ICE

Written By Jamie Joyce

Executive Summary

The Founders of the United States feared many things. They feared monarchy. They feared the concentration of power. They feared the erosion of individual rights by an unchecked government. But perhaps nothing terrified them more than the prospect of a standing army — a permanent, armed force under the control of the executive, deployed on domestic soil against the people it was supposed to protect.

This fear was not theoretical. The colonists had lived under it. British redcoats patrolled their streets, broke down their doors, and answered to a king who did not answer to them. The memory of that experience was so vivid that it shaped the most fundamental architecture of the American system of government: the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, the Posse Comitatus Act, and the deep constitutional tradition that separates military force from civilian law enforcement. The Founders understood that when armed agents of the state are present in the streets of a free country in sufficient numbers and with sufficient impunity, the distinction between law enforcement and occupation begins to disappear — and with it, the ability of citizens to speak, organize, and dissent without fear.

Right now, in 2026, the United States has placed more than 22,000 armed federal immigration agents on American streets. These agents carry firearms, wear tactical gear, make arrests, and use force — including lethal force. In Minneapolis alone, 3,000 federal agents were deployed in what the Department of Homeland Security called "the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out." Two American citizens were killed. Others were detained while grocery shopping, picking up prescriptions, and observing operations from public sidewalks. A Marine Corps veteran was arrested at gunpoint, had his biometric data taken and his phone copied without a warrant, and later said he and his fellow detainees were treated worse than his combat unit treated captured enemy combatants in Iraq.

The data shows that this force is not being used primarily to apprehend dangerous criminals. Of the approximately 3,800 people arrested during Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, 63 percent had no criminal convictions or pending charges. Thirty-five percent were "collateral" arrests — people swept up in street operations, not individually targeted. The operation was launched on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations amplified by far-right media; the vast majority of the targeted Somali-American community are United States citizens or legal permanent residents.

The Federal Immigration Enforcement Agent Safety and Accountability Training Act of 2026 is not merely a training bill. It is a constraint on the deployment of what has become, in constitutional terms, a standing army. It establishes mandatory training and certification requirements, prohibits deployment without them, requires body cameras and identification, mandates independent review of use-of-force incidents, and — critically — locks these standards into statute so that no executive official can lower or waive them. The bill represents Congress exercising the power the Founders gave it: the power to check an executive who commands armed forces on domestic soil.

This report examines the evidence for why that constraint is necessary. The Founders told us what would happen. The history of the United States has proven them right. And the streets of Minneapolis have shown us what it looks like when the warnings go unheeded.

I. The Founders Built the Constitution to Prevent a Domestic Armed Force Under Executive Control

The fear of standing armies was not one concern among many for the Founders. It was the concern — the constitutional problem they spent more time debating, warning about, and building safeguards against than perhaps any other single threat to the republic they were creating.

The deep-seated American distrust of a standing army was, as the National Constitution Center has documented, "not an invention of the colonists; it was an inheritance." It was formed during the tumultuous 17th century in England, when the English Civil War produced Cromwell's New Model Army — a professional military force that ultimately became the instrument of a dictatorship. The lesson the Anglo-American political tradition drew from this experience was direct and unforgettable: a permanent, professional force that answers to the executive rather than to the consent of the people's elected representatives is the classic instrument of tyranny.

James Madison — the principal architect of the Constitution — called a standing army "one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen." At the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1787, Madison and his fellow delegates debated the Constitution's "army clause" (Article I, Section 8), which gave Congress the power "To raise and support Armies," with the intensity of men who understood they were building a system that would govern the use of force against their own descendants. The Anti-Federalists — the ideological heirs of the English radical Whigs — viewed this clause with the deepest suspicion. For them, history taught one clear lesson: standing armies were the tools of despots.

Thomas Jefferson, writing to Madison from Paris, listed "protection against standing armies" alongside freedom of religion and freedom of the press as essential rights that must be secured in a Bill of Rights. Andrew Jackson later warned: "Always remember that an armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics — that without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe." The English Republican tradition on which the Founders drew was even more blunt. Andrew Fletcher warned that "he that is armed, is always a master of the purse of him that is unarmed." John Trenchard and Walter Moyle titled their influential essay An Argument Showing that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government, and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy.

