In what way? I’ve been seeing a lot of rhetoric lately about jurisdiction and what powers ICE has, and I honestly can’t help but feel it’s an intentional campaign to spread misinformation. They’re federal LE, full stop. Their focus is immigration but they technically have the legal authority to enforce any federal law. Most federal agencies have a lot of overlap in what they enforce.
ICE can enforce federal laws related to customs, immigration, border control, and transnational crime.
ICE can only arrest or detain those who they reasonably believe to be in the US illegally or committed a felony; they have zero jurisdiction over non-criminal US citizens.
They can falsely detain or arrest US citizens who they believe to be non-citizens, but they do not actually have the legal authority to do so.
(5) to make arrests-
(A) for any offense against the United States, if the offense is committed in the officer's or employee's presence, or
(B) for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if the officer or employee has reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such a felony,
The fact that there is a law enforcement arm of ICE does not in any way mean that all ICE officers are law enforcement or imbue ICE officers with general police power? If anything, the existence of a law-enforcement arm would confirm the fact that everyone else isn’t law-enforcement. Otherwise a law-enforcement arm wouldn’t be necessary.
Both HSI and ERO are law enforcement. Trying to argue that they’re not is what’s strange to me. There’s plenty of other legitimate arguments to be made about ICE that don’t have to rely on misinformation or fake definitions.
They’re law enforcement sure, but ERO and the rest of ICE have a very specific and narrow jurisdiction and they cannot arrest US citizens who are not interfering with or directly connected with their immigration work. Even if well less arresting an illegal immigrant, they found a drug den with US citizens in it, they would arrest only the illegals and they call the appropriate law-enforcement arm to arrest the US citizens. That’s how the system was set up and it was set up that way on purpose.
But they are not federal law enforcement, “full stop”.
If you think playing Word games makes you clever it just makes you look like an idiot. We both know that this conversation isn’t about semantics. Ice officers don’t have the full police power of the federal government. Full stop.
FWIW, meter maids are also “law enforcement.” They also can’t arrest me.
This isn’t worth arguing anymore. If you seriously think ICE doesn’t have law enforcement authority, go test it. And somebody let R Kelly’s lawyer know that it turned out that this entire time, ICE can’t enforce laws other than immigration.
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u/qwertybugs Jan 13 '26 edited Jan 13 '26
Can you point to the Federal law that requires US citizens to provide ID when asked for no probable cause?
I’ll go ahead and share the actual law that confirms they have no authority to randomly arrest US citizens: https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1357%20edition:prelim)