The ACLU just released Agents of Chaos and Cruelty, a data-driven civil rights review of how immigration enforcement was carried out across eight states in 2025. Naureen Shah, the ACLU’s Director of Policy and Government Affairs for Immigration, and Denise Bell, the consultant who led the research, reviewed more than 1,200 enforcement incidents in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, and New Mexico, and found more than 400 cases that involved misconduct by agents. Their central finding is that the tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are not aberrations, but are part of a consistent pattern of rogue, paramilitary-like behavior that should concern all Americans.
I spoke with Denise and Naureen because I wanted to understand more about how they came to this work, how they conducted the research, and why the ACLU chose this moment to issue such bold recommendations for systemic change (more on that in a minute).
Any project that involves detailed review of so many cases requires a diligent methodology, careful attention to detail, and experience documenting human rights abuses—which is why Denise Bell was perfect for this work. She brings two decades of international human rights work to this report. After the Dayton Peace Accords ended the war in the Balkans, she joined a United Nations mission to help refugees and internally displaced people return home, work that grew out of a conviction she still holds, that when the state turns its power against people and they cross a border, they become, as she said, “the constituents of no one.”
She began her career at Amnesty International working on Darfur, then earned a law degree and served with the Department of Justice at the New York Immigration Court, where she saw from the inside how a system staffed with capable judges is still stacked against the people standing in front of them. She later returned to Amnesty International USA to lead its campaigning and then its research on refugee and migrant rights, and she has worked on access to protection and pushed back against state overreach globally, nationally, and domestically ever since.
Drawing on this experience, Denise described how the research project began. Despite the obvious barrage of social media posts clearly showing concerning behavior by ICE agents, she explained to me that as a researcher, she started with the data first.
“We did not seek out a pattern. We did not seek out civil rights violations. We just reviewed what was out there publicly, and the pattern emerged.”
Looking at the data and drawing on her years of national and international experience in civil and human rights violations, Denise knew the patterns of systemic violence when she saw them. Long before ICE showed up in Minneapolis, Denise was already fearing the worst. Looking back over her notes from the fall of 2025, she told me that she found scribbled on one page a frightening but ultimately correct premonition:
“They’re going to kill somebody.”
ICE did kill someone—lots of people, in fact: two U.S. citizens, 50 people in ICE detention since the start of the current Trump administration, and at least another 10 people in a frightening but predictable wave of violence from officers who show up masked and unmarked to terrorize communities of immigrants and citizens alike. Since ICE appears unable to pull its punches, the ACLU’s careful documentation doesn’t either. The report shows that the rise of this 'national deportation policing force'—which includes ICE but extends to a wide range of complicit federal, state, and local agencies—is much bigger than just immigration:: these abuses “reveal a blueprint for expanding authoritarian rule in the United States, with profound consequences for everyone in America.”
The report chooses its opening case not in Minnesota but in Florida, and Denise walked through why. Floridalma Sanchez-Gomez, an asylum seeker with work authorization, was driving home with her two brothers when a traffic stop turned into her being tased twice in her own front yard, her home broken into with a crowbar, multiple federal agencies and a helicopter arriving within minutes, a thirteen-year-old returning to a broken home, and a U.S. citizen neighbor arrested for observing under Florida’s HALO law. Denise’s point is that this happened on an ordinary residential street, and that ordinariness is the finding.
“There was a shift to transform the agency into one that could sweep in as many people as possible, and thus it transformed society for everybody, because no one was off-limits, and no place was off-limits.”
As a geographer who works with enforcement data, what held my attention is the sheer scale of unhinged enforcement, and Naureen named the distinction that makes the scale matter. Immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal one, but the report documents agents behaving as an unaccountable occupying force.
“We’ve never seen immigration agents act at this scale and with the severity of misconduct, as we’ve just documented. … They’re acting more like a paramilitary agency, an internal security force.”
Naureen located the reason this continues in a single word: impunity.
“Impunity is what we see all around the world in places where torture and killings and abuse happens. It happens again and again, because people know they will get away with it.”
The report documents 437 incidents of likely racial profiling, and Naureen anchored that number in a fifteen-year-old in Illinois who was chased three blocks and tackled while waiting for a school bus, then asked whether he was a U.S. citizen. She connected it to a piece of the pattern that reaches everyone who witnesses it. Agents mask their faces, drive unmarked cars, and wear clothing that identifies no agency, so a person often cannot tell an arrest from an abduction or know whom to hold responsible. The consequence is that watching becomes dangerous.
