>who do you think ICE is going to look for?

They should do some actually police work. This kind of "Papers, please" approach to immigration enforcement is dystopian. If you genuinely feel that illegal immigration is a problem that needs to be fixed, attack it systemically. Go through government, business, and housing records, find people who aren't here legally, and then go detain them. Don't just round people up based on nothing but their ethnicity and make them prove their innocence to you. It's inherently unAmerican, at least according to the ideals we like to claim we have (even if our history often falls short of those ideals).

>but they do arrest a significant amount of those as well.

Then arrest those people who commit crimes. If these people are guilty of something, why is ICE the one rounding them up? Why isn't the FBI or local police? If this is all motivated by a desire for lower crime, why are we treating it as an immigration issue instead of a crime issue?

> They should do some actually police work. This kind of "Papers, please" approach to immigration enforcement is dystopian.

Why it’s dystopian? It’s literally how it’s done in other places as well.

I agree that the government has to go through and punish those who employ illegal immigrants too to disincentivize unauthorized employment, but it doesn’t have to be only one avenue.

> Why isn't the FBI or local police?

I do not know where you live, but lately crimes in the US in many jurisdictions are not prosecuted, and repeat offenders are not punished. Coupled with the fact that many cities forbid their local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration, I am not sure how can local police do anything.

If an illegal immigrant committed a crime it is a failure of both local LEO and immigration. It doesn’t have to be only one.