What Is Border Patrol Doing in American Cities?

Amid the chaos in Minneapolis, our attention tends to flit from incident to incident. We have all seen and debated the video of Alex Pretti being shot and killed in a tragic encounter with six Customs and Border Protection agents. The relevant questions of this shooting’s justice and legality have been litigated thoroughly in the public sphere and will be investigated by the proper authorities.

Taking a step back, however, I have another question: What was Customs and Border Protection (CBP) doing in Minneapolis in the first place? Isn’t this agency supposed to be, you know, patrolling the border?

Granted, CBP does have a rather large mandate under federal law. This is the same agency that makes you stand in line at the airport and show your passport every time you return from an international trip, ensuring you didn’t smuggle any illegal cheese or flowers into the country. It’s the agency responsible for collecting duties on imports at U.S. ports, including the ones the president changes by social media post every five minutes. And, most obviously, it polices the nation’s physical borders for the unlawful movement of people and goods. If you’re an illegal immigrant trying to enter America from Mexico, CBP is the agency you’re afraid of running into.

Why, then, has President Trump — who ran on securing the border as one of his principal campaign promises — overseen the transfer of thousands of Border Patrol agents from the southern border to major American cities? The government already has an agency for enforcing immigration law in the U.S. interior: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It has aggressively deployed ICE to find and arrest illegal immigrants, to be sure, but the administration has sent 1,000 CBP officers to the Minneapolis area as well. Border Patrol agents have also worked alongside ICE in other cities targeted for migrant detentions this year, including Los Angeles and Chicago. The man who was leading all these operations until his downfall last week, Greg Bovino, is not a part of ICE, but a senior Border Patrol officer whom DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had appointed “commander-at-large” of all immigration enforcement.

The reason that CBP has been redirected from the border to assist ICE is actually pretty simple: It’s available. There was no way Border Patrol resources could be shifted during the Biden years, as agents were overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of migrants flowing across the southern border each month. The Trump administration managed to end that problem within a month, resulting in the lowest number of monthly border encounters ever recorded.

Before the Biden administration, Republican lawmakers had long maintained that radically increasing federal manpower at the border was the key to stemming illegal immigration. As it turns out, policy is far more important. Trump effectively closed the border (as much as it ever will be), without having to add a single Border Patrol agent, by shutting down legal avenues for migrants to be processed and released.

Congress didn’t seem to get the memo, though. On muscle memory, Republicans threw tens of billions of dollars at CBP as part of their sprawling reconciliation bill in the summer of 2025 — even though, once again, border crossings were already at the lowest level in recorded history. They allocated $12 billion purely for Border Patrol to increase its workforce — already the largest of any law enforcement agency in America — and to purchase new vehicles and technology.

Ultimately, DHS was left with tens of thousands of Border Patrol agents milling around the southwestern states with not much to do. All the action was happening on the interior side of immigration enforcement, but there was a manpower mismatch. ICE has 22,000 agents — and that’s after a stunning 120 percent increase in a single year, as ICE began 2025 with 10,000 agents. CBP, on the other hand, boasts a workforce of over 60,000, with almost 20,000 agents belonging to Border Patrol.

That was too good a reserve force to pass up for Trump’s mass deportation campaign, so the administration recruited Border Patrol as ICE’s backup. The problem, as we have learned, is that Border Patrol is a very different job from urban policing. There are no crowds of protesters getting in your way on the southern border. Nor are there many private residences that you need to enter when pursuing suspects, or a lot of U.S. citizens going about their day who could be confused for illegal immigrants.

By the nature of their day job, CBP agents are simply not trained to operate in dense urban areas as ICE traditionally is. If the administration keeps sending them into U.S. cities anyway, we shouldn’t be surprised if complications keep arising.