Across the country, President Trump’s orders for the largest mass deportation in history have thrust ICE agents accustomed to operating under the radar into the spotlight.
Inside Kansas City’s ICE operations amid immigration debate
Watch as ICE agents in Kansas City deal with an increase in arrests, deportations, and deportations as tensions rise.
The second of two stories examining ICE’s role in the changing landscape of immigration enforcement.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A text message printed inside ICE headquarters in a suburban office park reads, “Get a gun and shoot in the street,” and immigration agents feel it’s directed at them.
It’s posted on the wall of a cubicle that dozens of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pass through each day. The message in the screenshot also declares, “This is war.”
In response, ICE officials wrote in all caps on a printout: “BE VIGILANT!!”
For ICE Detention and Deportation Superintendent Chione Feliciano, the memo served as a reminder of the inevitable dangers he and his colleagues face amid rapidly growing anger over the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.
Feliciano and other longtime ICE agents across the country, accustomed to operating under the radar, are in the spotlight as President Trump orders the largest mass deportation in history.
It’s an uncomfortable position for many, as they try to balance their self-image as patriotic, law-and-order Americans with the realization that they have suddenly become, in the words of one ICE official, “the bad guys.”
The deployment of masked federal agents throughout American communities in response to President Trump’s orders has sparked a sometimes violent backlash, including shootings, attacks on ICE facilities, and vehicle rammings.
The mostly peaceful demonstrators say the agents are crossing dangerous lines for American society, breaking car windows, chasing employees through restaurants and subjecting people to seemingly random arrests.
To report on both perspectives, USA TODAY reporters spent several days in Kansas City this November, accompanying ICE agents as they detained suspects, retrieved detainees from local jails, and placed others on charter flights to Texas for eventual deportation.
We also spoke with immigration advocates and local elected officials in the Kansas City area who say the expansion of immigration enforcement is tearing communities apart, pitting neighbors against each other, and creating violent conflicts over the tactics currently being deployed.
On a cool November morning, Feliciano, an 11-year veteran of the department, sped through the predawn darkness in his Dodge truck to join a team arresting a deported Venezuelan man convicted of sex crimes.
Feliciano’s white pickup truck had just left a repair shop after protesters tailed him through downtown Chicago and rear-ended him during the controversial Midway Blitz. During Operation Midway Blitz, Border Patrol agents fired tear gas at demonstrators when confronted by angry crowds.
He helped chain a Venezuelan man and load him into the back of an unmarked ICE vehicle. Feliciano then urged the officers to quickly get off the street.
“The longer we’re here, the more attention we’ll get,” he said. “Some people just want to drive by and look good, while others may have hostile intentions. We just want to keep everyone safe and get out of here.”
The “pendulum swing” of execution strategy
Feliciano, a Navy veteran and former local police officer, said the swing of the pendulum between different presidential administrations can interfere with the reason he became involved in immigration enforcement: removing criminals from American society.
He said he was especially proud when his team was able to deport convicted sex offenders, and said he believed sex offenders pose a significant social risk even after serving their sentences.
Under President Joe Biden, “there was a time when we were told that if we couldn’t remove them right away, we would just release them,” Feliciano said. “That’s why we currently have a huge number of aliens floating around the country with unresolved cases.
“Now our administration is saying, ‘Stop releasing them and put them back in custody,'” he said.
Feliciano’s team, a Venezuelan man arrested in November, had been deported from the United States after being convicted of statutory rape. He entered the country illegally. When he was arrested, he applied for asylum, saying he was afraid to return to Venezuela.
The judge ruled that the man could be deported to a third country such as Mexico, ordered him to wear a GPS tracking device and reintegrate him into society, ICE officials said. Re-entering the country after being deported is a serious crime, but applying for asylum, especially under the Biden administration, could qualify some people to remain free while their cases are pending.
Feliciano’s team decided to detain the man after detecting tampering with his GPS tracking device. It could have been a false alarm, but it could also indicate the man was trying to remove it.
After staking out the man’s home for several days, the team waited until he left for work early one morning, then stopped his Honda Pilot near an empty intersection and intercepted him with multiple vehicles. Agents prefer traffic stops to entering homes for safety reasons.
The man quickly surrendered and was shackled. At his request, officers drove back to his nearby home.
Tensions rise between ICE and its supporters
Back at the Kansas City ICE office, longtime employees sit next to new employees hired during President Trump’s rapid expansion of the agency. Under “One Big, Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress this summer, the federal immigration agency will be ordered to hire 18,500 new officers and support staff, nearly doubling its headcount.
Nationwide, these new federal agents, many in Customs and Border Protection, are being ordered to go after illegal immigrants, regardless of conviction.
