The ICE Men Cometh

ICE will soon be supercharged and more dangerous than ever—but it’s also vulnerable

Credit: X.com/whitehouse

There’s little doubt that ICE is growing more aggressive, its actions more extreme. With orders from the White House to meet quotas on detentions and deportations, its raids are becoming more frequent, more brutal and more indiscriminate.

We need to talk about where things stand and, importantly, where they are headed.

For months, especially across Southern California, ICE agents have been seizing allegedly undocumented immigrants from their places of work, from their homes, from retail stores, and off the streets. They have often been holding detainees in makeshift detention centers that are overcrowded and lack adequate facilities, depriving those held of access to the outside and to counsel.

ICE has been conducting these detentions while both heavily armed and masked, purportedly to prevent later identification and doxxing of the agents involved. The anonymity of ICE officers, together with their frequently documented physical brutality, has led to chaos and terror in immigrant communities and an utter lack of accountability for the agency.

Earlier this week, ICE and the U.S. military put on a show of force in Los Angeles, assembling at MacArthur Park, a gathering spot in one of the city’s most immigrant-heavy areas. Donald Trump signaled that he would like to “take over” other large blue cities such as Washington, D.C. and New York. And the GOP budget just authorized tens of billions of new funds for ICE personnel, equipment and detention facilities.

Given the above, experts in authoritarianism now cite ICE as the biggest threat to U.S. democracy. It’s critical to understand why that is, given that ICE’s role is supposed to be limited to border enforcement and unauthorized migration, and how it might be deployed against the regime’s opponents. It’s also critical to understand and put into clear perspective exactly how many resources will soon be flowing to ICE.

Despite this rising and very real threat, we shouldn’t assume that ICE will simply roll over our Republic in new armored vehicles and end our democracy. There are some key limitations and weaknesses of the agency that we should also understand, especially when we consider how best to push back against the coming assault.

ICE as a personal, presidential police force

Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol recently discussed the growing threat of ICE with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Her assessment was chilling and worth taking quite seriously.

Skocpol first noted the relatively centralized control of the police and bureaucracy in pre-World War II Nazi Germany:

[I]n Germany the most important state transformation happened just before Hitler was appointed Chancellor, when the previous government nationalized the Prussian police and bureaucracy, removing it from Social Democratic control in federated Germany’s largest state. Not long after, unexpectedly, Hitler could easily turn the centralized agencies into his Gestapo core.

This made the creation of a national police state in Germany far easier, at least compared to one that could be attempted in our own more distributed, federalist system.

I thought last year that the USA was somewhat protected against any similar coercive authoritarian takeover by its federal structure, given state and local government rights to control most U.S. police powers.

But there’s a weak point to our policing system that could allow far greater federal assertion of powers. And that’s immigration enforcement:

But now I see that the Miller-Trump ethno-authoritarians have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. president can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice.

Noting that “Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources,” including billions “to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens,” this then opens the door to ICE acting like Trump’s gestapo to suppress democratic opposition:

The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements… to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.

Skocpol’s warning is stark, and I am ringing the alarm as well.

This is the key story unfolding right now. Governors and civic groups and media outlets need to get clear on this imminent threat and work together across the board to reveal and push back against the emerging ICE police state.

The political harassment has already begun

Trump’s corrupt Justice Department is already working with ICE to silence, harass, intimidate and even arrest and charge political and civic leaders who get in the way of ICE detentions or call attention to ICE abuses.

We’ve seen clear examples of this already this year:

• April 25: Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan arrested and later charged with obstructing an immigration enforcement action;

• May 9: Newark, New Jersey mayor Ras Baraka arrested while protesting the opening of a new ICE facility in his city;

• June 10: Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) indicted by Trump lackey Alina Habba for interfering with law enforcement

• June 12: Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) forcibly removed and handcuffed for interrupting Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference

The Trump White House has also ratcheted up its belligerent rhetoric against Democratic officials who pledge to oppose ICE’s actions and protect sanctuary city status.

On June 8, Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan threatened arrest upon any official who might “cross the line” into “immigration interference,” including Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and LA Mayor Karen Bass. The next day, Trump made clear he supported arresting Newsom, saying, “I’d do it” if he were Homan.

