Second of two stories looking at the role of ICE in the changing landscape of immigration enforcement.
KANSAS CITY, Missouri ‒ Inside an ICE headquarters in a suburban office park hangs a printed text-message that immigration officers feel is aimed at them: "Get a gun and shoot them in the streets."
It's tacked on a cubicle wall that dozens of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pass by daily. The screenshot message also declares, "This is a war."
In response, an ICE agent wrote on the printout in all caps: "BE VIGILANT!!"
For ICE Supervisory Detention and Deportation Officer Keone Feliciano, the note is an unavoidable reminder of the danger he and his colleagues face amidst rapidly increasing anger over the Trump administration's aggressive approach to immigration enforcement.
Behind the scenes of an ICE immigration arrest
Across the country, Feliciano and other longtime ICE officers accustomed to operating below the radar have been thrust into the spotlight by Trump's orders to conduct the largest mass deportation in history.
For many, it's an uncomfortable position as they work to balance their self-image as patriotic, law-and-order Americans with the perception that they have suddenly become, in the words of one ICE officer, "the bad guys."
In response to Trump's orders, the deployment of masked federal agents across American communities has spawned sometimes violent backlash including shootings, attacks on ICE facilities and vehicle rammings
Protesters, the vast majority peaceful, say agents are crossing dangerous lines for American society, smashing car windows, chasing workers through restaurants and targeting people for detention seemingly at random.
To report on the perspective of both sides, USA TODAY journalists spent several days this November in Kansas City, accompanying ICE officers as they detained suspects, collected detainees from local jails, and loaded others onto a charter flight to Texas for eventual deportation.
We also spoke with Kansas City-area migrant advocates and local elected officials who say the expanded immigration enforcement is tearing communities apart, turning neighbor against neighbor and sparking heated confrontations over the tactics now being deployed.
On a cool November morning, Feliciano, an 11-year veteran of the department, raced his Dodge truck through the pre-dawn darkness to join his team as they arrested a previously deported Venezuelan man convicted of sex crimes.
Feliciano's white pickup was fresh from the repair shop after protesters tailed and rammed him on a busy street in Chicago amidst the controversial Operation Midway Blitz, during which Border Patrol agents fired tear gas at protesters after being confronted by angry crowds.
He helped chain and load the Venezuelan man into the back of an unmarked ICE vehicle. Then, Feliciano urged his officers to get off the streets quickly.
"The longer we're out here, the more attention it's going to draw," he said. "Some people just like to drive by and be looky-loos, but some people could have hostile intentions. We just want to keep everybody safe and get out of here."
More:Exclusive: A father and his three kids work for ICE. Why they do it.
'Pendulum swings' of enforcement strategies
Feliciano, a Navy veteran and former local police officer, said the pendulum swings between different presidential administrations have sometimes interfered with the reason he got into immigration enforcement: to remove criminals from American communities.
He said he's particularly proud whenever his team can deport convicted sex offenders, who he believes pose a significant public risk even after serving a criminal sentence.
There was a time under PresidentJoe Biden, when, "if we weren't able to immediately effect a removal, we were being ordered to just release them," Feliciano said. "Which is why we have now such a huge backlog of aliens just floating in the country with pending cases that have gone nowhere.
"Now we have an administration that's saying, 'Stop releasing them. Put them back in custody,'" he said.
The Venezuelan man Feliciano's team arrested in November had previously been deported from the United States following a statutory rape conviction. He reentered illegally; when he got arrested, he requested asylum, saying he feared returning to Venezuela.
A judge ruled the man could be deported to a third country like Mexico, ordered him fitted with a GPS tracker and released him back into the community, according to ICE officials. Re-entry after deportation is a felony, but making an asylum claim, especially during the Biden years, could qualify some people to remain free while their cases were pending.
Feliciano's team decided to detain the man after his GPS tracker detected tampering. It could have been a false alarm but potentially indicated the man had tried to remove it.
After staking out the man's house for several days, the team waited until he left for work early one morning before stopping his Honda Pilot near an empty intersection, blocking him in with multiple vehicles. Agents prefer traffic stops to entering homes for safety reasons.
The man surrendered immediately and was shackled. At his request, an officer drove his car back to his nearby house.
Growing tensions between ICE and advocates
Back at the ICE office in Kansas City, longtime officers sit next to fresh-faced recruits brought on under Trump's rapid agency expansion. Under the "One Big Beautiful Bill" passed by Congress this summer, federal immigration agencies have been ordered to hire 18,500 new agents and support staff – roughly doubling the force.
Nationally, these new federal agents, often from Customs and Border Protection, have orders to pursue undocumented immigrants whether they have criminal convictions or not.
