How Kristi Noem turned the Department of Homeland Security into the administration’s most controversial instrument, lost control of it, and got fired for it — while the courts spent a year trying to stop what her agents were doing in the streets.
A Short Explanation of What ICE Is
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a federal law enforcement agency. It has about 20,000 officers. Its job, broadly, is to find people in the United States who are not legally authorized to be here and remove them. That has been its job, with varying levels of intensity, since it was created in 2003 following 9/11.
It is not a military force. Its agents are not soldiers. They operate under the law, including the Fourth Amendment, which says the government cannot search or seize people or their property without reasonable justification, and usually not without a warrant signed by a judge. That is the same rule that applies to every police officer in every city in America.
What happened between January 2025 and March 2026 tested whether those rules still applied.
Rise: The Most Powerful DHS in History
Kristi Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security in January 2025 with relatively little resistance. She arrived with a mandate: execute the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, as Trump had promised on the campaign trail.
She moved fast. ICE hiring surged. Detention bed capacity grew from roughly 40,000 in January 2025 to over 66,000 by December, a 75 percent increase in one year. Congress provided $45 billion in new funding for immigration detention through the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” ICE’s enforcement operations expanded from border areas deep into the country, into cities and states that had explicitly said they did not want federal immigration agents operating within their jurisdictions.
The agency got more money, more agents, more vehicles, and more authority than at any point in its history. It also has fewer rules.
In March 2025, the administration dismantled multiple internal watchdog offices that oversaw DHS, including the office responsible for civil rights and the office responsible for inspecting immigration detention facilities. According to the Center for American Progress, ICE detention facility inspections fell by nearly 40 percent in 2025. The deadliest year in recent ICE detention history followed: more than 30 deaths in custody in 2025. Six more in the first weeks of 2026.
Noem was everywhere: press conferences at the border, television ads urging undocumented immigrants to self-deport, social media posts touting arrest numbers. The ads cost $220 million. They featured Noem prominently. Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana later described them as spending a “quarter to a fifth of a billion dollars” on spots in which she was the star.
The Agents You Couldn’t Identify
By mid-2025, something new and alarming was happening in American streets. ICE agents were conducting arrests while wearing masks and tactical gear, operating from unmarked vehicles, often without identifying themselves, and frequently without judicial warrants.
To understand why this matters, a simple comparison helps. When a local police officer arrests you, you can see their badge number. You can look up who they are. If they behave illegally, you can report them. Their identity is not optional. It is a basic requirement of accountable law enforcement in a democracy.
ICE agents operating in masks from unmarked cars offered none of that. You could not identify them. You could not challenge their authority. You could not hold them accountable. And because no one knew who they were, criminals quickly figured out they could impersonate them. In North Carolina, a man sexually assaulted a woman after posing as an ICE officer and threatening deportation. In Florida, another impersonator stopped drivers to steal their information. In Pittsburgh, a man broke into a home through a kitchen window, claiming to be ICE while holding a knife.
The masks not only protected agents from being identified by the public. They protected agents from being identified by the courts.
In May 2025, an internal ICE memo, hidden from public view and revealed only by whistleblowers in January 2026, instructed agents that they could enter private homes to make arrests using only an administrative warrant, a form filled out and signed internally by ICE employees, not a warrant approved by a judge. The Fourth Amendment does not recognize that distinction. Courts do not recognize that distinction. Federal agents breaking into a home with a battering ram on the authority of a document they signed themselves is, as Duke Law professors put it, not a complicated constitutional question.
On February 19, 2026, U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin made the point in language unusually blunt for a federal ruling. “Antiseptic judicial rhetoric cannot do justice to what is happening,” he wrote. “Across the interior of the United States, agents of the federal government, masked, anonymous, armed with military weapons, operating from unmarked vehicles, acting without warrants of any kind, are seizing persons for civil immigration violations and imprisoning them without any semblance of due process.” He ordered the immediate release of a detained man. The government did not dispute the facts. It disputed only whether the Constitution applied.
By that point, ICE had violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota alone since January 2026, according to the chief federal district judge of that state.
The Database Built Abroad to Do What America Wouldn’t
The accountability gap created by masked, unidentified agents did not go unanswered. It produced a response the administration had not anticipated: a publicly searchable database of ICE agents, built by a foreigner and hosted in a foreign country, specifically because it could not safely exist in the United States.
The ICE List (wiki.icelist.is) was created in June 2025 by Dominick Skinner, an Irish activist based in the Netherlands. Together with more than 500 volunteers across America, Skinner built a wiki that documents ICE agents by name, photo, incident, vehicle, and jurisdiction. The site currently lists more than 1,500 agents, cross-referenced with public records, social media profiles, court filings, and video footage from raids. It also documents incidents, facilities, and legal authorities. It is structured like Wikipedia, timestamped for verification, and released under Creative Commons Zero, meaning journalists, lawyers, and researchers can use any of it freely.
The reason it is hosted in Iceland, on an Icelandic top-level domain (.is), is not a coincidence. It is a deliberate choice to place the project beyond the direct reach of U.S. government pressure. The First Amendment does, in theory, protect this kind of journalism inside the United States. The ICE List’s founders were not confident that protection would hold in practice, given what they had watched happen to the ICEBlock app, whose developer was threatened by Attorney General Bondi, had his wife’s identity exposed by a Trump ally, saw her fired from her Justice Department job, and eventually watched the app removed from the Apple Store after Bondi directly instructed Apple to take it down. That case is now in federal court.
Hosting abroad was the practical answer to a political reality: the administration had demonstrated it would use whatever levers it could find to suppress tools that identified its agents or tracked their movements.