And after the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, pledged to stop masked ICE agents “from deporting our neighbors,” Trump stated, “Well, then, we’ll have to arrest him.” Citing false claims that Mamdani is in the U.S. illegally, Trump added, “We’re going to look at everything.”

The temperature isn’t going down. This week, during a meeting of his cabinet, Trump warned that he would like to “take over” New York City and Washington, D.C. “[I]f a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same. But we have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to," Trump said. (Note that Mamdani is a democratic socialist, not a communist.)

A grotesque show of force

The federal troops “supporting” ICE in Southern California haven't had much to do lately. The protests at ICE facilities have died down, and apart from interactions with angry residents where they conduct their raids, there hasn’t been much confrontation.

So this past Sunday, July 7, ICE and the U.S. military decided to create a spectacle and display some brute force.

It was a quiet day at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, with only a few children playing outside in summer camp. Then suddenly, as the New York Times reported,

[D]ozens of armed federal agents began marching over soccer fields and grass berms, based on footage of the incident. Military-style vehicles blocked the street and a federal helicopter flew overhead.

They wore fatigues, masks and helmets and marched in lines. Some were on horseback. Camera crews followed alongside them.

The camera crews were probably the whole point: to capture and later publicize the show of force. It was a grotesque, over-the-top display, intended to signal to local leaders and residents that the federal government was in charge.

A visibly upset Mayor Karen Bass confronted the forces and demanded that they leave:

Later, she put the federal government on blast. “What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation,” she told reporters at a news conference.

The highest-funded law enforcement agency in history

The recently passed and signed GOP budget allocates a simply staggering amount of money to ICE. JD Vance made it clear that ICE funding was his top priority in the budget, even saying the quiet part out loud:

“Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”

This is because a supercharged ICE could easily become the personal police force of the Trump regime.

The numbers are very big and very hard to wrap your head around. In broad terms, immigration enforcement breaks down into four areas, all to be spent on ICE through the end of September 2029. It includes $74.9 billion for ICE detention and removal, and the total price tag is north of $170 billion.

How much money is that? One way to look at it is to compare the annual ICE expenditure to other nations’ military budgets.

The chart above assumes a total price tag of $150 billion. But now it’s actually higher by around $20 billion, meaning the annual ICE budget is now greater than the entire military budget of Canada.

Here’s the more specific breakdown of where the money will go, courtesy of the Immigration Council. (You should look at the “Senate” column version, which is what ultimately was approved and signed into law.)

I want to draw your attention to detention and removal funding, specifically the line items for “Detention capacity expansion” and “Enforcement and removal, including hiring ICE agents, transportation costs, and detaining families.” Those are, respectively, $45 billion and $29.9 billion.

With numbers this large, it remains difficult to put them into context. So, some more comparisons are helpful.

The $45 billion in new “detention capacity expansion” comes to $10.25 billion each year for the next four years on average. That’s far larger than our federal government spends on its entire prison system each year. As the Immigration Council noted,

It is a 62 percent larger budget than the entire federal prison system and could result in daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.

As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo gravely observed, “[T]he allocations are enough of a tell to know that what we’re looking at here isn’t quite mass deportations. It’s mass detention.”

And how big is the nearly $30 billion allocated for hiring ICE agents? As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted, the vote to approve the budget made ICE “the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.”

Notably, most of the increase in funding is coming in the third and fourth years of Trump’s term, while 2026 is going to see a “ramp-up”. A visual of this increase shows how dramatic a rise this is:

Making their numbers

We’re already seeing across ICE detention centers in the U.S. that the numbers of detainees with no criminal record are rising rapidly. Trump campaigned on a promise of going after “criminals” with the implication that he would leave law-abiding yet undocumented immigrants be.

That is not what has happened. As Catherine Rampell noted in a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, citing a data analysis by Syracuse University researcher Austin Kocher,

While the number of convicted criminals held in ICE detention is about 1.6 times what it was before Trump took office, the number of detainees with zero criminal convictions or charges is up nearly 14-fold.

