John Sandweg, excap de l'ICE: "ICE's ideological recruitment is a recipe for disaster."

WashingtonWhen John Sandweg headed ICE under Barack Obama, the immigration agency's acronym wasn't as widely recognized. Agents didn't wear ski masks either. Now, under Donald Trump, the agents have become an omnipresent figure both on the nation's streets and in the American public consciousness. The paramilitary brutality employed in Minneapolis reached its peak with the killing of two citizens and has called into question whether ICE's primary objective is truly immigration control. "Obviously, they didn't send that large number of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] agents to Minneapolis just for an immigration operation. It's clear they were also sending a message to society," Sandweg explained from Arizona in a call with ARA.

The conversation took place three days before the border czar Trump's Thomas Homan, announced the conclusion of the large-scale anti-immigration operation in MinnesotaDuring his year as acting director of ICE (2013-2014), Sandweg worked with Homan. As a former colleague, he says he is "impressed" with how the border czar is de-escalating the situation and says that the measures he is taking—reducing the presence of officers and having more cooperation with local authorities—are not so different from those applied under Obama: "They were police tactics, not policies."

The first year of Trump's mass deportation campaign has concluded with some 675,000 deportations, according to DHS. These figures are opaque—since they cannot be broken down or independently verified—but they are still below the numbers achieved by Obama and Joe Biden. The data falls far short of Trump's goal of one million deportations annually and doesn't even exceed the 685,000 deportations that former President Biden is estimated to have carried out in 2024Furthermore, during the eight years of the Obama administration, more than 3.1 million deportations were carried out, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Sandweg explains that under Obama, operations "were much calmer and lower-profile" because targets were thoroughly vetted before taking action. Throughout the conversation, the former head of ICE expresses his concern about the change in tactics the agency is adopting under Trump and how the accelerated recruitment campaign is changing the culture of an agency created in 2003 as part of the response to the 9/11 attacks.

We've seen a very visible change in how ICE operates under the Trump administration: agents wearing masks, aggressive arrests, nighttime operations like those in Chicago, and scenes like the one in Minneapolis, where neighbors They describe unmarked cars driving around and people being arrested. on the street based on racial profiling. How can this escalation of aggression be explained?

— It all begins in summer, when Stephen Miller And DHS chief Kristi Noem says at ICE that They want 3,000 arrests a dayAs a result, tactics changed from those historically focused on three areas: stopping people at the border, arresting people in jails, and conducting street operations. On the street, ICE acted in a targeted manner: they investigated and identified immigrants convicted of crimes and prioritized the most serious cases. When they went out, they knew who they were going to look for, and that person almost always had a criminal record. The problem is that this modus operandi It's slow, and when Trump comes in, he wants quick results. This translates into raids on parking lots, car washes, traffic stops, arrests at immigration courts, and summoning people with stays of removal and arresting them when they go to register.

Trump says they are arresting "the worst of the worst," but a recent CBS review estimates that of the Of the 400,000 people arrested by ICE this year, only 14% had a criminal record.. How do you interpret this discrepancy between the public security narrative and the actual profile of the people detained?

— I doubt that capturing a large number of criminals is the administration's objective. That's what they say, but the way they're acting doesn't match up. The criminals They're not usually found in Home Depot parking lots looking for workYou might find one or two that way, but finding criminals requires a selective approach. It's worth noting that the CBS report includes everyone, whether ICE arrests them on the street or takes them from jail. If you subtract the approximately 140,000 people arrested inside prisons and correctional facilities, the percentage of migrants with criminal records detained in these operations in Minneapolis is quite high. Just looking at the data, I think it's pretty clear that the goal in Minnesota was to arrest as many people as possible.

But what's more, the number of people deported during this first year with mass deployments is still lower than the number of expulsions in Biden's last year.

