A former top ICE official just went on MSNBC and said what anyone paying attention already knows: Trump’s immigration crackdown is a colossal failure on every front that actually matters.
“This is not working for our communities, it’s not working for our economy and it’s not working for our national security and public safety,” Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff under President Biden, told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday.
THE DETAILS: Houser isn’t some random critic—he ran the day-to-day operations at the very agency Trump claims to be weaponizing for “public safety.” And he’s been talking to his former colleagues. He told Wallace he’s spoken to “dozens, if not hundreds” of state and local law enforcement officers as well as current ICE personnel, and the verdict is unanimous: nobody on the ground believes this approach is making anyone safer.
The public agrees. A recent CBS News/YouGov poll found that 52% of Americans now think ICE is making communities less safe—not more. “So Americans are beginning to see, as the polling you showed indicates, we’re less safe,” Houser said.
WHY IT MATTERS: Here’s the part that should make you furious: while the Trump administration stages theatrical raids in U.S. cities—complete with violent arrests and denial of legal counsel to detainees—the agency’s actual core mission is getting neglected. Drug crimes? Human trafficking? You know, the stuff that actually endangers communities?
“There’s been a de-prioritization of that,” Houser said bluntly.
Instead, ICE agents are being pushed to meet arrest quotas dreamed up by Stephen Miller from his White House perch. The result isn’t public safety—it’s political theater designed to terrorize asylum seekers and generate headlines.
OF COURSE: Meanwhile, protests against ICE continue in Minneapolis and across the country. Attorneys representing detained individuals have accused the Department of Homeland Security of denying people their constitutional right to legal counsel. Because nothing says “law and order” like violating the law.
Houser pointed out that while there have been “systemic failures” across multiple administrations on immigration, what’s happening now is different. This is “political opportunism” dressed up as enforcement—quota-arrest targets and violent crackdowns that achieve nothing except spreading fear among people seeking legal asylum protection.
BOTTOM LINE: When the guy who literally ran ICE operations tells you the current approach is broken—not working for communities, not working for the economy, not working for national security—maybe it’s time to admit this was never about safety in the first place. It’s about cruelty as policy, arrests as performance, and human beings as political props.