ICE Office Of Professional Responsibility Ditches ICE Oversight, Starts Hunting Down ICE Critics

from the gestapo-of-our-own dept

ICE has already been operating like a paramilitary kidnapping squad. Officers roam through neighborhoods, stake out hardware store parking lots, and even occasionally enjoy some ethnic food just so they can raid the source of hospitality later.

It’s nasty, disturbing, and definitely doesn’t resemble any of the things that have made America great. Now, the rot has spread. It’s not enough for ICE to engage in daylight snatchings on the regular. Now, its internal oversight office has abandoned any pretense of keeping ICE in line. In fact, it has completely gone in the opposite direction, turning this wing of ICE into another set of secret police, as this report from Wired makes clear:

Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter, and calling for his indictment.

The agents at the poll site asked Gonyea to sign a warning notice that said it was unlawful to “threaten to assault, kidnap and/or murder” federal officials or their immediate family members in an effort to impede that federal official’s work. The form also requested that she remove her post “and/or discontinue” her behavior.

“My signature would have been an admission of guilt,” Gonyea says. “I refused to sign it.”

That’s just one person who’s been subjected to the OPR’s decision to stop investigating allegations against ICE officers to focus on allegations of external “threats” to ICE officers. There are more. Many more.

OPR was behind at least one of the flurry of administrative subpoenas sent to tech companies in recent months in an effort to unmask online critics.

[…]

In a court declaration filed in April, an ICE official said that between January 2025 and March 2026, OPR investigated 131 cases involving “incidents of doxing and threats directed towards ICE employees nationwide.”

That’s fucked up. This is definitely not what the Office of Professional Responsibility is supposed to be doing. According to the ICE OPR itself, its purview is limited to investigating ICE.

The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.

To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated. OPR’s role permits the agency to focus on its larger mission of promoting homeland security and public safety.

Nothing in this says the OPR is investigating ICE critics. Nothing in this even minimally suggests the OPR’s directives can be expanded to cover external investigations of US citizens over social media posts, etc.

You have to scroll down the page a bit and expand a few things before you find ICE OPR’s justifications for being America’s ICE-focused Gestapo:

OPR protects the agency by detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating internal and external threats against the agency, ICE senior leaders and ICE headquarters facilities by managing the ICE Insider Threat Program and counterintelligence functions involving ICE personnel. 

This is new language, specific to Trump’s version of ICE. It wasn’t there last year. There’s nothing in this December 2018 OIG report on ICE OPR operations that says anything at all about “detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating external threats.” There’s nothing in this 2008 OPR directive that says anything more than that the OPR is tasked with investigating allegations against ICE officers or personnel handling its detention facilities.

So, it’s reasonable to believe this language was added shortly after (March 2026) the OPR was rerouted to hunt down ICE critics, rather than focus on what must be thousands of complaints about ICE officers and/or detention facilities.

And despite these efforts apparently being well underway by April 2026, acting ICE director Todd Lyons made sure he didn’t bring up that part of OPR’s operations up when publicly testifying before Congress.

In written testimony for an April hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, which helps set the budget for DHS, Lyons touted OPR’s work inspecting detention facilities, vetting job applicants, and overseeing the agency’s 287(g) program, but didn’t mention the office’s work investigating online posters. ICE did not respond to questions about why Lyons didn’t discuss that work.

First off, the OPR should not be doing this, full stop. There are plenty of federal law enforcement resources available to be utilized in the rare case where an actual threat exists. Second, the OPR has never done this prior to being run by this administration. Third, this rerouting of OPR’s resources makes it clear the administration is more interested in punishing critics (First Amendment be damned) than engaging in any minimal oversight of ICE’s activities.

And this is bad news for the nation, obviously. If this OPR can be turned into literal speech police, the same can be expected from any other law enforcement agency with an in-house OPR. That’s tyranny. That’s fascism. That’s an entire administration treating Trump like a king and 325 million Americans subjects. It’s not only unacceptable, it’s antithetical to everything America once stood for. And all of this news arrives shortly Trump presided over the Republic’s wake on July 4th. We had a good run, but it’s probably time to stop pretending we don’t have a second King George that needs to be shown the door.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, dhs, free speech, gestapo, ice, office of professional responsibility, trump administration