A former FBI counterintelligence agent argues that ICE’s masked operations, deadly force and erosion of community trust violate the basic legal standards that define legitimate law enforcement in a democracy.
This piece is part of an ongoing series, “Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care.” The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility.
ICE is the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history—its budget larger than the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service and Bureau of Prisons combined. Its agents wear masks, drive unmarked vehicles and operate with an impunity that has drawn comparisons to secret police forces around the world. Multiple federal courts have refused to trust the agency’s own statements of fact. And in Minneapolis, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in front of their neighbors’ cameras.
Asha Rangappa has seen this movie before—just never in America.
A former FBI special agent who spent years in the bureau’s New York division, specializing in counterintelligence, Rangappa was trained to monitor threats to America. Her job required surgical precision, behavioral psychology, extraordinary patience and, above all, trust.
“The bread and butter of your work as a law enforcement agent is that you need the community’s help,” she told me. “You actually can’t do your job without it.”
Now a senior lecturer at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs—where she teaches national security law, Russian information warfare and leadership ethics—and the author of The Freedom Academy, a Substack with almost 100,000 subscribers, Rangappa hasn’t stepped back from the work. She’s translated it into a different arena, becoming one of the most incisive voices in national security analysis.
But when I sat down with her for this conversation, I wasn’t interested in the punditry. I wanted to understand the training for all Homeland Security units—and why everything ICE is doing violates it.
From Bangalore to Baltimore to the Bureau
Rangappa was born in Baltimore to South Indian parents from Bangalore who immigrated in 1970, part of the wave of Indian doctors recruited during Vietnam to fill a physician shortage. The family moved to Hampton, Va., when she was 4.
She was the only Indian kid in her school for most of her childhood. “Probably like a lot of other Indian kids in the early ’80s, my parents pretty much identified all of the Indians within a two-hour radius,” she said, laughing. “That was their community.”
But Rangappa was never the compliant daughter (a common theme I’m noticing from most of the women I’m interviewing). She has an older sister who filled that role. She was the rebellious one—outspoken, assertive, dark-skinned in a culture that noticed.
“It was like two strikes against me because I was dark,” she recalled. “They would always point that out. And I was too assertive. So it was like, ‘Well, she’s never going to get married. But she’d make a good lawyer.’”
She laughed about it, but the seed had been planted. Whether by internalization or instinct, Rangappa adopted the law as her path early. She was drawn to right and wrong, to prosecution, to the idea that rules meant something. She applied to Princeton, got in, did a Fulbright in Bogotá, Colombia—over her grandfather’s dissent—then went on to Yale Law School.
The FBI was never part of the original plan. It came almost accidentally. During a summer internship at a U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore, she took a tour of the FBI Academy. The tour guide mentioned that under J. Edgar Hoover, agents had always been lawyers or accountants. Something clicked.
“I was like, ‘Well, I’ll be an FBI agent, kick down doors, and then move into a U.S. Attorney’s office.’” She applied in 1999, but the bureau wasn’t hiring. She went on to a federal clerkship. Then 9/11 happened.
“They were hiring thousands of agents and looking for people with critical skills. Foreign languages being one of them.” Rangappa spoke fluent Spanish from her time in Colombia. She also spoke Kannada, her parents’ native language—though the intelligence community didn’t have anyone who spoke it to test her. “So they just kind of took my word for it,” she said.
So in 2001 she joined Quantico and became one of the first Indian American women to serve as an FBI special agent. We laughed about the fact that this was more than a decade before Priyanka Chopra made it look glamorous on ABC’s Quantico.
The Non-Negotiables: What Every Federal Agent Is Trained to Do
What struck me most about Rangappa’s description of her training wasn’t what was specific to counterintelligence. It was what was universal. The standards that applied to her also applied to every law enforcement officer operating under the Department of Homeland Security—including ICE.
“When I would approach someone, the first thing I did was take out my credentials and say, ‘I’m Rangappa, I’m with the FBI,’” she told me. “That’s what you do.”
Federal law requires it.
Under 8 CFR 287.8, the regulation governing immigration enforcement activities, officers must identify themselves as authorized to execute an arrest and state the reason for that arrest. They must obtain warrants, except in narrow circumstances where a person is likely to flee.
DHS’ own Use of Force Policy—updated in 2023 to align with Department of Justice standards—mandates de-escalation before force is used, prohibits excessive force outright, and requires that any use of deadly force meet the constitutional “reasonableness” standard established by the Supreme Court.
These aren’t aspirational guidelines. They are legal requirements that apply to every DHS law enforcement officer in the country—all 80,000 of them.
“In a democracy, in the United States, we’ve never had this before,” Rangappa said. “Law enforcement isn’t masked. You’re never unidentified. You issue warnings. You make it clear what you want people to do.”
I asked her what she sees when she watches footage of current ICE operations. She didn’t offer a comparison to her counterintelligence days. She offered something more damning: a list of violations of the agency’s own rules.
- Masked agents with no visible identification.
- No warrants presented.
- No de-escalation attempted.
- Rubber bullets and tear gas deployed against peaceful observers—in direct defiance of a federal court order.
- A woman shot and killed while driving away, by an agent who, according to video from multiple angles, was positioned to the side of her vehicle with her wheels turned away from him.
- A nurse—phone in one hand, the other raised in the air—pepper-sprayed, tackled and shot by an agent approximately 10 times in five seconds.
“To even say they’re applying any law enforcement approach at all is giving them too much credit,” she said. “This is a very deliberate attempt to terrorize. That’s the point.”
What the Courts Are Saying
But what about those who believe ICE is simply protecting communities? What about the person on the fence, hearing reassurances about targeting “the worst of the worst”? I pressed Rangappa on what evidence would be most persuasive.