The Founders did not simply warn. They built. They distributed the war power across branches: Congress alone could raise armies, and no appropriation could last more than two years — ensuring that the legislature would have to actively choose, every two years, to maintain any standing force. They wrote the Second Amendment to preserve a citizen militia as a counterweight to any standing army. They wrote the Third Amendment — prohibiting the quartering of soldiers in private homes — not merely as a logistical regulation, but as, in the words of constitutional scholars, "the final, physical bulwark against what the American Founders considered one of the gravest threats to a free society: a standing army." The Third Amendment, as the National Constitution Center explains, "is the only part of the Constitution that deals directly with the relationship between the rights of individuals and the military in both peace and war."

The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, drafted by George Mason, declared "that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty." The Delaware Declaration of Rights agreed that "no soldiers ought to be quartered in any house in time of peace without the consent of the owner." When the federal Congress wrote the Third Amendment in 1789, it was codifying what had become, as the Constitution Center puts it, "conventional American wisdom" — the conviction, born of lived experience, that the physical presence of armed government forces among the civilian population is incompatible with freedom.

The Founders understood something that modern Americans have been slow to recognize: it does not matter what the armed force is called. What matters is what it does. A force of 22,000 armed agents, deployed in American cities, making arrests, using force, and operating under the authority of the executive — regardless of whether it is called an "army" or an "enforcement operation" — raises precisely the constitutional danger the Founders built the entire structure of American government to prevent.

II. The Posse Comitatus Tradition: The Law That Keeps Armed Federal Forces Off American Streets

In 1878, Congress drew a line. The Posse Comitatus Act — signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes — declared that whoever "willfully uses any part of the Army… as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

The law was passed in response to the use of federal troops to enforce laws in the former Confederate states during Reconstruction. Whatever one thinks of the goals of Reconstruction, the experience of armed federal soldiers patrolling civilian communities and enforcing civil law confirmed the Founders' warnings about what happens when the executive commands a domestic armed force. As the Brennan Center for Justice explains, the Posse Comitatus Act "embodies an American tradition that sees military interference in civilian affairs as a threat to both democracy and personal liberty."

The principle is simple: the military exists to fight foreign enemies; the police exist to enforce domestic law; and the line between them must never be erased. When that line disappears — when armed agents of the federal executive patrol city streets, make arrests, use force, and answer only to the executive chain of command — the constitutional structure that protects American citizens from their own government begins to collapse.

The Posse Comitatus Act applies, by its terms, to the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force. It does not apply to DHS agencies like ICE and CBP. This is the gap through which a de facto standing army has been driven. Because ICE and CBP are classified as civilian law enforcement — not military — they are not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act. But when 22,000 armed agents are deployed to American cities, wear tactical gear, operate in formation, make warrantless arrests, shoot American citizens, and refuse to cooperate with local law enforcement or state investigators, the distinction between a civilian agency and a military occupation becomes a legal fiction that the Constitution was not designed to tolerate.

The Congressional Research Service, in its analysis of the Posse Comitatus Act, notes three tests that courts have developed to determine when the Act is violated: whether the armed forces perform tasks assigned to civilian law enforcement; whether the military use pervades civilian activities; and whether citizens are subject to "the exercise of military power which was regulatory, prescriptive, or compulsory in nature." Apply these tests not to the Army but to what happened in Minneapolis — where 3,000 armed federal agents operated in formation, detained citizens, blocked state investigators from crime scenes, and shot unarmed people — and the functional reality of the situation becomes clear, regardless of the bureaucratic label attached to the agents involved.

III. The 22,000-Agent Force: What a De Facto Standing Army Looks Like

Between August 2025 and January 2026, ICE expanded from approximately 10,000 to 22,000 officers. This expansion was driven by legislation that tripled ICE's enforcement and deportation budget to approximately $30 billion. At the same time, the agency cut more than 40 percent of its basic training program — eliminating constitutional law instruction, halving firearms training, and removing all legal education on the use of force. The graduation rate fell from 80 percent to 60 percent. More than 900 recruits completed the compressed program and were deployed.

This was not a targeted law enforcement operation. It was the rapid construction of a domestic armed force.

To accommodate the expansion, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers — the facility where the majority of federal law enforcement officers are trained — suspended most non-ICE training from September through December 2025, disrupting the training pipelines of more than 75 federal partner agencies. Under the revived 287(g) program, an additional 8,500 state and local officers were deputized for immigration enforcement through a 40-hour online course — replacing a four-week in-person program.

