A Sobering Look Inside The Families Of ICE Agents As 30 People Share Their True Feelings

Before you can even begin to argue about it, it helps to know what "it" even is. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, is actually a surprisingly young agency. According to its own official history, it wasn't created until 2003. It was born from the great, post-9/11 government shake-up that gave us the Department of Homeland Security.

Essentially, the government took parts of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the U.S. Customs Service, smashed them together, and gave them a new, much more intimidating name. It was the bureaucratic glow-up nobody asked for. This messy origin story is the key to understanding a distinction that many family members in the online thread desperately tried to make.

They explain that ICE has two very different "legs." One is Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the part that goes after the "real baddies" like human traffickers and drug cartels. The other is Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which is the arm that deals with immigration enforcement, the part we see in the headlines. For many of the families, this distinction is everything.