In the alphabet soup of government agencies, federal officers tasked with carrying out immigration law come in different flavors: ICE, ERO, CPB, HSI. Many Americans who now face unprecedented enforcement operations in their own backyards—most recently, right here in North Carolina—are realizing that the agents detaining people aren’t all the same.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks, American politicians came face-to-face with the bleak realization of just how bad information-sharing was between government bodies. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security as a superstructure for national security—a new monster cabinet that subsumed 22 other agencies and offices.
It was almost like that foundational moment in Roman mythology when the god Saturn devoured his newborn sons; containment, he believed, would one day prevent them from rising up and seizing power.
Spoiler alert: that didn’t work.
During the formation of DHS, the government decided to shutter the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), a troubled agency that had handled an assortment of immigration issues for 70 years. It was the only entity DHS completely dissolved.
When the INS died in March 2003, the DHS birthed three subagencies to absorb its responsibilities, including two recently involved in operations in North Carolina: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
While both agencies handle aspects of immigration enforcement, their roles and responsibilities are supposed to be distinct. Last week’s “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” though, illustrated how their efforts are merging, leaving questions about what tactics are legal, who was detained, and where they were taken.
Similar Mission, Different M.O.
ICE’s primary task is to enforce the nation’s patchwork quilt of immigration policies and laws across the interior. They investigate criminal activities related to immigration, trade, and national security, and are perhaps most widely known for removing people through deportation. ICE’s mission, as it’s currently worded, is to “protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.”
CBP’s mandate is to manage, control, and protect the nation’s borders to prevent the unauthorized entry of people, drugs, and contraband. They do customs inspections, track down unauthorized border crossers, and staff ports of entry. Its mission is to “protect the American people, safeguard our borders, and enhance the nation’s economic prosperity.”
Both ICE and CBP serve as umbrellas for a number of subagencies; within ICE, the two largest are Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), while CBP’s are the Border Patrol and the Office of Field Operations.
Government stats show ICE currently employs about 20,000 law enforcement agents and support personnel, while CBP’s total staff is roughly 60,000. Both agencies have a history of struggling to recruit and hire, faring even worse under Trump. Insiders have described the most recent ICE efforts to add 10,000 agents to its ranks as “a shit show” due to a lack of HR and support staff to make mass hiring possible. CBP’s efforts to hire law enforcement officers, meanwhile, have fallen short for more than a decade,according to the Government Accountability Office. Attrition among Border Patrol agents has outpaced hiring for years.
Typically, most CBP operations occur at or along border crossings. Blue-uniformed CBP agents from the Office of Field Operations inspect agricultural and passenger imports, perform customs inspections on vehicles and goods, and try to prevent people from entering the country with fake papers or without authorization. They’re trained in Georgia.
Green-uniformed Border Patrol agents—who often call themselves “the Mean Green” and attend a paramilitary training academy in New Mexico—spend the majority of their time working on the swaths of land between official entry points to the United States, searching for signs of people who entered the country illegally. Border Patrol agents are trained in tracking footprints, usually operate alone or in pairs, and can legally apprehend and search anyone without a warrant within 100 miles of America’s land borders and coast line—which is about two-thirds of the country and includes most major U.S. cities.
Even though CBP’s Border Patrol agents aren’t trained in community policing, they have a long history of being called in as backup to quell protests and domestic unrest, such as the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, the 1992 riots in Los Angeles and the January 6, 2021 insurrection in Washington, D.C.
Under a September U.S. Supreme Court ruling, both CBP and ICE can legally use racial profiling to arrest people.
When CBP agents apprehend someone, they are allowed to hold them for 72 hoursbefore they must turn them over to ICE. (The deadline, however, isn’t always met.)
Interior operations are typically handled by ICE agents, who conduct investigations, apprehend, detain, and deport people who admit or are found guilty of being in the country without authorization. ICE investigations generally involve going after known criminals and targeting transnational crime and smuggling networks. While they do not need judicial warrants to arrest those they suspect of being in the country without authorization, they do need them to enter private residences and businesses.