When this force was deployed to Minneapolis under Operation Metro Surge, the DHS called it "the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out." Three thousand federal agents descended on a single metropolitan area. They wore tactical gear. They operated in unmarked vehicles. They conducted street sweeps. They refused to identify themselves to the people they confronted. They blocked state law enforcement from investigating their actions. They shot three people, killing two — both American citizens. They detained a Marine Corps veteran observing their operations, took his biometric data, and copied his phone without a warrant.

In the words of the bill's findings: agents from CBP — "whose primary operational domain is border and near-border terrain" — were deployed to "interior urban enforcement operations outside their primary operational domain" without training for the environments they entered. The bill explicitly identifies this as the problem: border agents trained for open desert were operating in residential neighborhoods, apartment buildings, and public streets, making split-second decisions about the use of force against civilian bystanders in environments for which they had received no preparation.

Madison warned in Federalist No. 46 that a standing army of "twenty-five or thirty thousand" could never conquer the American militia. He did not anticipate a scenario in which 22,000 armed federal agents — wearing tactical gear, carrying automatic weapons, and operating under the direct authority of the executive — would be deployed not against a foreign army but against American communities, under the banner of immigration enforcement, with the acquiescence of the Congress he trusted to serve as a check.

IV. The Diminishing Returns: When the Criminal Apprehension Rate Proves the Mission Is Not What It Claims

If 22,000 armed agents were deployed on American streets to apprehend dangerous criminals, the question must be asked: is that what they are actually doing?

The White House claimed that Operation Metro Surge arrested "more than 4,000 dangerous criminal illegal aliens — including violent killers, rapists, gang members, and other public safety threats." The data tells a very different story.

In March 2026, data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit — analyzed by the Deportation Data Project, reported by The Intercept, and confirmed by FOX 9 — revealed that of the approximately 3,800 people arrested during Operation Metro Surge, 63 percent had no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. Fewer than one in four had any criminal record at all — and that category includes misdemeanors and traffic violations. Thirty-five percent of all arrests were "collateral" — people swept up in street operations who were not individually targeted. Although the operation was purportedly focused on fraud in the Somali-American community, fewer than 3 percent of arrestees were Somali, and none had ties to the social services frauds that had been cited as the justification for the operation.

The proportion of arrests involving people without criminal records increased sharply during the surge. Before Operation Metro Surge began, 44 percent of ICE arrests in Minnesota involved people without criminal records. During the surge itself, that figure jumped to 64 percent. The operation was not becoming more targeted as it continued — it was becoming less targeted. The net was widening, not narrowing.

This pattern is constitutionally significant for a reason the Founders would have recognized immediately. When a standing army is deployed for a stated purpose — and the data shows that it is not accomplishing that stated purpose, but is instead sweeping up the general population — the question arises: what is the real purpose?

A force of 3,000 armed agents that arrests 3,800 people over several months, 63 percent of whom have no criminal record, is not a law enforcement operation. It is an occupation. It is the physical assertion of executive authority over a civilian population. And when that force simultaneously kills unarmed citizens, detains legal residents and citizens on the street, enters diplomatic facilities in violation of international norms, and refuses to cooperate with local and state law enforcement, the effect — regardless of the intent — is indistinguishable from the standing army the Founders built the Constitution to prevent.

A 55-year-old American citizen was tackled, handcuffed, and held for five hours at a federal building after asking an agent "Are you ICE?" on a public sidewalk. A 20-year-old American citizen was tackled, put in a headlock, and detained despite shouting "I'm a citizen" and offering to show his passport. A pregnant woman from Ecuador was arrested on her way to work, and her husband and two children were taken from their home. Each had a pending asylum petition and no criminal record.

These are not the characteristics of a law enforcement operation designed to protect public safety. They are the characteristics of a domestic armed force whose primary effect is to assert the presence and power of the executive in civilian space — the precise scenario the Founders spent time to defend against.

V. When the Force Is Used to Suppress Dissent

The bill's findings contain a provision that might, at first glance, seem like a minor procedural requirement: a prohibition on "field-level operational collection targeting First Amendment-protected activity." The provision prohibits covered personnel from collecting personal information — names, photographs, license plate numbers, residential locations — about any individual "solely on the basis of that individual's participation in protest, demonstration, counter-surveillance, or other activity protected by the First Amendment." It prohibits designating individuals as "domestic terrorists," "agitators," "insurrectionists," or similar threat categories based on protected activity.

This provision exists because of what actually happened.

