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A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer was jailed on Friday on allegations of breaking into a woman’s apartment.
Thomas Bailey, 58, faces a charge of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling after his arrest by the sheriff’s office of St Tammany parish, Louisiana, the agency said in a statement.
The sheriff’s office said Bailey entered his ex-girlfriend’s apartment near the community of Covington, a New Orleans suburb on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, without her permission. She was not in the apartment at the time, and the sheriff’s office said investigators booked him with a crime defined as the “intentional entry without authorization into any inhabited dwelling … used … as a home or place of abode by another person”.
Bailey is employed by an ICE office in the Louisiana community of Oakdale, which by car is about three hours to the west of Covington, the St Tammany sheriff’s office said. The agency’s statement noted that he was a resident of Lecompte, which is about a half-hour’s drive to the north-east of Oakdale.
The sheriff’s office referred to Bailey as a federal officer but did not provide specific details about his role within ICE, which has been at the forefront of the mass deportation campaign that Donald Trump’s administration has pursued during his second presidency. A page under Bailey’s name on the professional networking social media site LinkedIn refers to him as an “agent” of ICE.
An ICE spokesperson on Friday said in a statement that the agency could not comment on Bailey’s arrest “due to the sensitive nature of these charges and pending litigation”.
However, the statement said that ICE “stresses integrity and ethical behavior, and the vast majority of [agency] employees perform their duties with professionalism and honor”.
“ICE takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously,” the statement continued. “Any allegations of misconduct are investigated by the appropriate agencies, and any employee who has committed provable misconduct will be held accountable. ICE takes swift and appropriate action to investigate and cooperate with outside law enforcement agencies when allegations of criminal conduct by an employee are suspected or alleged.”
Prior to Bailey’s case, ICE had been met with public scrutiny over its hiring practices after the Associated Press reported in February that a least two dozen of the agency’s employees and contractors had been charged with crimes since 2020. The wrongdoing in question involved physical and sexual abuse, misuses of authority and corruption, according to AP’s review.
The outlet later reported that rapid recruitment and expansion by ICE, particularly as the Trump administration prepared to implement its mass deportation agenda, had set the stage for an influx of employees with questionable qualifications.
Furthermore, in late July, the Trump administration’s border chief Tom Homan appeared on CNN and said he doubted that an ICE officer at the center of a recent fatal shooting “should have ever cleared vetting”.
Homan made that remark in the aftermath of the deadly shooting of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on 13 July in Biddeford, Maine. The officer involved in that killing was later identified by news outlets as David Brouillette. And two of Brouillette’s ex-wives publicly described alleged abusive, violent and threatening behavior during their relationships with him.
Asked “should someone with those issues be an ICE agent”, Homan said: “No, if those … are facts … I don’t think he should ever have cleared vetting.”
A poll taken by PBS News, National Public Radio and Marist after immigration agents’ killings of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis in January determined Americans largely disapproved of ICE agents.
Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed – 65% – said they believed ICE had gone too far in enforcing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, the pollsters said.
A bond amount for Bailey was not immediately set, St Tammany parish jail records showed on Friday. It was not immediately clear whether Bailey had an attorney.
“Regardless of where you work or what position you hold, the law applies equally to everyone,” a statement attributed to St Tammany sheriff Bret Ibert said on Friday after Bailey’s arrest. “When someone enters another person’s residence without permission, we are going to investigate the circumstances and take the appropriate action based on the facts of the case.”
Bailey could receive up to six years in prison and a maximum fine of $1,000 if eventually convicted of unauthorized entry of an inhabited dwelling.