On the day he took office, Trump issued an executive order diverting ICE’s investigative focus from crimes like child pornography, human trafficking, and antiquities fraud to enforcing basic immigration laws “and other federal laws related to the illegal entry and unlawful presence of aliens.”
Once an individual is in ICE custody, they can remain there for months, if not years. ICE currently has 131 facilities and contracts with a network of local law enforcement in 40 states to detain immigrants. It’s the largest immigrant detention system in the world, and capacity grew by 75% between 2005 and 2015. Since taking office for his second term, Trump has reopened ICE detention centers that had been closed since 2021 due to “alarming conditions” and substandard care.
When making arrests, CBP’s Border Patrol agents and ICE agent attire can be differentiated or, at times, hard to distinguish. While ICE doesn’t have a uniform or dress code, agents sometimes wear tactical vests and helmets; often, they dress in plain clothes and look like civilians.
The Border Patrol isn’t afforded the same sartorial flexibility. They maintain a strict dress code and agents can be punished for breaking rules that include long-debated standards for facial hair, fingernail length, and makeup. Border Patrol rough duty uniforms are typically green, but they also have dress uniforms; some units have tactical camo, and they can also dress as civilians for undercover work.
Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Both ICE and CBP answer to in-house teams dedicated to internal investigations called the Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates agents accused of wrongdoing and can issue disciplinary recommendations.
Yet accountability has been a proven challenge for both agencies; a 2018 GAO reportfound that out of 23,558 reported incidents, “more than half of CBP and more than two-thirds of ICE misconduct cases resulted in no action or were not referred for adjudication.” The GAO also found that neither agency consistently documented the findings of misconduct investigations.
Both ICE and CBP have struggled with record-keeping and data-management.
Meeting Trump’s Targets
The cultures inside the two divisions are distinct—another reason “Operation Charlotte’s Web” looked different than what people might expect from ICE. Border Patrol carries a century-old reputation for cowboy-style independence, resistance to oversight, and corruption.
“The administration thinks ICE isn’t getting the job done,” a DHS official told NBC News in October. “So CBP will do it.”
In Charlotte and the Triangle, that looked like caravans of unmarked cars, trucks, and minivans carrying agents who concealed their identities with balaclavas and masks. Many vehicles lacked government plates. Most CBP and ICE agents couldn’t be identified by name or badge numbers unless asked. Many of those apprehended were sent to CBP detention and untrackable until they were transferred to ICE custody days later.
Under pressure to hit quotas of 3,000 a day and working more closely together, ICE and CBP personnel are difficult to distinguish, even to some insiders.
“It’s not always clear to me whether it’s ICE, Border Patrol or even what’s called Federal Protective Service, the law enforcement DHS agency that protects federal buildings,” former acting ICE director John Sandweg told Politico last month.
Lawyers for the Trump administration have denied quotas for detaining or deporting immigrants exist.
Currently, around 8,500 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations officers are working with approximately 1,500 Border Patrol agents dispatched to American cities to make arrests. NBC News reported last month that the administration plans to replace “at least half” of ICE leaders with Border Patrol officials, citing “disappointment with arrest numbers.” DHS said at the time that it had “no personnel changes to announce.”
“Once complete, Border Patrol’s power grab of its sister agency will likely mark a dramatic shift in how immigration agents conduct arrests,” wrote community activist Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, in a recent op-ed.
Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has morphed to accommodate his focus on immigration. More than half of its annual budget is now projected to fund immigration activities in the coming years, according to a recent New York Timesanalysis. ICE’s budget is expected to nearly triple.
In its section on DHS, the conservative plan Project 2025 called for “dismantling” it entirely in order to set up a mega-agency focused on immigration. It proposed combining CBP and ICE to start, then subsuming all other agencies that touch immigration.
In short, CBP’s takeover might not stop with ICE.
In Roman mythology, Jupiter went on to reign after overthrowing his father, Saturn. Will DHS meet the same fate amid Border Patrol’s rise?
Erin Siegal McIntyre is a writer, photographer, and member of the journalism faculty at UNC-Chapel Hill. She previously lived and worked on the border in Tijuana, Mexico, for a decade and is writing a book on the institutional culture of the Border Patrol.
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