“If we’re watching what’s happening, and we’re horrified by what’s happening, and we pull out our phones to record what’s happening, now we are in the crosshairs of what we call the National Deportation Policing Force.”
That force is not only ICE. Naureen described more than 2,000 state and local law enforcement agencies now signed up through the 287(g) program to take and make calls for ICE, which is the mechanism I have mapped in my own work on local deputization. It is how a national pattern gets built out of local police departments, and it is why the report treats these incidents as connected rather than episodic.
The part of the conversation that will draw the most attention is the affirmative vision, because the ACLU has called for a level of systemic change it never has before. Naureen argued that the system is built around enforcement when it should be built around management, and that mere tinkering will not fix it. We need substantial transformation.
“We want to replace ICE. That’s what we’re calling for as the ACLU for the first time. We want to replace ICE with that management system that is oriented towards getting people on a path.”
I was eager to talk more about this, because calls to abolish ICE have circulated for years and have often left me wanting, since an immigration system still exists on the books no matter which agency runs it. It’s not enough to want to tear something down; we have to have a vision for what we want to build in its place. What Naureen and Denise describe is a practical and very doable replacement agency: an immigration management agency oriented toward service rather than force.
This conversation belongs alongside the others I have hosted this year with the people assembling this record. Human Rights Watch reconstructed the federal surge in Minneapolis and the rising death rate inside ICE detention. Heidi Altman of the National Immigration Law Center walked through the enforcement money Congress approved and what the availability of that money drives. Nayna Gupta and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council laid out what an immigration system built for compliance would actually require, where compliance only means something if the system is one that people can comply with. Agents of Chaos and Cruelty ties them together, from the killings to the funding to a concrete demand to replace the agency at the center of it.
I’m deeply grateful to Denise and Naureen for spending an hour with me on this incredibly impactful report. Download the report and please actually read it so that you understand what the data says about how immigration enforcement is creating chaos across our country right now.
Timestamp of key themes
00:00 — Welcome, and why this report and why now
05:35 — How Naureen came to immigration work
09:02 — How Denise came to it, from Balkans refugee missions and Amnesty to the immigration courts
12:45 — What the report documents and what motivated it
21:47 — How they chose eight states, and why the pattern is systemic
26:51 — The Florida case study and what “no one is off-limits” means
31:10 — The HALO law, recording enforcement, and the National Deportation Policing Force
35:59 — What use of force actually looked like, beyond firearms
45:19 — Replacing enforcement with management, and calling to replace ICE
51:05 — Abolish versus replace, and an immigration agency built for management
53:13 — What a transparent agency would report, and the data going dark
56:28 — Closing takeaways and how to take action
Five Things You Can Do Right Now
Read the report. Download Agents of Chaos and Cruelty, and if it helps you focus the way it helps me, print it. If you can scroll on socials for an hour, you can read this. Your brain will thank you. 🧠
Take action with the ACLU. Go to aclu.org/action. Naureen pointed to a discharge petition on the American Dream and Promise Act, which could open a path to citizenship for roughly 4.4 million people, and asked people to request a meeting with their members of Congress during the August recess.
Support your local rapid-response network. Denise credited community responders in states like Illinois, Colorado, and California for surfacing and verifying incidents that no outlet would otherwise report. These are the networks documenting enforcement where you live, so get involved if you can. And if you need data driven training and support, reach out to us at Relevant Research about a potential partnership.
Know your rights before you record. Recording enforcement is protected in many places, but laws like Florida’s HALO law may expose observers to arrest depending on the circumstances and the state you are in. Learn what applies where you are before you find yourself in that position. If you have tips and resources, share them with me in the comments below.
Share the report and this conversation. The value of this work depends on people seeing it. Send it to someone who still thinks Minneapolis was just an isolated incident rather than a systemic problem that should concern all of us.
Help Keep These Conversations Going
There are plenty of places to read the headline about Minneapolis. There aren’t many places where you can hear the two people who reviewed twelve hundred enforcement incidents explain how they built the record, why they call it a pattern, and what it would take to replace the agency carrying it out. If you think this kind of access to the people doing the documentation deserves a wider audience, a paid subscription is the best way to make it happen.
