Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks changed how the federal government approached national security, one agency created in that transformation has become central to a very different debate.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, began operating on March 1, 2003, as part of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The agency brought together immigration and customs investigative and interior-enforcement functions that had previously been housed elsewhere in the federal government. (ICE)
ICE still conducts national-security and counterterrorism investigations. But its current mission is much broader.
Today, ICE is one of the federal government’s primary agencies for enforcing immigration law inside the United States. And recent data show that a large share of the people caught up in that enforcement have no criminal conviction.
That difference between why the post-9/11 system was created and what ICE does today is at the center of the agency’s 25-year story.
Why was ICE created after 9/11?
ICE was created as part of a sweeping federal reorganization following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, creating the Department of Homeland Security. DHS says the new department brought together 22 federal departments and agencies into a single Cabinet-level organization as part of the government’s post-9/11 security framework.
The reorganization also changed how the federal government handled immigration enforcement.
The former Immigration and Naturalization Service was divided among three new DHS components: ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
ICE received the investigative and interior-enforcement functions of the former INS along with investigative functions from the former U.S. Customs Service. The agency formally assumed responsibility for enforcing immigration laws on March 1, 2003. (ICE)
The new homeland-security structure placed immigration enforcement inside a department whose founding mission centered heavily on protecting the country against terrorism and other threats. DHS itself describes the post-9/11 framework as an effort to protect the country from large-scale attacks and evolving security threats. (DHS)
But that does not mean ICE was created solely to fight terrorism.
ICE was created for more than counterterrorism
ICE’s mission has always been broader than terrorism.
The agency says its responsibilities include enforcing immigration law, combating transnational crime and protecting national security. Its investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations, works on cases involving drug trafficking, human trafficking, financial crimes, cybercrime, child exploitation, customs fraud and terrorism. (ICE)
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division handles immigration enforcement inside the United States, including arrests, detention and removal of people who immigration authorities say are removable.
ICE’s own annual report describes immigration enforcement as the largest single area of responsibility for ERO, while HSI focuses on criminal investigations involving transnational threats. (ICE)
ICE is not one operation with one purpose. It is an agency with multiple missions.
The question 25 years later is therefore not whether ICE still performs counterterrorism work.
It does.
The more revealing question is how much of the agency’s modern interior enforcement involves people whose cases have nothing to do with criminal convictions or terrorism.
What does ICE do today?
The answer is primarily immigration enforcement inside the United States, along with a broad range of criminal investigations.
ICE’s own mission statement says immigration enforcement is a primary focus of its officers and agents and that most of that enforcement mission takes place in the interior of the country. (ICE)
The agency can make administrative immigration arrests based on alleged violations of immigration law. A person therefore does not need to have been convicted of a crime for ICE to arrest or detain that person.
That contrast is critical when reading ICE statistics.
An immigration violation is not the same thing as a criminal conviction.
For readers trying to understand what current enforcement looks like in California, Parriva’s reporting on ICE arrests in Southern California provides a closer look at how the broader federal enforcement system is affecting local communities.
More people in ICE detention have no criminal conviction
The latest publicly available ICE data collected by the Deportation Data Project extend through August 6, 2026. The project, based at UC Berkeley and UCLA, obtained the records through federal records requests and litigation and has released data covering ICE encounters, detainers, arrests, detention stays and removals. (Deportation Data Project)
The most recent nationwide detention analysis available before the August data release found that 70.6% of people in ICE detention had no criminal conviction as of July 11, 2026, according to data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. TRAC reported that 46,436 of 65,765 people in detention had no criminal conviction. (TRAC)
That does not mean every person without a conviction has no criminal history.
A person can have pending criminal charges, prior immigration violations or other circumstances that do not appear as a criminal conviction in the dataset.
It also does not mean ICE has stopped targeting people with serious criminal convictions.
It means something narrower and important:
The majority of people in ICE detention at that point did not have a criminal conviction.
That is a very different picture from an immigration-enforcement system focused exclusively on people convicted of serious crimes.
The latest data show enforcement has expanded sharply
The change is also visible in the scale of enforcement.
