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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If someone told me now, it’s ICE. If it was before I would guess state department [/quote]

Look, we’ve got to be clear about something that keeps getting blurred—often intentionally—in these conversations. Working for ICE is not the same thing as “working in national security.” It’s just not. Those two things live in totally different universes of mission, scope, and public accountability.

When people talk about “national security,” they’re talking about the institutions tasked with protecting the country from foreign threats—intelligence agencies, counterterrorism units, cyber defense, the folks tracking geopolitical risk. It’s about espionage, state actors, international terrorism, military strategy. That’s the lane.

ICE, meanwhile, is an immigration enforcement agency. Its job is domestic—administrative, civil enforcement of immigration law. ICE is not in the Situation Room; it’s not briefing the President on Russian nuclear posture or Chinese cyber operations. It’s not even in the same bureaucratic orbit. It’s carrying out arrests, detentions, and deportations inside the United States. That’s law enforcement—domestic law enforcement—not national security.

And, yes, sometimes immigration intersects with national security concerns. But that doesn’t magically transform every ICE employee, or even most of them, into some kind of clandestine national-security operative. By that logic, the TSA agent checking your shampoo is a counterterrorism strategist and the FDA inspector checking a lettuce shipment is protecting the homeland.

The broader issue is this: invoking “national security” lends a kind of unearned gravitas, a shield against scrutiny. It suggests secrecy, expertise, even heroism. And that’s exactly why the conflation is so misleading. Because ICE has its own mission, its own controversies, its own record—and it shouldn’t be laundered through the language of national security to avoid public accountability.

So, no. Working for ICE is not “working in national security.”
It’s working in federal immigration enforcement. And we can have a serious conversation about that—what it is, what it isn’t, and what it should be—without pretending it’s something else.[/quote]

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