Subject: Reinventing ICE
While most people spent the budget fight fixated on health care policy, I suspect that in a year we will consider this legislation to be the moment that Trump created his own internal security apparatus: His goal is to have ICE supplant the FBI in national law enforcement.

This is a big deal. Because the FBI is a professionalized organization with strict standards and a well-defined mission while ICE is more or less a national brute squad.

The Trump administration realized that corrupting the FBI would be a tall order. So while they’re certainly trying to do that, they put most of their chips on a different number: Reinventing ICE as the primary instrument of internal state power.

Jonathan Last