Blame Trump for Trump-era immigration excesses

It’s not structure, it’s morally bankrupt leaders

ICE agents detain a woman after pulling her from a car on January 13, 2026, in Minneapolis. (Photo by Stephen Maturen)

The United States Postal Inspection Service sometimes claims to be the oldest federal law-enforcement agency, arguing that its origin dates to 1775 when Benjamin Franklin, in his capacity as colonial postmaster general, first appointed a surveyor to audit the mail. Then in 1789, the country established both the U.S. Marshals as part of the original Judiciary Act and also a U.S. Customs Service to enforce the tariff laws that, at the time, provided the bulk of revenue.

Then in 1791, George Washington created the Park Watchmen to provide security for the under-construction capital of Washington, D.C.

The watchmen evolved into what is today the U.S. Park Police, who do not police America’s national parks (that would be the National Park Service Law Enforcement Rangers) but rather urban parks that are under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. That means the National Mall and a bunch of other parks in D.C., but also some facilities in New York and San Francisco.

After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln created the U.S. Secret Service to combat the rising problem of counterfeiting. After William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Congress decided that presidents needed protection, and they assigned that duty to the Secret Service.

Because the original mission of the Secret Service was to combat counterfeiting, it was housed in the Treasury Department. The Customs Service was also in the Treasury Department because its core mission was collecting taxes. And when the Justice Department decided in the early 20th century to beef up federal investigative capabilities, they chose not to expand existing federal law-enforcement agencies and instead spun up their own Bureau of Investigation, which evolved into today’s F.B.I.

We don’t need to go through the entire history of every law-enforcement agency. The point is that it is a tangled web. The different agencies have narrow scopes and are also gerrymandered in weird ways. Bank robbery is handled by the same agency as counterterrorism but a different agency from counterfeiting, which is the same agency that does presidential protection, which is a different agency from protecting federal buildings.

I don’t think this makes a ton of sense compared to the setup they have in, say, Germany where the Bundeskriminalamt does detective-type stuff and the Bundespolizei does “guys in uniforms”-type stuff and that’s it.

And I’ve always felt it would make a lot of sense to reorganize the entire federal law-enforcement apparatus into either a single U.S. Police Service or else a dual structure with a German-style split. I first wrote about this back in 2012, prompted by an unrelated federal-government-reorganization proposal.

Which is just to say that my longstanding view is that we should, in fact, abolish ICE.

Please do not “Abolish ICE”