To many progressives, ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is synonymous with President Donald Trump’s brutal and cruel immigration regime.

But to hardliners in the Trump administration bent on carrying out mass deportation, ICE has actually been something of a disappointment.

So they’re increasingly turning to another agency that they view as willing to go faster and harder: the Border Patrol.

Border Patrol agents have already played a major role in the administration’s highly visible and controversial operations in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago over the summer and fall, patrolling residential areas in militarized fashion, and using tactics like tear gas. “A majority of the viral videos you see online are Border Patrol agents,” rather than ICE agents, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin posted on X.

Administration hardliners evidently like what they’ve seen. In a late October “purge,” several leaders of ICE field offices were removed from their posts, with some to be replaced by Border Patrol officials instead.

Some ICE officials, and others sympathetic to their perspective, aren’t thrilled about this, and their anonymously-sourced grievances have spilled out in the press. “Since Border Patrol came to LA in June, we’ve lost our focus, going too hard, too fast, with limited prioritization,” one official complained to Fox News. Another said that “ICE is arresting criminal aliens,” while Border Patrol is “hitting Home Depots and car washes.”

Rise of the cowboys

Behind the tension is a fundamental difference in the two agencies’ approaches — one that has major implications for what will unfold in cities going forward.

The typical ICE approach is to have some idea of who is being targeted in advance of an enforcement operation — say, particular names, or a workplace. They get specific information that someone is in the country illegally, or that a workplace is employing people illegally, and then they try to make arrests.

By contrast, the approach of the Border Patrol — stemming........

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