An analysis by the Deportation Data Project found that interior deportations increased fivefold during the first year of the second Trump administration, while ICE arrests increased 4.4 times when comparing the final six months of the Biden administration with the January 2026 peak. (Deportation Data Project)
The project’s August 2026 data release added nearly five months of additional enforcement records, extending the underlying dataset through August 6. The new release also added the city where an arrest occurred, allowing researchers and journalists to examine the geographic expansion of enforcement in greater detail. (Deportation Data Project)
Recent reporting based on those records has found large increases in arrests of people without criminal convictions in communities around the country.
Parriva has also examined the broader rise in ICE deportations, street arrests and arrests of people without criminal convictions.
The pattern is therefore not simply a historical question.
It is part of the current operation of the immigration-enforcement system.
What about terrorism?
Terrorism remains part of ICE’s mission, particularly through Homeland Security Investigations.
ICE says HSI is the largest contributor to FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces and investigates subjects connected to national-security threats. (ICE)
But terrorism represents a very small share of the people recorded in ICE’s removal data.
An American Immigration Council analysis of ICE data found that 0.4% of people deported from ICE detention in 2025 were tagged as known or suspected terrorists, while 2% were tagged as suspected gang members. More than one-third had no criminal record at all. (American Immigration Council)
Those figures need to be interpreted carefully.
They do not measure how much of ICE’s budget or investigative workforce is devoted to counterterrorism. They describe classifications attached to people in the removal data.
What they do show is that people identified in the data as known or suspected terrorists represented a very small fraction of those deported from ICE detention in 2025.
Who is most affected by interior deportations?
The people removed from the U.S. interior have historically been disproportionately from Mexico and northern Central America.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, Mexicans accounted for 63% of interior deportations between fiscal years 2021 and 2024. People from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras accounted for another 24%.
Together, those four nationalities represented 87% of interior deportations during that period. (Migration Policy Institute)
That pattern is not necessarily explained by a single enforcement policy.
MPI notes that the United States has longstanding repatriation agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, while removing people to some other countries can be more difficult because those governments accept fewer returnees. (Migration Policy Institute)
For Latino communities, however, the practical effect is significant.
The people most likely to encounter the interior deportation system have historically included large numbers of Mexican and Central American immigrants.
That makes ICE’s evolution particularly relevant to Latino families, not simply as a national-security story but as an immigration, family and community story.
Parriva has also examined how rising deportations are intersecting with the growth of the Latino population in the United States.
This did not begin with the current administration
The distinction between immigration violations and criminal convictions also predates today’s political debate.
A 2011 analysis by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that 83.4% of ICE-initiated deportation proceedings in immigration courts during fiscal year 2011 involved immigration violations only. Criminal charges accounted for 14.9% of proceedings, while national-security or terrorism grounds appeared in just 30 cases. (TRAC)
That does not mean today’s enforcement system is identical to the one that existed during the Obama administration.
It isn’t.
Policies, priorities, arrest levels and detention practices have changed substantially over time.
But the historical data demonstrate an important point:
ICE has never been solely a counterterrorism agency.
Its immigration-enforcement function has been central to its work since the agency was created.
Twenty-five years later, ICE is a different kind of institution
The story of ICE begins with 9/11.
The attacks helped produce a new federal security architecture. Congress created DHS, reorganized the federal immigration system and placed ICE inside a department whose founding mission was deeply connected to national security.
But 25 years later, ICE’s day-to-day work extends far beyond counterterrorism.
Its responsibilities include national-security investigations and transnational crime. They also include the routine enforcement of civil immigration law inside the United States.
Recent data show that the people caught up in that system include large numbers of people without criminal convictions.
And the people removed from the interior have historically been overwhelmingly drawn from Mexico and northern Central America.
For Latino communities, that makes ICE’s 25-year evolution more than a footnote to the history of September 11.
It is the story of how an agency born from a national-security reorganization became one of the most consequential immigration-enforcement institutions in everyday American life.
For families trying to understand what ICE means today, the most important distinction is also the simplest:
The agency was created in the post-9/11 security transformation. But its modern work is much broader than counterterrorism.
And the numbers show just how broad that work has become.
