Op-Ed: I helped lead ICE. Trump’s dragnet enforcement doesn’t make us safer

This piece appeared in the Houston Chronicle print and online edition, August 3, 2026.

By Jason Houser

I served as chief of staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I’ve spent two decades in the national security and homeland security system, working alongside agents who take their oaths seriously. None of that experience prepared me for what this administration calls enforcement.

What is happening now is not a public-safety strategy. It is a quota, and quotas do not distinguish between a threat and a target.

ICE arrested a recor2d 43,138 people last month, the highest total since this administration took office. The White House has reportedly pushed the agency to hit 2,000 arrests a day, and has backed that demand with a $70 billion funding surge.

But arrests are not removals. The number that actually tells you what’s happening is the detention population: 65,765 people in ICE custody by July 11. Within that population, people who have no criminal conviction and no pending criminal charge make up the largest group.

ICE is taking people into custody faster than the system can resolve their cases. People sit in detention for weeks or months while proceedings, appeals, travel documents and receiving-country arrangements crawl forward. This growing population is not evidence that ICE needs greater resources to process them — it underlines the reality that we are cramming people into detention without regard to whether this is serving any urgent public safety purpose.

Meanwhile, the focus on arrest quotas means that fewer 

federal resources go to  catching the people who actually endanger this country: sex traffickers, child predators, fentanyl smugglers, violent gang members, terrorists, transnational criminal organizations. You do not find those people by staking out a construction site or a Home Depot parking lot. You find them through long investigations — digital forensics, financial analysis, victim interviews, surveillance, search warrants and cooperation with local police like the Houston Police Department and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office.

Yet thousands of federal law-enforcement personnel have been pulled off exactly that work and redirected toward civil immigration arrests. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations units — the people who chase traffickers and child predators for a living — have reportedly been reassigned to investigate allegations of election fraud. Are we safer when a trained criminal investigator reviews signatures on voter registration forms, instead of an Epstein-style predator or a trafficking ring? Of course not.

Many of the people now swept into this system entered lawfully or were living and working here under humanitarian parole, refugee protections, Temporary Protected Status, or work authorization the administration has since revoked or tried to revoke for hundreds of thousands of people. A person does not suddenly become  dangerous because Washington changed a policy or mailed a termination notice.

The warning signs were already there. Racing to build up its ranks, ICE cut more than 240 hours — over 40% — of basic training. That included firearms training, legal instruction, driving, and preparation for the judgment calls that prevent a stop from turning fatal. At the same time,  the agency struggled to vet the recruits it was rushing into the field. Six days after an ICE agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on a Houston street, another ICE officer killed Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national, during a traffic stop in Biddeford, Maine. 

Only then — after the second death in a week — did the Department of Homeland Security pause most vehicle stops nationwide so agents could receive additional training.

The pause lasted about a day. President Donald Trump publicly overruled it, calling vehicle stops one of ICE's "most important and effective crime-fighting tools," and agents were back on the road within 24 hours. Days later, border czar Tom Homan announced that body cameras would finally be required for vehicle stops — nearly two weeks after Salgado was killed without one. Full deployment could still take months.

But this is where immigration enforcement is headed. Politics is taking priority. More officers with less training, supervision and accountability are being sent into the field with instructions to maximize arrests at all costs. No intelligence-based targeting, no focus on preserving and protecting public safety — and no consequences when things go wrong, as happened this month in Houston.

Americans should not mistake activity for security. Filling detention centers while pulling investigators off traffickers, predators and criminal organizations does not make Houston, or anywhere else, safer. ICE should end arrest quotas, restore threat-based priorities, put Homeland Security Investigations officers back on criminal investigations, equip every officer with a body camera before every operation, and restore real detention inspections and post-release death reporting.

Public safety requires priorities, not volume — and Houston is paying the price for the difference.

Jason Houser served as chief of staff for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2021 to 2023.