ICE’s primary mission is to “prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities,”
as described by the Department of Justice in 2004. The focus was meant to be on crimes like money-laundering and human trafficking, and ways terrorists could get anything from small pox to suitcase bombs into the country.
But did ICE make sense on its own? In 2004, the conservative Heritage Foundation suggested ICE be
merged out of existence, by combining it with the new border force, Customs and Border Protection. And in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general concurred in
a 175-page report (pg. 19) that there was little reason for ICE to have been created at all:
We could not find any documentation that fully explains the rationale and purpose behind ICE’s composition. One senior official offered the following explanation…ICE was established with not a focus on supporting a particular mission, but on building an institutional foundation large enough to justify a new organization.
Were ICE to just focus on immigration fraud, employee sanctions, and removing dangerous people who were illegally already in the country, it would be a small agency, the report notes. Instead, though, ICE was “sized up,” to become a large bureaucracy in its own right.