In the days after the shooting of Alex Pretti, President Trump called Pretti — a veteran's caretaker with no criminal record — an "agitator and, perhaps, insurrectionist." DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described his actions as "domestic terrorism." Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino accused Pretti of trying to "massacre law enforcement." These characterizations were made before any investigation was complete, contradicted the agency's own internal assessment, and were contradicted by every independent video analysis of the incident.

The bill's authors understood what this language was doing. When the executive labels a citizen exercising their constitutional rights — filming law enforcement officers performing their duties in public, helping a woman knocked down by an agent — as a "terrorist" or an "insurrectionist," it is not merely mischaracterizing an individual. It is establishing the predicate for treating dissent itself as a threat that the armed force is authorized to suppress. Those who say “he was harassing police for days, he got what he had coming,” are detached from both empathy and the larger issue at hand. It is despicable to excuse the death of a nonviolent person being shot several times in the back, and it is foolish to think this doesn’t set dangerous precedents.

During Operation Metro Surge, observers who monitored federal agents were detained. Whistles and car horns — the means by which community members alerted their neighbors to ICE activity — were treated as hostile acts. The bill specifically notes that the "escalation in the severity of ICE tactics, harassment, and threats against observers" was a defining feature of the operation. The Marine veteran detained at gunpoint was observing the scene of the Pretti shooting from a public street.

The COINTELPRO program of the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that domestic law enforcement agencies will, absent legal constraint, use surveillance capabilities to suppress constitutionally protected political activity. The Church Committee documented it. Congress created reforms. But those reforms addressed surveillance, not physical force. The question now is different: when the executive deploys a 22,000-agent armed force into American cities, and that force treats observers, protesters, and bystanders as threats to be neutralized, the suppression of dissent is accomplished not through wiretaps but through the physical domination of public space.

This is precisely what a standing army does. It does not need to arrest every dissident. It needs only to be present — armed, visible, unaccountable, and willing to use force — to create the conditions under which citizens stop speaking, stop organizing, and stop exercising the rights the Constitution guarantees. Michel Foucault described this dynamic in the context of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon: "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power." The difference is that the Panopticon was a metaphor. Three thousand armed agents on the streets of Minneapolis are not.

VI. Portland 2020 and Minneapolis 2026: The Template

The deployment of armed federal agents into American cities for domestic purposes did not begin in Minneapolis. In the summer of 2020, CBP tactical units were deployed to Portland, Oregon, under "Operation Diligent Valor." The DHS Inspector General's subsequent review (Report OIG-21-31) found that of 63 officer training records examined, only 7 — fewer than 11 percent — had documented riot and crowd control training. Officers wore inconsistent uniforms. Some could not communicate with agents from other DHS components. Unidentified federal agents in camouflage pulled protesters into unmarked vehicles.

Former CBP Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske publicly stated that deploying border agents to urban protest environments was "clearly the wrong group" for the mission. The Inspector General recommended reforms. DHS concurred. No mandatory training standards were enacted.

Six years later, the same pattern repeated — with lethal consequences. The same agency. The same type of agents. The same lack of training. The same type of civilian environment. But this time, 3,000 agents instead of 755. This time, two people dead instead of none. This time, the operation lasted months, not weeks.

The progression from Portland to Minneapolis is not a failure to learn. It is a template. Portland demonstrated that border agents could be deployed to American cities without meaningful legal consequence. Minneapolis demonstrated that the operation could be scaled. The question that the bill forces Congress to confront is: what happens when the template is applied next — to a different city, for a different stated purpose, under an executive who has already demonstrated willingness to label citizens exercising their rights as "terrorists" and "insurrectionists"?

The Founders knew the answer. They had seen it in their own lifetime. They wrote the Constitution to prevent it. The question is whether the safeguards they built are sufficient for a threat they could not have imagined in its specific form — or whether Congress must act, as it did with the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878 and with FISA in 1978, to extend those safeguards to meet a new reality.

VII. The Training That Was Cut Was the Training That Protected Rights

One of the most revealing details in the bill's findings is not about what was added to the ICE training program, but about what was removed. When DHS cut 240 hours from the basic training program in August 2025, the eliminated content included constitutional law instruction, due process coursework, and all legal education on the use of force. Protesters' rights training was cut from approximately two hours to ten minutes.

This is not incidental. A federal agent who has received no instruction on the Fourth Amendment's limits on searches and seizures, no education on the First Amendment rights of observers and protesters, and no legal framework for when force is and is not authorized is not merely undertrained. That agent is, functionally, an instrument of executive will unconstrained by constitutional knowledge — which is precisely the description of a soldier in a standing army that the Founders feared.

