Following recent wins by Minneapolis anti-ICE protests, ICE was forced to withdraw 700 agents from the city. The protests also led to the resignations of Greg Bovino and Trump toady Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security. Recent protests in Detroit have similarly shut down several ICE detention facilities. Direct mobilizations against ICE have been working.

Schroyer’s appointment marks the appearance of a new strategy. Instead of launching high-visibility, direct attacks on major cities, ICE is ramping up the weaponization of criminal indictments, such as those against the Minneapolis 15 and the Prairieland Nine, and focusing heavily on building partnerships with local and state police.

These so-called 287(g) agreements remain in place in large parts of the country, including states governed by Democrats, while ICE places traps at courthouses and targets immigrants, often with the complicity of local police and courthouse employees.

In announcing the appointment, newly-appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin heaped praise on Schroyer, highlighting his experience running large-scale racial profiling at state level under ICE’s Operation Guardian, in which every trooper in the Oklahoma Highway Patrol effectively became a federal deportation officer.

In one case, Schroyer’s program specifically targeted Asian commercial truck drivers. During a joint dragnet with ICE on Oklahoma’s Interstate 40, troopers executed 520 traffic stops resulting in 120 arrests. This single operation targeted commercial drivers from India, Uzbekistan, and China. Oklahoma governor J. Kevin Stitt issued a celebratory press release slamming other states’ “sanctuary” policies, warning the public of the dangers of foreign truckers. Colorado and Wyoming set up similar immigration dragnets.

The racial focus of Shroyer’s “Operation Guardian” became crystal clear when Oklahoma troopers arrested Yingchao Fan, a Chinese national, following a highway rollover accident. Although Fan faced no criminal charges or traffic citations and was legally permitted to be in the United States, he was nevertheless handcuffed and brought to Sequoyah county jail, where he was then transferred to a CoreCivic facility by ICE. Fan’s move to a private prison complicated his lawyer’s efforts to file a habeus petition and demonstrated how poorly state troopers were trained and how important they viewed supporting the expansion of ICE.

While federal officials frame such “sweeps” as public safety measures to keep the “worst of the worst off our streets,” they represent both politicized collaboration and financial opportunism.

After Congress threw obscene amounts of money at ICE, thanks to $191 billion from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and another $70 billion for ICE, it allowed the agency in turn to dangle wads of cash before local police agencies eager to hire more officers, pay for overtime and high-tech toys — and also cash in on bounties for immigration arrests.

Placing Lance Schroyer at the head of ICE is the clearest signal of the Trump regime’s tactical pivot in the face of massive public opposition, and a clear indicator of the hope ICE places in Schroyer’s ability to roll out localized, high-frequency, racially-based arrest machinery on a terrifying national scale.

Regardless of who is at the head of ICE, we need to fight to abolish the agency and shut down all detention centers across the country. This fight must be independent of both Republicans and Democrats, since both portray themselves as “tough on the border” and have voted to expand ICE and DHS.

We need to fight for full rights for immigrants — a fight that will require mobilizations in our workplaces, places of study, and unity with the immigrant rights and other social movements.

The post Why Lance Schroyer Is the New Head of ICE appeared first on Left Voice.

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