How did we get to ICE?

TL;DR

ICE emerged from 200 years of immigration policy gradually shifting from open labor management to militarized law enforcement driven by racism and national security fears.

Key Points

• 1.The U.S. had virtually no federal immigration enforcement for its first century — the Constitution never mentions immigration, and 98–99% of European arrivals were admitted freely through Ellis Island (12 million passed through between 1892–1924).
• 2.The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Supreme Court's ruling that border control is "extra-constitutional" established the legal foundation for race-based exclusion that still echoes today.
• 3.The Immigration Act of 1924 closed America's normatively open borders using quotas based on the 1890 census, deliberately limiting Eastern/Southern Europeans and banning all Asian and African immigration entirely.
• 4.FDR's 1940 transfer of the INS from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice redefined immigration as a criminal justice issue — the INS then ran 65 internment camps detaining 32,000 German, Italian, and Japanese non-citizens during WWII.
• 5.The 1954 Operation Wetback, led by Army Lt. General Joseph Swing, used military tactics to deport a claimed 1.3 million people — shifting immigration enforcement's focus permanently toward the southern border and Latino communities.
• 6.After 9/11, the INS (whose budget had grown from $181M in 1975 to $6B by 2003) was folded into the new Department of Homeland Security and merged with Customs Enforcement to create ICE — explicitly a law enforcement body, not a labor management agency.