The bill's Phase I training requirements specifically address this gap. They mandate 102 hours of applied authorities and constitutional law — including "Fourth Amendment search and seizure doctrine, Fifth Amendment due process, First Amendment rights of observers, journalists, and protesters, officer liability, and civil rights statutes applicable to federal law enforcement conduct." They mandate 16 hours of de-escalation training validated by randomized controlled trials showing a 28 percent reduction in use-of-force incidents. They mandate 40 hours of crisis intervention training. They mandate training on identification, transparency, and reporting — the accountability mechanisms without which an armed force becomes a law unto itself.

The Phase II requirements go further. They mandate 120 hours of urban operations training, including a 40-hour module specifically addressing the difference between border terrain and urban civilian environments. They mandate 20 hours on First Amendment and protest environments — recognition of protected activity, constitutional limits on force when enforcement intersects with demonstrations, and scenario-based application in simulated protest environments. They mandate 55 hours of cultural competency training developed with mandatory input from community organizations in the cities where enforcement operations are concentrated.

Every hour of this training serves a constitutional purpose. It is the mechanism by which an armed force is transformed from an instrument of executive power into a law enforcement agency bound by the same Constitution that binds the citizens it encounters. Without it, the force is — in constitutional terms — exactly what the Founders warned about: armed agents of the executive, deployed on domestic soil, unrestrained by law and accountable to no one but the executive who commands them.

VIII. What the Bill Would Do to Constrain the Standing Army

The Federal Immigration Enforcement Agent Safety and Accountability Training Act of 2026 does not use the phrase "standing army." But its structure is designed to address the precise dangers that phrase was coined to describe. Here is how.

It requires training before deployment. No covered personnel may participate in any interior enforcement operation without holding a current Urban Deployment Authorization. No agent may conduct independent enforcement operations without a Full Deployment Certification. This means that the executive cannot surge undertrained agents into American cities at will. The force can only be deployed after its members have been trained in constitutional law, de-escalation, use-of-force limits, and the specific demands of civilian urban environments.

It requires identification and transparency. All covered personnel must display visible identification during enforcement actions, including badge numbers and agency affiliation. They must carry and present government-issued identification upon request. They may not obscure, remove, or conceal their identity. This is the antithesis of the anonymous standing army — it ensures that every agent who exercises force on an American street is individually identifiable and accountable.

It requires body cameras that cannot be turned off. Camera activation is not discretionary. Failure to preserve or produce a recording creates a legal presumption that the recording would have been adverse to the agency's account. This deprives the executive of the ability to control the narrative of what its armed force does on the streets.

It prohibits deployment without congressional notification. Any deployment of 10 or more surge personnel to a single metropolitan area requires written notification to the Senate and House Judiciary Committees within 24 hours — including the certification status of each agent, the rules of engagement, and the coordination protocols with local law enforcement. This is a direct application of the Founders' principle that Congress must oversee the deployment of armed forces.

It mandates independent investigation of use of force. Any serious use-of-force incident must be referred within 24 hours to the DOJ Civil Rights Division. If the Civil Rights Division fails to act within 180 days, the matter automatically transfers to the DOJ Inspector General. The executive cannot investigate itself.

It creates a private right of action. Any person killed or injured by an uncertified agent may sue the United States. Sovereign immunity is waived. This gives citizens a direct legal remedy against the misuse of the armed force — a right the Founders would have recognized as essential.

It locks the standards into statute. This is perhaps the most important provision: no executive branch official may reduce the training requirements by any means — rulemaking, policy guidance, operational order, budget action, or otherwise. Only Congress can lower the floor. This is Congress exercising its constitutional role as the check on executive military power — the same role Madison designed it to play when he ensured that military appropriations could not last more than two years.

It applies to everyone. Not just new hires. Not just junior agents. All covered personnel, regardless of hire date, seniority, or assignment history. The bill's findings note that some of the most serious crimes by ICE personnel — including physical abuse, sexual abuse, and corruption — were committed by veteran employees and supervisors. The standing army problem is not a problem of recruitment; it is a problem of unchecked power.

IX. The Insurrection Act and the Danger That Comes Next

The bill constrains the existing de facto standing army. But it must be understood in the context of a broader constitutional danger.