— Of course, because one of the objectives was to send a message to the public. To demonstrate strength by having officers on the street in tactical gear. This business of announcing operations in advance and saying, "We're sending officers to Minneapolis." This is senseless. I've never heard of any law enforcement agency announcing that it's about to conduct an operation in a specific location. This puts officers in danger and endangers the public. This whole display is meant to show that campaign promises are being kept and also to instill fear in migrants so they leave the country voluntarily. This administration is even paying $2,600 to anyone who self-deports. Finally, they also want to force the cooperation of states and local governments: if you don't cooperate with us in the mass deportations, we'll send thousands of officers into your community.

We've seen these aggressive tactics before. in Los Angeles in the summerAnd in Chicago in the fall. Why has it all exploded in Minneapolis? In Los Angeles, we already had Border Patrol agents (CBP) acting under the orders of Greg Bovino, who was expelled from Minnesota after the two murders.

— The administration has made ICE and CBP agents do things they don't normally do. It has put agents dedicated to immigration enforcement to confront protesters and protect federal buildings. This created a very dangerous situation for both the agents and the protesters and immigrants. The CBP agents, deployed en masse to Minneapolis, are not trained to operate in urban environments. If you work at DHS, you know that the CBP culture is very aggressive because they operate in a very dangerous environment on the southern border, where they can encounter drug traffickers in the middle of the desert.

Does the fact that they now wear masks, which makes accountability more difficult, influence their aggressiveness?

— I have sympathy for the agents, but you can't have a federal agency where agents wear masks. It undermines the agency's credibility and creates fear among the public—the very public the agency has sworn to protect. When I led ICE, no one wore a mask except in very limited circumstances.

How do you assess the administration's response to the murders of Pretti and Good at the hands of immigration agents? They were labeled "domestic terrorism," and even Vice President JD Vance argued that the officers had immunity.

— I found it very disappointing to see them say that the officers' actions were fully justified before the facts had even been clarified. The problem with this is that it undermines the agency's credibility. It's very difficult to believe that an investigation will be fair.

The Trump administration is accelerating the recruitment of ICE agents. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ended 2025 with 12,000 new recruits, exceeding its target of 10,000 and bringing the total to 22,000. To facilitate this, age requirements and training programs have been significantly reduced. What impact does this have on the profile of these agents?

— We never hired so many people so quickly, mainly because finding the right fit isn't easy. The speed at which recruitment is happening is a problem. Bringing on such a huge number of people in such a short time is potentially dangerous. When I was hiring, there were very thorough background checks and extensive training. I'm concerned that these checks have now been shortened and that training is being reduced as well. All of this should concern the public.

To this must be added the marked ideological factor of the recruitment campaign, with almost warlike messages and calls to protect the country from an alleged invasion.

— This ideological recruitment is a potential recipe for disaster. Especially considering the cuts in training. What you want are people who enforce the law fairly and treat everyone with dignity and respect. If you start recruiting people motivated more by animosity toward immigrants than by a desire to make the country safer, you could end up creating bad officers.

Could the escalation of brutality, which has coincided with the beginning of 2026, be explained by these new agents?

— This hasn't happened yet, but it will. I don't have the exact figures, but I would say that of all these agents, only several hundred are new. In a year or two, we'll really start to see these thousands of new agents, with lower levels of training, deployed and out on the streets as ICE agents. So, the situation could get even worse. The risk will be very different in two years' time than it is today. And, certainly, it's already different today than it was a year ago.

Is Trump changing the essence of what ICE used to be?

— When you simply hire 10,000 new people and dismiss experienced leaders, you're changing the culture. These recruitment processes will change the culture of the ICE, which could have a long-lasting impact within the organization.

The other aspect of this agency hypertrophy is the injection of money with a budget on par with an army, averaging about $37.5 billion annually over the next four years.

— Most of that money will be spent on detention. The administration is massively expanding detention, from 40,000 to 100,000 spaces. That's a huge amount of money, and it's very concerning that so much is being spent with a weakened oversight structure. I don't think it's any secret that the inspector general's office and some of the internal offices responsible for ensuring everything is done correctly have been weakened by the administration. And again, I would say that, looking at all the data, those billions of dollars are certainly not needed.