You have never been accosted by police and assumed to be a criminal, especially in a country foreign to where you live? I think this experience would shed light on your question.
ICE is different from other police agencies. The "punishment" is deportation, which ICE insists requires no time in court in front of a judge to mete out this "punishment". And as we have seen with guy sent to the El Salvador gulag, "deportation" is not simply getting put on a plane back home. It means getting sent to a foreign prison or war zone (South Sudan).
So, you have a small risk of a catastrophic outcome when interacting with ICE. And you will have no recourse in court because ICE intends to make you disappear first. And for many Americans, this whole situation is an affront to American way of life (no due process, very nazi like behavior with the Florida concentration camp).
Lastly, the US is different from other countries because the states are partially sovereign. State law and federal law don't generally intersect and state/local police have no duty to enforce federal law. They aren't supposed to enforce federal law either. In other countries, there is typically a national police agency all police operate under and provincial governments operate under national law.
I have been checked like that as I travel a lot through the Europe. And atleast in my case I just showed them my ID, they ran it through the database and that was the end of it. It sucked, but it was a one-off, so I shrugged it off.
I would argue that deportation is not really a punishment. It is just ejecting you from a place you should not be in the first place - basically a state-operated bouncers. From the perspective of the citizen, I'd want people like that out - for my sake, and their. Because they will create gray economy & not pay taxes. And not only that - since they are in the grey zone of the economy, the people who will employ them can 1) really abuse them as they have no legal/work protections and 2) those companies can get quite a big advantage over other as they have much lower labor costs. Which in turn hurts companies that are employing legal workers, which in turn hurts tax revenue.
Regarding being sent to the active war zones - I always thought that US do have asylums for people esaping from war etc? Meaning those people should be able to get some permit to stay & therefore should not be affected by ICE at all - or is this not a thing in the US? For some reason I thought that this is a part of some kind of international treaty or something, that you cannot deport people who are escaping from war.
Regarding the El Salvador, I read quite a lot about CECOT and about (recent) history of El Salvador and to be frank, I totaly get why the people in El Salvador chose to do what they did. The amount of atrocities that local gangs were commiting was incredible and given the sheer amount of the gang members and their violence, there is really nothing "human" you can do. Granted, I have not visited El Salvador, so my information may not be 100% correct, but right now I shed no tears for the gang members in their gulags. We really are not talking about people that you can reason with.
I knew US states were partially sovereign, but I always thought that federal laws are applied country wide & are enforced like that on all levels. And the local laws are on top of those. I did not know that the local police does not/should not enforce federal law I thought that if you commit something like wire fraud, local police will be working with the FBI to catch you. But as far as I understand it, local police is not really involved in those deportations, right? I always saw ICE agents (= federal) running around & rounding people up.
ICE is different from other police agencies. The "punishment" is deportation, which ICE insists requires no time in court in front of a judge to mete out this "punishment". And as we have seen with guy sent to the El Salvador gulag, "deportation" is not simply getting put on a plane back home. It means getting sent to a foreign prison or war zone (South Sudan).
So, you have a small risk of a catastrophic outcome when interacting with ICE. And you will have no recourse in court because ICE intends to make you disappear first. And for many Americans, this whole situation is an affront to American way of life (no due process, very nazi like behavior with the Florida concentration camp).
Lastly, the US is different from other countries because the states are partially sovereign. State law and federal law don't generally intersect and state/local police have no duty to enforce federal law. They aren't supposed to enforce federal law either. In other countries, there is typically a national police agency all police operate under and provincial governments operate under national law.