Obama’s former ICE director says Trump admin acting like ‘police state’
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Former Obama ICE Director Sarah Saldaña condemned President Donald Trump’s ICE enforcement on Friday, arguing it was comparable to a police state.
Amid Trump’s push to make good on his campaign promise of mass deportations, many commentators recalled his predecessor, Barack Obama, nicknamed “Deporter in Chief” during his presidency. While some have argued that Obama’s deportation was met with less pushback from local leaders at a time when American politics was relatively more moderate, one official argued that Trump’s deportation was an outlier.
CNN played a clip of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem talking about targeted enforcement of deportation efforts that not only focus on specific individuals, but also requesting identification verification from people around them, saying it’s a common practice.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Saldaña: ”What do you think? Is it standard practice for ICE agents to ask someone to prove their identity and show their citizenship documents when asked if they are a citizen?”
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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks at a news conference at One World Trade Center in New York City on January 8, 2026, to discuss ongoing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations as part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policy. (David ‘Dee’ Delgado/Reuters)
Saldaña responded: “I know a little bit about this, and that’s not the practice. It’s not part of the protocol. Of course, as just reported, the Obama administration’s goal in arrests and removals was to make society safer. So we weren’t scouring neighborhoods and metropolitan areas looking for people who might be in the country without permission.”
“I always object to the term ‘raid’ because my familiarity with the process and what we needed was targeted operations,” he continued. “I heard the secretary there say that all of his operations were targeted. I think it’s pretty clear that that’s not the case, and requiring American citizens to show identification is a huge step forward and should give us all pause.”
Saldaña said this policy was “close to a police state.”
“I have concerns that the United States’ decision last year in the Vasquez Perdomo case opens the door to this issue of identification, which has always been necessary,” Saldaña added. “Police officers may ask you to prove your identity, but that is very different from proving that you are a citizen of the United States, and the documents you carry will generally not reflect that. So this imposes a liability and comes very close to violating the civil rights of the ordinary citizen.”
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A federal law enforcement agent during a raid outside a home in South Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
He argued that involving thousands of agents in such sweeps was an overreaction to the problem at hand. Currently, many agents face crowds of agitators and are forced to perform crowd control when carrying out immigration raids.
“Florida and Texas have much larger immigrant communities than the state of Minnesota. Again, the goal must be to ensure public safety, and this type of threatening presence cannot achieve that,” Saldaña said. he said.
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Protesters gather outside City Hall in Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026, for a demonstration against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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