WASHINGTON — Wes Powers can see the Bishop Henry Whipple Building from his dining room window. In January, the Navy veteran left his house for the federal complex — the hub of the sweeping Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown in Minnesota — to join what began as a peaceful protest.
But Powers said the demonstration quickly escalated. At one point, an ICE agent fired a chemical agent at close range, covering him and others in the substance. When he tried to get the name and emergency contact information of a protester pinned to the ground by ICE agents, agents tackled him, knelt on his head, placed him in handcuffs and took him into custody, he said.
Powers, a U.S. citizen, said he was held in a cell where chemical irritants lingered in the air. He recalled ICE agents taking photos of him on their personal phones and photographing the IDs of other detained citizens. He said he was denied privacy when speaking with his lawyers and was never asked about his citizenship status while he was detained. Nine hours later, he said, he was released without charges.
“I feel frozen, scared and angry,” Powers said. “But this is not just my story.”
The Department of Homeland Security has arrested more than 4,000 people in Minnesota since the start of Operation Metro Surge, the largest federal immigration enforcement operation in U.S. history. Powers is just one of the hundreds of U.S. citizens who immigration agents have taken into custody and released without charges since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. In most of these cases, DHS has no video documentation of the detainment.
Now, as Congress debates how to rein in the agency, Democrats say incidents like Powers’ highlight a key problem: Many encounters between immigration agents and civilians happen without an official record. Lawmakers have stood by a list of 10 reforms they want Homeland Security to implement before voting to fund the agency and end its month-long partial shutdown, which has left more than 100,000 federal employees working without pay, according to the White House.
Despite the shutdown, Homeland Security has continued paying much of its roughly 260,000-person workforce using funds from last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated more than $190 billion to the agency, including roughly $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for Customs and Border Protection.
Congressional Republicans have largely opposed cutting department funds. But one proposal has drawn rare bipartisan interest: requiring agents to wear body cameras. A recent funding proposal included $20 million to equip ICE and CBP officers with body-worn cameras, a provision Republicans left intact even as negotiations over the broader DHS budget stalled.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the beginning of February started requiring every DHS officer on the ground in Minnesota to wear body cameras.
Supporters say the cameras could provide a record of encounters between agents and civilians. Some Democrats don’t think the reform is enough.
“DHS, ICE and CBP need to be dismantled,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said after exiting a March 4 hearing in which she questioned Noem. “That is why I have refused to give another cent to these agencies without significant reform.”
Jayapal added that she doesn’t think requiring immigration agents to wear body cameras alone will stop them from “violating people’s rights.”
Evidence mixed
Research on police body cameras suggests the devices may not be a cure-all. Studies have found mixed evidence that cameras reduce misconduct, raising questions about whether the technology would meaningfully change how federal immigration agents operate in the field.
Scot Haug, a retired Idaho chief of police who helped lead the implementation of body-worn cameras within his agency in 2008, said he focused his 32-year career in law enforcement on using technology to improve service and transparency.
“Every law enforcement officer — no matter if they’re federal, state or local — should be wearing a body-worn camera,” Haug said.
He noted that cameras often help investigators reconstruct encounters between officers and civilians and can provide evidence that aids both criminal cases and internal reviews. Departments that adopted the technology have also seen fewer complaints against officers and more training material for recruits, he said.
But Haug added that cameras themselves can’t root out larger issues in how law enforcement officials interact with the community.
“Cameras provide a camera’s perspective,” Haug said. “Just because an officer has a body-worn camera on doesn’t provide the whole context of what’s going on.”
When body-worn cameras were first introduced to police departments in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Haug said many officers were skeptical about the technology. Some worried the devices would be used primarily to discipline them or second-guess split-second decisions made in the field. But several years after their implementation, he said, many officers began to see the cameras as a form of protection.
Michael White, a former Pennsylvania police officer who now teaches at the Arizona State University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said his research has produced similar findings. By the mid-to-late 2010s, body-worn cameras had become an “almost routine” part of local policing.
Body-worn cameras protect officers just as much as the civilians they interact with, White said. Recordings can hold law enforcement accountable, but they can also protect against unfounded claims of misconduct.
“You’d be hard pressed to go anywhere in the country and find large numbers of officers who are opposed to body-worn cameras,” White said. “Officers who have them don’t want to give them up, and officers who don’t have them want them.”
Roughly 80% of local police departments require their officers to wear body cameras today. In 2022, President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring federal law enforcement officers to do the same. When Trump took office last year, he removed the requirement.
The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Cameras do not equal culture change
In White’s view, body-worn cameras would offer the same benefits for federal immigration agents as they do for local police.
But White warned against relying on cameras to resolve systemic issues he sees within DHS. He said the technology is a “very good first start,” but not enough to produce the level of reform sought by Democratic lawmakers and a majority of Americans who think ICE’s tactics have gone too far.
“Body-worn cameras are a tool. That’s it,” White said. “It’s relatively easy to buy cameras and to have officers wearing cameras, but if you expect to change behavior, you’re going to need a lot more than just the cameras.”
Both White and Haug said the rise of smartphones and social media has already transformed how encounters between law enforcement agents and civilians are documented. Cell phone videos of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota rapidly fueled public outrage over ICE’s actions in recent months. While videos captured by bystanders often shape public perception of controversial incidents, they said body-worn cameras are necessary to provide critical context by showing events from the officer’s perspective.
Powers said he is skeptical that requiring ICE agents to wear cameras would meaningfully change how they behave in the field. He said he doesn’t think he would have been treated any differently during his nine-hour detention if the agents had cameras on them.
If civilians are already documenting confrontations with law enforcement and misconduct still occurs, he said, adding another camera may not make much difference.
“We’re filming them, and they’re still beating people up in the streets,” Powers said. “It doesn’t matter if they have a camera or not. I don’t think their behavior is going to change.”
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