Like other hardline immigration enforcement officials, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino suggested that previous presidential administrations had betrayed the trust of the American people by failing to adequately control illegal immigration.
“We will not allow criminal illegal aliens to take over American communities. We will continue to pursue illegal aliens in Los Angeles, Chicago, and any other city of our choosing,” Bovino said in a Nov. 15 social media post. “That’s the way this team works.”
This more militant approach took shape in Kansas City in late July, when ICE agents raided two popular Mexican restaurants in the western and southern suburbs and detained about a dozen employees.
ICE had a criminal federal search warrant signed by a judge to search the premises as part of an ongoing investigation, officials said. ICE officials said they are under orders from the Trump administration to question suspected illegal immigrants whenever they encounter them.
As the attack progressed, dozens of immigrant rights activists and community members surrounded the restaurant, shouting at federal agents and employees, and damaging one vehicle. Protesters called the attacks unjust and immoral, but ICE officials consider the protests to be based on misinformation.
ICE has not yet explained specifically what its officers were looking for during the raid, but notes that these restaurants were previously investigated for wage theft during the Biden administration. Activists say a lack of trust stems from ICE’s refusal to explain why the two restaurants were placed in immigration detention.
Melanie Arroyo, a Lenexa City Council member in suburban Lenexa, across the state line in Kansas, said: “We feel scared and anxious, but strangely we feel more empowered to speak up for our community. We feel determined to protect our residents.”
Around Kansas City, community activists are handing out fliers advising people of their constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent, not opening the door to investigators without seeing a warrant, and filming interactions from a safe distance.
The “pendulum swing” in immigration enforcement is also spilling over into local politics.
Arroyo’s own citizenship was briefly investigated by state and local police after one of her constituents misinterpreted her legislative testimony.
At first, she thought it was funny that someone would question her citizenship, but then she realized that her neighbors were demanding to see her documents, even though she is an American citizen.
“This is a scary pattern and people need to wake up and realize they can’t just go along with it, because this is not OK,” Arroyo said.
Genevra Alberti, a longtime immigration attorney in Kansas City, said accountability has worsened amid mass hiring and a tougher enforcement environment. In recent months, she has noticed that the Kansas City ICE office has been less responsive to questions about her clients and that detention center officials have been less cooperative regarding her concerns about overcrowded cells and health issues.
“There are always police officers here and you can tell they enjoy what they do, which is great for them,” she said. “They get to do something they’ve always wanted to do.”
Democratic Rep. Susan Lewis, who represents the Kansas City suburbs, said the new, tougher approach destroys the trust built between local police and immigrant communities that have long been encouraged to report crimes, even if they are in the U.S. illegally.
“It’s gotten to the point where no one can trust each other. People aren’t out in the community like they normally would. So they can’t shop. They can’t go to school. It’s affected our entire lives because we don’t know who to trust. Can we trust our neighbors?” Lewis said.
“We’re just enforcing the law as written.”
Feliciano and his team insist they are using an appropriate level of force as a growing number of migrants face deportation if detained.
Under past presidential administrations, undocumented immigrants were often allowed to remain free on bail or with GPS monitoring while their cases proceeded.
But President Trump’s White House has effectively ordered people living without legal status in the United States to be held without bail until their cases are decided. Some are forcibly returned to third countries.
In the face of this change, Feliciano said, migrants are becoming more desperate and more likely to resist arrest, increasing the risk for everyone involved.
“The detention space hasn’t changed much, but we can now move people through the system faster,” Feliciano said.”We are moving people out of the country very quickly. ”
That means more and more undocumented immigrants who are stopped for routine traffic violations are fleeing or refusing to cooperate with local police or ICE agents.
For longtime agents like Feliciano, the change means preparing for violence from both the people they’re stopping and local residents angry at the White House’s orders. Therefore, the printout was pasted on the wall of the cubicle.
Feliciano said threats of violence from local residents will not deter the Kansas City team from following their orders. He takes pride in the work his agents do in targeting criminals through surveillance and recording.
Later that week, as he drove to the Kansas City airport to supervise deportation flights, Feliciano listed all the ways detainees could have a chance to defend themselves in court, appeal decisions and apply for asylum.
He said ICE agents like him will continue to follow orders from the White House and arrest people who pose a danger to the public, despite concerns about what he calls “social justice warriors” protesting in Chicago and other cities.
Feliciano watched from the airport tarmac as team members whipped and chained detainees before they were loaded onto chartered planes bound for centralized deportation facilities in Texas. His phone rang. One of his other officers called to discuss the details of continued surveillance for the next targeted arrest.
“We are not the emotional police. We are the legal police,” he said. “And we’re just enforcing the law as written.”
