crossword. Explore all of our newsletters here. Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
Author: Will Gottsegen.
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