She pointed to the courts.
Rangappa explained a judicial concept called the “presumption of regularity”—the idea that when the government states a conclusion, courts give them a presumption that the conclusion came from a normal, lawful, deliberative process. It’s a form of institutional trust, built over decades.
“What we’re seeing in all of these contexts is that judges are repeatedly—and these are multiple different courts, not just one—saying, ‘We don’t trust the government. We don’t trust what you’re saying,’” she told me. “Or, ‘You’re actually lying. You’re not entitled to the presumption of regularity.’”
Many of these judges, she noted, were appointed by conservative presidents. This is not partisan grievance. This is the judiciary—the last guardrail—waving red flags.
Destroying Trust Is ICE’s Strategy
And yet, even setting aside the courts, ICE’s approach fails on its own terms.
“If you’re saying the goal is to find people who are dangerous and here illegally, that’s a surgical operation about a limited group of people,” she said. “Everybody else can be potentially helpful to that effort. That’s why trust is important.”
You don’t find the most dangerous people by driving entire neighborhoods into silence. You find them by earning the cooperation of the people who know where they are. Every community that goes quiet is a community that stops talking—not just to ICE, but to all law enforcement. The collateral damage isn’t just moral. It’s operational.
But Rangappa doesn’t believe the stated mission is the real one. Community trust, she argued, was never the objective. Destroying it was. “They are following a model of secret police organizations around the world,” she said. “Those organizations also rely on the community—but they rely on the community to rat out each other.”
She drew parallels to Latin American regimes that rooted out “communists and socialists” through neighbor-on-neighbor surveillance. Reports have surfaced of ICE agents going to the homes of white residents and asking which houses their Asian neighbors live in. When that solidarity fails—when people refuse to turn on each other—everyone becomes the enemy.
“The people who aren’t playing along are themselves traitors,” Rangappa said. “That’s how it escalates.”
The Bravest Thing You Can Do Right Now
I wanted Rangappa to give me a playbook. Tell me what happens next. Tell me there’s a mechanism—legal, political, constitutional—that will stop this.
She was honest. “We’re in a very unprecedented situation,” she said.
Congress could defund ICE or add requirements, but the political will hasn’t materialized. The courts can issue orders, but they have no independent enforcement power. “They’re still doing it,” she said.
What’s left, she argued, is the political cost—the moment when the behavior becomes so viscerally, undeniably unacceptable that it shifts public opinion. She invoked Vietnam, when the tide turned not because of policy debates but because Americans started watching bodies come home on television.
“Think about it,” she said. “If you had just heard a report that a woman driving a car had been shot by ICE—but you didn’t have the video from five different angles playing on social media—that might have been a blip. It might have been more easily spun.”
She cited research suggesting that toppling authoritarian movements requires roughly 3.5 percent of the population to mobilize. That’s the tipping point. And it’s precisely why the current regime is working so aggressively to suppress observers, journalists and anyone who hits record.
“Probably the most dangerous thing people are doing right now,” she said, “is just documenting what is happening in front of them. The mere act of hitting record is the bravest thing you could do right now.”
The Danger of Dampened Empathy
As someone who is politically active and deeply embedded in advocacy—through this series, through my work on the board of the Center for Reproductive Rights, through years of organizing—I told Rangappa that I see the same fatigue everywhere. People who care, who showed up in 2016, who marched and donated and signed, now telling me they just don’t want to hear about it anymore.
Rangappa named it precisely.“A lot of ways that people check out is they dampen their empathetic response,” she said. “They find ways of rationalizing things so that they don’t have to feel any guilt or shame or empathy for the people who are being harmed.”
This resonated deeply. In my own book, I write about how Indian American women are conditioned to present themselves in particular ways—to compartmentalize, to manage discomfort, to defer. Undoing those patterns requires active, conscious work. Rangappa agreed.
“If there was a plan to engage in ethnic cleansing in Springfield, Ohio, you call it that,” she said, referencing a court’s restraining order on what she described as exactly that. “Forcing people to engage with the reality of it—as opposed to whatever rationalized version they’re telling themselves—that’s where we play a role.”
She had recently given a talk with historian Timothy Snyder, the author of On Tyranny, who laid out the different ways people can engage: documenting, witnessing, using whatever leverage they have in their corner of the world. For Rangappa, that means her platform—her Substack, her Yale classroom, her media appearances. For me, it means this series.
“I have to use it,” she said of her platform. “And I’m trying to use it to bring in people who can be examples. People who have faced the fear of whatever sacrifice they’ll make—and did it anyway.”
Calling It What It Is
Before we ended, Rangappa told me something that has stayed with me. She described being at Yale the week before, facing a conservative student who kept insisting that people were “here illegally” and therefore deserved whatever consequences came. She didn’t equivocate.
“There was a person who was shot. There is a standard for the use of deadly force. And that standard was not met,” she told him.
She sees a growing pressure, even on credentialed experts like herself, to both-sides every issue—to leave room, to hedge, to treat questions of basic human rights as matters of debate.
“There comes a point where it’s not a debatable issue anymore,” she said.
Asha Rangappa was trained to monitor actual threats to national security. That work required patience, nuance, legal rigor and community trust. Everything she learned in the FBI tells her that what is happening now is not law enforcement. It is not protection. It is not safety.
It is, she says plainly, terror.
If 3.5 percent is what it takes to topple an authoritarian movement, we’re not far off. But the gap isn’t millions of strangers. It’s the people you know who’ve gone quiet. The ones who stopped watching the news because it’s easier not to know.
Close that gap. Record. Talk. Show up. Make it impossible for the people in your life to look away—because that’s exactly what they’re counting on.
Great Job Jaime Patel & the Team @ Ms. Magazine for sharing this story.