The site uses facial recognition AI to unmask agents caught on video during raids, then cross-references results with public databases and social media to confirm identities. Hotel staff has sent guest lists. Community members have photographed names on ICE agents’ coffee cups. Baristas have contributed. The goal is simple: restore the accountability that badges and name tags would have provided, through the only means available when agents refuse to wear them.
The administration called it doxxing. Skinner called it journalism. The distinction matters. Doxxing, in its usual sense, means exposing private individuals to harassment. ICE agents are federal law enforcement officers conducting arrests in public, on behalf of taxpayers, with lethal authority. Their identities are not, by any serious legal or ethical standard, private. Every local police department in America publishes its officers’ names. The only reason ICE agents are anonymous is that the agency chose to make them anonymous.
The site has survived DDoS attacks, the administration’s pressure on Meta to block its links (which Meta complied with), and Iceland’s government’s investigation into whether the .is domain should be subject to new restrictions. It remains online. As of early 2026, it had documented more than 4,500 federal enforcement personnel after a DHS employee data leak tripled its database overnight.
The administration’s response to the ICE List encapsulates an important point. It did not dispute the underlying facts. It did not argue that its agents should instead be identifiable through official channels. It tried to shut the record down. That is not the behavior of an institution confident its agents are acting within the law. It is the behavior of an institution that would prefer no one find out.
Blue States as the Target
The operations were not random. They were concentrated in cities and states that had opposed Trump’s immigration agenda: Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. These are places governed by Democrats, places that had passed sanctuary city policies, places whose officials had publicly refused to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.
Border czar Tom Homan, the unofficial coordinator of immigration enforcement who reports directly to Trump without Senate oversight, was explicit about the logic. Cooperation with federal enforcement meant a drawdown of agents. Non-cooperation meant more. When Minnesota refused to turn over immigrants held in state jails without criminal convictions, more agents arrived. When city officials protested, the language from Washington became more aggressive. Homan made clear the withdrawal of agents was conditional on the state’s compliance. That is not law enforcement. That is leverage.
Operation Metro Surge, launched in December 2025 and described by DHS as “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out,” sent 3,000 ICE officers and 1,000 Border Patrol agents into the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area. The stated reason was fraud within segments of the Somali community. The actual scope was far broader. A federal judge later found that the overwhelming majority of cases brought to him by ICE involved people lawfully present in the United States. Of the roughly 4,000 people arrested, about 5 percent had records of violent crimes.
Schools went to remote learning. Businesses closed. Fifty thousand people marched through the streets of Minneapolis in minus-20-degree temperatures. Over 100 clergy members were arrested during a civil disobedience protest at the airport. It was, as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey later put it, an occupation.
Two Dead Americans
On January 7, 2026, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, in Minneapolis. She was in her car, recording the operation on her phone. Medical examiners ruled the shooting a homicide.
Noem’s response was to call Good someone who had “weaponized” her vehicle.
Sixteen days later, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, during a protest on Nicollet Avenue. He had a legal permit for the handgun tucked in his waistband. Video footage, reviewed by multiple news organizations and by Britannica, shows the gun being removed by an officer while Pretti was already on the ground. Moments later, ten shots rang out.
Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, the tactical head of the Minneapolis operation, claimed Pretti had come to the scene to “massacre” federal agents. The video evidence showed no such thing.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, not a man known for going easy on immigration enforcement, called the events a disaster. “What we’ve seen is innocent people getting detained who turn out to be American citizens,” Tillis said in Noem’s confirmation hearing. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska called for her resignation. The deaths of two American citizens by federal agents conducting an immigration sweep were, for a number of Republicans, the line.
The Fall: $220 Million and a Lie About the President
Noem’s firing on March 5, 2026, was triggered not by the shootings but by a different kind of error: she told Congress that Trump had approved her $220 million self-promotion ad campaign. The White House denied it immediately. “POTUS did not sign off on a $220 million ad campaign. Absolutely not,” a White House official told NBC News the same day.
Trump was, according to sources close to him, “mad as a murder hornet.”
She was gone before the end of the week. An ABC News source inside DHS described the mood upon hearing the news as “a sigh of relief.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, less measured, said taxpayer dollars had been “weaponized by DHS to kill American citizens” and called her tenure at the agency “lawless.” He also noted that she had “paraded around in a luxury jet and wasted public funds to glorify her ICE Barbie self-image.”
She was not replaced by a reformer. She was replaced by Senator Markwayne Mullin, a former professional MMA fighter whom Trump praised, in part, for how well he performed on cable television.
What Was Actually Built
Strip away the politics, and what Noem built at DHS was an agency that operated without consistent judicial oversight, without body cameras on its agents, without visible identification, and without accountability for individual officers who could not be identified. It used warrants that it signed itself to break into people’s homes. It violated court orders by the dozens. It detained American citizens. It killed two more.
A poll taken in early 2026 found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed ICE had gone too far.
The Constitution has a name for armed agents who operate masked, unidentified, and unaccountable to any court: it does not give them one, because it did not envision them. The Founders wrote the Fourth Amendment precisely because they had experienced what it felt like when agents of the Crown conducted searches and seizures at will, with no warrant, no identification, and no accountability.
Judge Goodwin, in his February ruling, framed it as simply as a federal judge is likely to: “If all officers across America might take to the streets in masks, that would run contrary to the transparency and accountability our democracy demands.”
The administration had campaigned on law and order. What it looked like in Minneapolis, to a federal judge, to bipartisan senators, and to fifty thousand people marching in subzero temperatures, like something else entirely.
Sources: NPR, NBC News, CNN, ABC News, MS NOW, Newsweek, Britannica, Wikipedia (Operation Metro Surge), the Center for American Progress, the American Immigration Council, the ACLU, the New York City Bar Association, West Virginia Record/Legal News Line, PBS NewsHour, Poynter, GovFacts, Duke Law, the Museum of Protest, the Vera Institute of Justice.