Turning up the heat on I.C.E

By Mo Hill, Opinion Editor

With the murder of Renee Good on Jan. 7 and the murder of Alex Pretti on Jan. 24 at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subdivision, it is clear that the Department of Homeland Security has overstepped its boundaries and has begun impeding on the rights of United States citizens.

What began as a campaign against immigration by President Trump has now become an uncontrolled attempt at suppressing the citizens under his rule. Let’s call it what it is – a dictatorship – which is defined by Britannica as a “form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations.” The usage of ICE to disperse, arrest and kill citizens is unlawful, unethical and unconstitutional. ICE has become a consistent issue throughout the past year and the levels of aggression used by them against suspects (both documented and undocumented) has had an unnecessary increase. 

According to the Associated Press, the Department of Homeland Security has recently issued an internal memo that gives ICE agents the power to forcibly enter the homes of suspected undocumented persons without a judicial warrant: “Federal immigration officers are asserting sweeping power to forcibly enter people’s homes without a judge’s warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo obtained by The Associated Press, marking a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.” In any case, this is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. 

This followed Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a Supreme Court case in Sept. 2025 which ruled that ICE agents are allowed to use racial profiling in immigration enforcement operations. This ruling has led to a vast increase in the populations of ICE detention centers according to the American Immigration Council, with numbers now reaching upwards of 73,000 people detained as of Jan. 2026. This also includes U.S citizens who have been wrongfully detained by ICE. According to ProPublica, an investigative journalism outlet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has detained 170 citizens as of Oct. 16, 2025: “The government doesn’t track how many citizens are held by immigration agents. We found more than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests.” A case can be made that the use of racial profiling by the Department of Homeland Security is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution as it denies people the right to due process by making them a specific target based on skin color, and that the arrest of individuals protesting the actions of ICE is also a violation of the right to protest guaranteed by the First Amendment.

The United States government is using a group of federally backed militants to remove and harm documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants and citizens alike in an attempt to cover up for the mistakes that it has made in both the present and the past. It is immoral, unethical, unconstitutional and incredibly anti-American. The United States is a nation for the people and by the people, and as the people, it is our responsibility and duty to keep those in power in check and to prevent them from stripping the people of the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that once made this country so great.