A nearly 14 times increase in detainees with zero criminal convictions makes the goal of this regime plain as day: It has embarked upon mass detention plans that will sweep up anyone without official authorization to be here, irrespective of past criminal history. ICE will not distinguish among the people it seizes.

That’s where it starts to really matter what else the White House is doing to make many more people instantly deportable. One of its cruelest moves has been to remove Temporary Protected Status from people who arrived here legally, throwing them overnight into the “immediately deportable” list. As Rampell writes,

Under the stewardship of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, this administration has also been working to “de-document” hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are here legally.

These include Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came in with advanced permission under a Biden-era program, after undergoing onerous screening abroad and securing a sponsor here in the United States. It also includes Hondurans and Nicaraguans who had been living and working in the United States legally for decades, as Trump announced on Monday. Some of our Afghan allies, including many who supported U.S. military efforts at great personal risk to themselves and their families, are in the crosshairs as well. As are some Ukrainians and many, many others.

With a single pen stroke and the blessing of the radical Supreme Court majority, the White House has made all of these people “fair game” for detention by ICE, which now can make its numbers far more easily.

ICE’s racial profiling and tactics

It should surprise no one that the vast majority of individuals targeted for de-documentation and detention by the regime have black or brown skin. This means, of course, that anyone who looks like they might be undocumented is now at higher risk. ICE has already wrongfully detained many who are either U.S. citizens or who have a legal right to be here. Because it detains first and asks questions later, wrongfully seized persons can languish in legal limbo for days or weeks inside of hellish ICE facilities.

A lawsuit filed by the United Farm Workers, the ACLU and others against Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security describes what is going on in Southern California in harrowing terms:

Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away.

The raids in this District follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody. In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind. If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained. Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.

Further, apparently to accommodate the sharp rise in arrests, the government has resorted to keeping individuals at what is supposed to be a short-term processing center and ICE basement holding area in downtown Los Angeles, known as “B-18,” often for days. In these dungeon-like facilities, conditions are deplorable and unconstitutional. The government has also unlawfully deprived those arrested of access to counsel. Under such conditions, some of those arrested are pressured into accepting voluntary departure.

Groups have begun to document the racial profiling and abuses. For example, here is a video compilation by CalMatters on the raids and detentions captured by citizens on their personal recording devices:

NBC News also compiled a series of videos documenting ICE’s raids and tactics.

The Trump-Miller regime seeks to replicate the broad terror inflicted upon immigrant communities in the Los Angeles area and deploy it to other cities such as New York and Chicago. It also wants to see more ICE agents fan out and terrorize other communities across the country.

And it now has tens of billions in new funds to do this.

Blocking ICE

The documentation of ICE’s racial profiling, brutal tactics and lack of compassion, paired with its nefarious hiding of its own agents’ identities, has already soured a majority of the American public against its deportations.

As Democratic strategist Max Burns noted,

Prior to May, most Americans viewed ICE positively. Now the agency evokes images of masked men huddled around blacked-out vans and Alligator Alcatraz. Agents’ refusal to identify themselves, and MAGA’s celebration of their unaccountability, has led millions of Americans to see the agency as little more than Trump’s personal skullcrushers. Now, 54 percent of adults say ICE’s actions have gone too far.

It turns out letting ICE go hog-wild on non-criminal immigrants who are just trying to work or care for their families is extremely unpopular. Burns notes that six recent polls show a collapse of public support for Trump’s immigration policies, with him three points underwater on what used to be one of his best issues. That level of unpopularity toward the GOP on immigration hasn’t happened in 20 years.

The Catholic Church itself has recently taken an unprecedented stand, with two dioceses recently informing parishioners that they can skip mass over fears of ICE raids. "In issuing this decree, I'm guided by the Church's mission to care for the spiritual welfare of all entrusted under my care, particularly those who face fear or hardship," San Bernardino Bishop Alberto Rojas and Vicar General Gerard M. Lopez wrote.

ICE was not exactly a popular or respected agency among law enforcement before this chaos began. As Josh Marshall observed,

ICE was generally known as a place made up of people who couldn’t get jobs at the more established and reputable federal policing agencies…. Because of this, it has a high proportion of people who are there because they want to wear a uniform, knock people around and act tough. That’s an aspect of every policing organization. But more professional organizations do their best to weed those people out on the front end and instill discipline that keeps those impulses in check. There’s much less of that at ICE. So it’s never had a good reputation within federal law enforcement.