Like other hardline immigration enforcers, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino has suggested that prior presidential administrations broke faith with the American public by failing to properly restrict illegal immigration.
"We will not allow criminal illegal aliens to take over American communities. We will continue to track down illegal aliens in Los Angeles, Chicago, or any other city we choose," Bovino said in a Nov. 15social media post. "That is the way THIS team operates."
This more combative approach took shape in Kansas City in late July when ICE officers swarmed into two popular Mexican restaurants in the western and southern suburbs, detaining about a dozen workers.
ICE had a criminal federal search warrant, signed by a judge, to search the premises as part of an ongoing investigation, officials said. Under the Trump administration priorities, ICE officials say they are under orders to question suspected undocumented immigrants whenever they encounter them.
As the raids unfolded, dozens of migrant-rights activists and community members surrounded the restaurants, screaming at federal agents and officers and damaging one of their vehicles. While protesters portrayed the raids as unwarranted and immoral, ICE officials consider the protests ill-informed activism.
ICE has still not explained specifically what officers were looking for during the raids, but note the restaurants had previously been under investigation for wage theft during the Biden administration. Activists say ICE's refusal to explain why the two restaurants were targeted for immigration enforcement is contributing to a lack of trust.
"We are feeling scared and worried but in a strange way we feel more empowered to speak up for our community. We feel this commitment to defend our people," said Melanie Arroyo, a member of the suburban Lenexa City Council, across the state line in Kansas.
Around Kansas City, community activists are handing out fliers advising people of their constitutional rights, including their right to remain silent, to not open the door to agents without seeing a warrant, and to film interactions from a safe distance.
The "pendulum swings" in immigration enforcement are spilling into local politics, too.
Arroyo's own citizenship was briefly investigated by state and local police after one of her constituents misunderstood legislative testimony she had given.
At first she thought it was amusing that someone had questioned her citizenship – until she realized neighbors were demanding to see her papers although she was an American citizen.
"This is a scary pattern and people need to wake up and recognize that we can't just be compliant. Because this is not OK," Arroyo said.
Accountability has deteriorated amidst the hiring spree and tougher enforcement environment, said Genevra Alberti, a longtime Kansas City immigration attorney. In recent months she's found the Kansas City ICE office less responsive to her inquiries about her clients and detention officers less cooperative when it comes to her concerns about overcrowded cells or health issues.
"There have always been officers here who I could tell enjoyed what they were doing, and for them, this is great," she said. "They get to do what they've always wanted to do."
Kansas state Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Democrat who represents suburban Kansas City, said the new harsher approach is rupturing the trust built between local police and immigrant communities, who have long been encouraged to report crimes against them even if they're living illegally in the United States.
"It has come to the point where no one is trusting each other. People are not out in the community like they normally would be. That means they're not shopping. They're not going to school. It's affecting our entire way of life because you don't know who to trust. Can you trust your neighbor?" Ruiz said.
'We're just enforcing the laws as written'
Feliciano and his team say they're using appropriate levels of force at a time when an increasing number of immigrants know that getting detained means they'll get deported.
Under past presidential administrations, undocumented immigrants were often allowed to remain free on bond or on GPS monitoring while their cases played out.
But the Trump White House has essentially ordered detention without bond until their case is decided for anyone livingwithout legal status in the United States. Others are being deported to third countries.
In the face of this shift, immigrants are feeling more desperate and are more likely to resist arrest, Feliciano said ‒ raising the danger for everyone involved.
"The detention space hasn't changed much but we're able to get people through the system faster," Feliciano said."We're getting people out of the country very, very quickly."
That means undocumented immigrants stopped for routine traffic violations are now increasingly running away or refusing to cooperate with local police or ICE agents.
For longtime agents like Feliciano, this shift means being prepared for violence both from the person they're stopping and from community members angered by the White House orders. Hence the printout tacked to the cubicle wall.
Feliciano said the threat of violence from community members won't dissuade his Kansas City team from following their orders. He takes pride in the work his agents do targeting criminal offenders through surveillance and documentation.
Later in the week as he navigated his pickup to the Kansas City airport to oversee a deportation flight, Feliciano listed off all the ways detainees have their chance to plead their case in court, appeal the decisions and request asylum.
He said ICE officers like him are going to keep arresting people who pose a danger to the public, working as ordered by the White House, despite the concerns of what he called "social justice warriors" protesting in Chicago and other cities.
On the airport tarmac, Feliciano watched as members of his team frisked and chained detainees before they were loaded onto a charter flight headed to a centralized deportation facility in Texas. His phone rang; one of his other officers was calling to discuss details of ongoing surveillance for their next targeted arrest.
"We're not the feelings police. We're the law police," he said. "And we're just enforcing the laws as they're written."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:ICE operations and an inside look amid mass deportation push