The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the President to deploy active-duty military forces domestically to suppress insurrection, enforce federal law, or protect civil rights when state governments are unable or unwilling to act. Invoking the Act is, as the Brennan Center notes, "extremely rare and politically explosive, as it represents a direct use of the standing army for domestic purposes — the very scenario the founders feared most."

If the executive has already demonstrated that it will deploy 22,000 armed agents through DHS — an agency not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act — label dissenting citizens as "terrorists" and "insurrectionists," and order that force to operate in American cities with training that omits constitutional law and use-of-force limits, what would prevent the same executive from invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy actual military forces for the same purpose? And if the precedent has been established that a de facto domestic armed force can operate in American cities with impunity, on what basis would anyone resist the formalization of that arrangement?

The Founders designed a system of escalating safeguards against exactly this progression. The Posse Comitatus Act prevents military deployment for law enforcement. The Insurrection Act creates a narrow exception that requires extraordinary circumstances. But both safeguards assume that the executive cannot simply create a parallel armed force — one that carries military-grade weapons, operates in military-style formation, and is deployed in military-scale operations — that is not technically covered by either law. DHS agencies occupy precisely this constitutional blind spot.

The bill addresses this blind spot not by extending the Posse Comitatus Act — which would require a different legislative vehicle — but by imposing on DHS enforcement agents the same kind of constraints that the Founders imposed on the military: training requirements, deployment conditions, congressional notification, independent oversight, and the prohibition on executive waiver. If the executive wishes to deploy armed agents onto American streets, Congress demands that those agents be trained, identifiable, accountable, and constrained by constitutional law. This is the minimum that the Founders' framework requires.

X. Conclusion: The Question the Founders Asked Is the Question Before Congress

Every section of this report asks the same question from a different angle: what happens when the executive places a large, armed, inadequately trained force on American streets — and the data shows that this force is not primarily apprehending dangerous criminals, but is sweeping up the general population, detaining citizens, killing bystanders, suppressing observers, and operating without transparency or accountability?

The Founders had an answer. They called it a standing army. They built the entire American constitutional system to prevent it.

James Madison warned that a standing army was "one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen." Thomas Jefferson listed protection against standing armies alongside freedom of the press as essential rights. The Third Amendment prohibited the quartering of soldiers in civilian homes. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibited the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. Every generation of Americans has understood that when armed agents of the executive are present in sufficient numbers on domestic soil, answerable only to the executive, the line between protection and oppression dissolves.

The evidence from Minneapolis demonstrates that this line has dissolved. Sixty-three percent of those arrested had no criminal record. American citizens were detained, shot, and killed. Observers were arrested for watching. A Marine veteran was treated worse than he had treated enemy combatants in Iraq. Agents refused to identify themselves. State investigators were blocked from crime scenes. The executive labeled a murdered nurse as a "terrorist" and an "insurrectionist" — language designed not to describe the facts but to establish the predicate for treating dissent as a threat.

The bill before Congress does not abolish ICE. It does not prevent immigration enforcement. It does not challenge the executive's authority to enforce immigration law. What it does is impose on the executive's domestic armed force the same constitutional constraints the Founders imposed on the military: you may have this force, but it must be trained, accountable, transparent, and constrained by law. You may deploy it, but Congress must be notified, agents must be identified, body cameras must be activated, and independent investigators must review every use of force. You may not lower these standards unilaterally. You may not waive them for operational convenience. You may not create a domestic army that answers only to you.

Congress has acted before when the constitutional balance was threatened. After Reconstruction, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act. After COINTELPRO, Congress created FISA and intelligence oversight committees. After Watergate, Congress strengthened checks on executive power. In each case, the reforms came because the evidence of executive overreach was so overwhelming that inaction became politically and morally untenable.

The evidence presented in this report meets that standard. Twenty-two thousand armed agents. Two dead American citizens. Sixty-three percent of arrests involving people with no criminal record. Constitutional training eliminated. Body cameras not required. Agents unidentified. State investigators blocked. Citizens labeled terrorists for exercising their First Amendment rights.

The Founders warned us about exactly this. They built safeguards. Those safeguards have gaps. The bill closes them. The question is not whether the Founders would have recognized what is happening on American streets. They would have recognized it instantly. The question is whether Congress will honor their work — or watch as the standing army they feared becomes a permanent feature of American life.

Pass the Federal Immigration Enforcement Agent Safety and Accountability Training Act.

Sources

Jamie Joyce
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