This could make recruiting new and capable ICE agents a challenge, and we should press this point. After all, the more shame the public can bring upon accepting such a position, the more ridicule heaped upon the idea that ICE agents must hide their identities just to function, the less appealing that job will be. And if only the truly extreme in our society sign up to be ICE agents, that will quickly push ICE toward very public mistakes and public relations nightmares.

And as Nick Miroff of The Atlantic reported today, morale within ICE, in fact, is already ebbing. The White House has demanded ever higher numbers of raids to meet quotas that leaders within the agency and the rank and file view as highly unrealistic. ICE has been forced to shelve major criminal investigations in order to prioritize civil immigration arrests, all of which come with strong public disapproval.

”It’s miserable,” one career ICE official told Miroff. The job was “mission impossible.” The new budget hopes to ameliorate some of the pressure, but training up new ICE agents takes time, as much as 18 months in many cases. To get around this, ICE will have to rely on the military’s help (which could get legally challenged as a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act) or simply go with more untrained recruits.

In his analysis, Marshall also points out that the population ICE is used to going after—undocumented immigrants or those with precarious legal status—have relatively few rights and protections, setting up a situation ripe for abuse. But ICE isn’t used to dealing with the U.S. citizenry at large.

We’ve seen ICE agents back off quickly when confronted by a (whiter) angry public, whose rights are more established and who aren’t as afraid of being labeled non-citizens and hauled off to a detention center. It’s increasingly clear that the best response to ICE presence in an area is an overwhelming, yet peaceful, community response, including most crucially from U.S. citizens.

To get ahead of ICE, citizens are already organizing, including using a popular app called ICEBlock, which alerts users to nearby ICE sightings. According to CNN, ICEBlock currently has more than 20,000 users, many of whom are in Los Angeles. And its inventor had a very specific reason for creating the app. “When I saw what was happening in this country, I wanted to do something to fight back,” Joshua Aaron told CNN, adding that the deportations were reminiscent of Nazi Germany. “We’re literally watching history repeat itself.”

While the Trump-Miller White House threatens to deploy ICE en masse to the streets of other Democratic-controlled cities such as New York or Chicago, that may not go down as hoped. Strong public backlash is likely, especially to the presence of federal troops. While some argue that Trump may be counting on protests to make his case that even greater force is warranted, he also risks overplaying his hand and losing what public support he still has for draconian detention and deportation measures.

What good, after all, are these harsh detention and deportation measures serving if his true goal is ethnic cleansing rather than public safety? And how is the public possibly safer with pitched battles with ICE in the streets?

Blue state attorneys general should also take note: The physical abuses by ICE agents, which are now well-documented, are not immune from state-level prosecution. As Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) recently urged, if an illegal assault occurs at the hands of an ICE agent, it should be charged by state authorities as a crime. Orders to detain undocumented migrants do not give carte blanche for all manner of illegal behavior.

Beyond urging state law enforcement to get involved and meeting the threat of ICE through peaceful resistance in the streets, our overall task ahead is clear: to ensure that ICE becomes synonymous with fascism. These are the lawless goons, the gestapo of our times.

Anyone who accepts an ICE job needs to understand that they will live with the ignominy of that decision for all time, that they could face current prosecution for any abuses, and that they will not be shielded from future prosecution by claiming they were “just following orders.”

We must ensure that politicians who supported the ICE budget pay a political price for their vote, especially in vulnerable swing districts or where entire minority communities are now under threat. And a whole generation of young people, many who did not fully understand the consequences of their votes, must be activated against the fascist threat, the face of which ICE has already become.

In short, if JD Vance is to be believed, the Trump regime is celebrating a big win with its ICE budget and looking forward to the massive cruelty and daily trauma it intends to inflict upon vulnerable people.

Instead, by supercharging one of the most despised, unprofessional and unaccountable law enforcement agencies, it is creating the very lightning rod the resistance to Trumpism needs—one that readily and inherently symbolizes the fascist, authoritarian nature of this government.