Crucial Reporting on ICE
How journalists are covering 2026’s most urgent story
With immigration enforcement ramping up in the second Trump administration, the agency has become a flashpoint for unrest and growing concern about the US’s treatment of immigrants. Many journalists have turned their focus to reporting on ICE, digging into the legality of agents’ conduct, the conditions in immigrant detention, and which historical moments we can collectively draw lessons from as we try to make sense of what’s happening in the streets of Minneapolis and around the country.
Here at The Preamble, we’ve gathered a few stories from trusted writers across Substack who’ve got insight to offer on ICE. Check them out below.
— The Preamble Editorial Team
What Is ICE Hiding in Minneapolis?
While all eyes are on the streets of Minneapolis–St. Paul, an ICE detention facility in the city has barred members of Congress from oversight, writes Tim Dickinson at The Contrarian.
“The Whipple building at Fort Snelling sits on a narrow swath of land between the airport and the Mississippi River. How many people are detained there? How long do detainees stay? In what conditions? The Department of Homeland Security is not providing details, beyond a rough count of 2,400 arrested in Minneapolis since late November. A CBS affiliate reports that many detainees are eventually shipped to outlying county jails…
“When members of Congress sought to perform oversight at the federal facility on Saturday, they were turned away after just 10 minutes — on the basis of a new policy issued by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem that states Congress must give one-week notice before entering a detention facility funded by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.” Earlier this week, a court upheld the one-week-notice policy, allowing the administration to continue restricting access.
“For the brief period that Congress members were able to enter the Whipple building, “what Reps. Kelly Morrison, Ilhan Omar, and Angie Craig (all Minnesota Democrats) glimpsed inside was upsetting: Detention rooms without beds or blankets. No apparent shower facilities.”
A Mistaken Deportation, and a Student’s Fight to Return
Over at The Daily Chela, a story on the mistaken deportation of a student sheds light on the human impact of an immigration enforcement agency that’s increasingly untethered from normal procedures and the rule of law.
“Instead of reuniting with her family, Lopez Belloza was whisked out of the country in violation of a federal court order, a bureaucratic blunder so glaring that it led to a rare public apology from the U.S. government. Now, her promising future is suspended in limbo as she fights from abroad for a chance to return to her campus, her community, and the life she worked so hard to build.”
Trump’s ICE and Hitler’s Brown Shirts
Looking to history for parallels to the current moment in the United States, Robert Reich republished a piece from German documentarian Neal McQueen, who examined “the chilling parallels between ICE and Hitler’s Brown Shirts”:
“On February 22, 1933, Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Göring signed an order deputizing 50,000 stormtroopers as auxiliary police,” writes McQueen. “On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”
“Both documents expanded the authority of organizations tasked with confronting what their political sponsors called ‘enemies within.’
“The comparison that follows is not about moral equivalence. The Sturmabteilung was a party militia that murdered political opponents and helped lay the groundwork for genocide. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency operating under statutory authority. They represent different legal systems, different eras, and different constraints.
“What the comparison examines is structural. It asks: what happens when a state rapidly expands a force authorized to use coercion against a designated population?”
ICE Has Stopped Paying for Detainee Medical Treatment
While ICE is required to provide medical treatment to detainees, the agency “has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025,” writes Judd Legum at Popular Information.
“ICE’s failure to pay its bills for months has caused some medical providers to deny services to ICE detainees, an administration source, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Popular Information. In other cases, detainees have allegedly been denied essential medical care by ICE…
“In lawsuits, numerous ICE detainees with severe illnesses allege that they cannot obtain treatment. For example, Viera Reyes, a detainee being held at ICE’s California City Detention Facility, has symptoms and test results that suggest he has prostate cancer. But despite often being in excruciating pain, Reyes cannot obtain a biopsy.”
ICE’s Deadly Professionalism Deficit
One of the defining images of the second Trump administration is that of the masked ICE agent dressed in what often looks like military attire. Kevin D. Williamson at The Dispatch argues that “when law enforcement agents dress for war, war follows,” and that ICE agents’ misconduct is symptomatic of the same lack of professionalism as their military cos-play.
“The ridiculous mall-commando get-ups in which ICE agents are costumed are an affront to republican manners: The masks — which should be forbidden, categorically, to all American law enforcement — symbolically violate the fundamental promise of public accountability for public servants,” writes Williamson.
“The tactical vests and plate carriers and helmets and the rest of that imbecilic fantasy dress-up gear is almost always inappropriate, and it is comical in light of the fact that this particular ICE squad [involved in killing Renée Nicole Good] apparently did not have the tactical acumen to deal with the challenging environment of an ordinary Midwestern city in a relatively mild January and kept getting their vehicles stuck in the snow — but I suppose snow is not what one is planning for when one is dressed for Fallujah.”
Nothing like waking up and doomscrolling through story after story of founding ideals being dismantled. Thanks for the elevated heart rate, Preamble.
I keep trying to play Donald’s advocate here, because I genuinely want to understand how any of this makes sense to someone who voted for “law and order” and “fiscal responsibility.” But I can’t make it work.
You want lower crime? Undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent crimes, so your focus on immigrants is misguided. 9 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates per capita elected Trump into office twice… maybe those are the states most in need of military intervention?
Meanwhile, ICE is arresting people at courthouses — punishing them for showing up to follow the law — and immigration court no-shows have tripled because compliance now feels like a trap.
You want lower prices? Economists at the Peterson Institute project that mass deportations are raising prices by over 9%. Vegetable prices are already up nearly 40%. The people harvesting your food aren’t taking jobs Americans want — they’re doing jobs Americans won’t do. Even Trump has admitted this when he has said farm workers should get more leniency. I guess this isn’t a matter of principle, but of whoever Republicans think are the most effective scapegoats without making food even more expensive.
You want fiscal responsibility? Penn Wharton estimates this will cost $900 billion over ten years, charged to a credit card our grandkids won’t be able to pay off. And the $50K signing bonuses for people showing up to training with disqualifying criminal histories seems a bit reckless and ironic, don’t you think?
You want law and order? Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned because DOJ refused to investigate the officer who shot Renée Good. More people have died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the last four years combined. A journalist named Laura Jedeed — who is openly anti-ICE — was offered a job after a six-minute interview with no vetting. Look up her story. People do more research on their Tinder dates than ICE does before giving people guns.
And Kristi Noem threw on a flamboyant cowboy hat to call Good — a mother of three who blew a whistle and blocked traffic — a “domestic terrorist.” Does anyone remember what that word is supposed to mean? It requires intent. Did Good become a terrorist in the split second she decided to leave the scene? If blocking traffic makes someone a terrorist, what does that make the person ordering raids that are openly terrorizing communities? Doesn’t that make her a Noem terrorist?
ICE isn’t conservative values. It’s radical extremism, and radically expensive by every measure: to our conscience and to our budget. I don’t understand how anyone could support it.
ICE is grotesquely lawless. They are terrorizing our country and showing all of us how little the Constitution means to the republicans. The one bright spot I can see is that Americans are showing up. Minnesota is showing grit and courage and love for others. State after State is learning and preparing for their own ICE invasion. America is still here.