Former ICE chief explains how agency decides which cities to target

While some Democrats accused the Trump administration of politically targeting Democratic cities for enforcement, former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director John Sandweg shared his views on how the agency chooses the next city for operations.

Sandweg, who served as acting ICE director under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2014, told Fox News Digital during an interview that the existence of sanctuary policies housing illegal aliens plays a key role in determining cities to target. However, Sandweg said this was not entirely due to political reasons.

“The biggest factor would be the immigrant population and how significant the population is in that community. Secondly, is there something like an asylum policy that would increase the number of major targets, meaning that ICE wants to detain people who are not currently in jail or prison,” he explained. “These are the traditional factors that ICE would rely on when making decisions about where to conduct major surges.”

In 2025, the Trump administration sent ICE agents to cities such as Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago. These were all large cities with significant immigrant populations, and they all had asylum policies. Sandweg said he expects such pressures to be “just getting started.”

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“You want to go where the criminals are … and so you look at the data on where we can find the biggest bang for our buck,” he explained, adding: “Traditionally that would be in larger urban cities because they have higher population densities and that’s where you’re more likely to find your criminal populations.”

As for the role of sanctuary cities in ICE’s targeting process, Sandweg said “not all sanctuary policies are created equal.”

“ICE is really good at getting people into jails and prisons. There isn’t a single person in the United States today who is booked into a jail or prison that ICE doesn’t have visibility into,” he explained. “While we pay a lot of attention to such public confrontations between protesters and DHS agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere, there is a lot going on behind the scenes that the public does not understand, including the rounding up of people in federal, state, local and prisons and jails across the country.”

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Federal and Border Patrol agents are surrounded by residents as they plan to flee after an immigration raid on Atlantic Boulevard. Bell, California, June 19, 2025. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Although he said some sanctuaries are willing to cooperate with ICE to detain illegals on serious criminal charges such as violent crimes, some are not willing to do so.

Sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to comply with ICE’s requests to detain illegal aliens, called “detainees,” pose their own operational challenges, Sandweg said. This could potentially lead the agency to decide to send more representatives and resources to the region.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents review lists of names and hearing times and locations at the Federal Plaza courthouse before making an arrest on June 27, 2025, in New York City. ((Photo: BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images))

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“There are jurisdictions that have very restrictive asylum policies, where you sit there scratching your head and saying: These are the bad guys, why don’t they give us custody of this person in prison?” he said. “You’re going to find more targets in those jurisdictions because these are people, ICE would normally take them into custody in jail or prison.”