ICE and the Plenary Power Problem
Why an extralegal enforcement regime necessarily results in “Minnesota” outcomes
An Eccentric Econ Policy Brief
A federal tactical officer can shoot someone down on a Minneapolis street—twice in under a month—and the city that absorbs the trauma can’t hire him, discipline him, or fire him. That’s not just tragic—it’s a structural flaw in our system. It’s the predictable outcome of a constitutional design failure.
When immigration enforcement is built not on enumerated constitutional powers, but on an exception—“plenary power” rooted in vague appeals to national sovereignty—you end up with a domestic security force embedded in communities, yet structurally beyond their control. A line item in a federal budget becomes a militarized machine. Over time, “Minnesota” doesn’t feel like an aberration. It feels like the rule.
Executive Summary
ICE—technically a statutory agency—functions through a legal loophole. Courts have treated its interior enforcement powers as “plenary,” granting extreme deference with little oversight. But exception zones like this don’t stay theoretical. They become policy incentives: pressure to produce numbers, political insulation, routine scripts to justify lethal force, and limited accountability.
Case in point: Minneapolis, January 2026
A U.S. citizen and ICU nurse named Alex Pretti was fatally shot by a Border Patrol agent during an immigration enforcement operation. His death triggered mass protests and multiple investigations. But the pattern didn’t begin or end with him. This wasn’t a mistake—it was the system working as designed.
Abolition, not reform
The fix isn’t “reform.” The fix is dismantling and rebuilding from scratch. ICE, as it currently operates, is engineered to produce harm.
Congress can create agencies. But ICE shows what happens when that power is grafted onto a constitutional exception, handed military-style tools, a post-9/11 mandate, and a ballooning budget. Immigration morphs from an administrative issue into a national security threat—one removed from local democratic accountability.
We normalize power that exists inside cities but sits outside their control. That’s a recipe for democratic decay.
ICE’s legal gray zone
The Constitution gives Congress power to establish a “uniform rule of naturalization.”
It does not clearly authorize sweeping federal policing of immigration inside U.S. borders.
Courts have filled in the gap using broad appeals to sovereignty and foreign relations.
This vague doctrine became ICE’s legal foundation—and enforcement free-for-all.
ICE wasn’t designed as a villain. It was post-9/11 bureaucracy—created to make immigration an issue of homeland security. Tactical gear, field operations, and law enforcement optics followed. And then came the incentives: numbers-based performance metrics.
Arrests. Detainers. Removals.
Metrics that turned policy into performance art—and people into data points.
Officers who “take initiative” are rewarded. Officers who admit fault? Punished. The internal logic doesn’t reward fairness. It rewards visible action.
The playbook: Scripted justification, no accountability
Operating in a legal exception zone, ICE learns the script:
“He reached.”
“The vehicle was used as a weapon.”
“It was a split-second decision.”
These might be true. But more importantly, they’re useful—they shift the burden of proof to the public. Meanwhile, ICE controls the evidence, the timing, and the narrative.
The pattern repeats:
Tactical action
Official narrative
Delayed facts
No local power to intervene
That’s not an accident. It’s institutional design.
You don’t need a conspiracy—just incentives
Put together:
A constitutional exception
Performance-driven enforcement
Tactical discretion in ambiguous situations
…and you get “Minnesota” outcomes. Not as rare accidents—but as systemic outputs.
Even under the most deferential Supreme Court interpretations, due process still applies once someone is inside the U.S. ICE’s model—raid first, document later—makes that impossible.
ICE’s enforcement approach undermines the legal floor, not just the ceiling (See Yamataya v. Fisher (1903); and for the detention boundary, Zadvydas v. Davis (2001)). Surprise raids, thin records, and delayed disclosures make a mockery of fair process.
Minnesota wasn’t the exception. It was the model in action.
What needs to change now
If abolition is politically delayed, we need constitutional triage. The goal isn’t better optics—it’s reducing structural harm.
Immediate steps:
Require judicial warrants for home entry, unless there’s true exigency
Automatic independent investigations after any use-of-force death
Fixed disclosure timelines so communities aren’t kept in the dark
Hard deadlines for detention reviews to prevent punishment by process
Ban performance metrics based on arrest or removal numbers
Publish impact-focused data: average detention time, time to hearing, time to disclosure
Long-term: Abolish ICE as constituted
This doesn’t mean abandoning immigration enforcement. It means replacing ICE’s militarized, exception-based structure with a civil-compliance system governed by administrative rules and due process.
Replace raid-first tactics with paper-first compliance
Make notice, documentation, and counsel access the default
Require judicial oversight for any coercive enforcement
There’s already a white paper detailing the full spec and measurement model for this replacement.
We don’t need better slogans.
We need structural change.
– Tarnell Brown
The killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis wasn’t a “one bad apple” tragedy. It was the predictable output of an agency designed as a domestic exception zone—legally, politically, and operationally. This white paper is the long‑form architecture behind my recent posts on ICE, interior enforcement, and abolition‑first reform. It treats ICE not as a moral Rorschach test but as an institutional technology: what powers it claims, what information it hides, what incentives its budget creates, and why the tail‑risk violence we’re seeing is baked into the design. Download it if you want to see what “abolish ICE” looks like when you spell out the constitutional gap, the political‑economy mechanism, and an implementable replacement built on paper‑first compliance, custody as last resort, and hard disclosure clocks.
Key takeaways
CE sits inside a manufactured “plenary” exception zone where ordinary constitutional limits are weakened, and that exception has migrated from border control to interior policing.
Once you give an interior police agency broad exception powers and fund it on raid‑first performance metrics, you should expect opaque operations, rights violations, and rare but catastrophic tail‑risk incidents—not as accidents, but as outputs.
The paper models this as the interaction of three levers: exception strength (E), accountability (A), and operational intensity (i); high E, low A, and high i reliably push the system toward high‑conflict encounters like Minneapolis.
An abolition‑first replacement architecture is both possible and concrete: dissolve ICE as constituted, move civil functions into a non‑police compliance service, and hard‑code paper‑first enforcement, custody clocks, disclosure clocks, and metrics that reward error correction and harm reduction instead of arrest counts.