The ICE Man Cometh

Trump’s Gestapo is here. It operates throughout the country. It can suddenly arrest anyone, with no crime alleged, and deport them for permanent imprisonment overseas. Will anyone stop this?

US Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents take part in a safety drill in the Anapra area in Sunland Park, New Mexico. Photo by Herika Martinez / AFP.

Last year, I did a series called Decoding Project 2025 — and one of the most jarring Trumpian proposals was, from my point of view, the planned degradation of the existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into an immigration Gestapo to detain undocumented immigrants and deport them without any legal due process.

I was wrong.

It turns out ICE is not a Gestapo for undocumented immigrants.

It is a general Gestapo — a secret national police force not just for undocumented immigrants but for any immigrants, even legal ones with documents, even permanent residents (green card holders), and if Trump has his way, soon, even U.S. citizens.

ICE is arresting and detaining people without alleging that they have committed any crimes at all—holding them without any legal process, without an immigration removal proceeding, without a trial, without an evidentiary hearing, without anything—and then shackling and chaining them into military cargo planes and deporting them for indefinite imprisonment without trial in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).

Then the administration lies, falsely claiming that it can do nothing to return anyone who has been sent to CECOT.

Then the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, follows along with the lie, claiming that he is powerless to return anyone to the US.

Meanwhile, the ICE officers try to shrug off any responsibility, claiming that they are just doing what the government tells them to do.

Frankenstein’s monster is running amok, terrorizing people and killing them, and yet everyone involved is throwing up their hands, disingenuously, claiming that they have no power to stop the monstrous Gestapo that Trump has created.

Yet every step of the monster’s creation was premeditated—a completely purposeful crime against humanity.

This is not an accident. This is what they meant to do. They had a blueprint and they are following it.

The question now becomes whether anyone is going to do anything to stop Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and everyone else involved in these extrajudicial detentions and deportations.

The courts are being defied and flouted, but will they escalate their response to insist that the law be obeyed?

The Supreme Court has now issued two frustratingly elliptical orders, one in the J.G.G. case and one in the Abrego Garcia case. The former is regarding a group of plaintiffs who fear illegal deportation to El Salvador despite the government having no evidence against them. And the latter concerns someone who is already there on what even the government admits is an “administrative error.”

In J.G.G., SCOTUS unanimously upheld the settled law that anyone targeted for removal from the US must receive due process, with advance notice of the legal proceedings against them and a meaningful chance to mount an opposition. But it also ensnared everyone in a needless thicket of technicality by forcing the plaintiffs’ challenges to be re-filed as habeas corpus petitions in the district courts where they are being detained, the equivalent of a court order declaring that people were standing in the wrong places on the Titanic.

In Abrego Garcia, SCOTUS unanimously ordered that the administration “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from CECOT and continue to provide regular updates to the district court regarding the progress of that facilitation. But it also ensnared everyone in a needless thicket of technicality by noting that the district court must have “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

In other words, certain justices on the Court seem far more concerned with the effect of court orders on the presidency rather than the effect of those same court orders on an innocent man who is being held without trial or any other judicial process in a foreign gulag. Apparently the presidency is such a fragile snowflake that the slightest cross word from a judge would cause it to crumple, whereas an innocent man can be disappeared from his wife and children and held without trial indefinitely, and he and his family are just expected to suffer in silent strength while all the elite lawyers and judges and politicians squabble and furrow their brows.

The Court’s inability to speak clearly and decisively on these matters creates ambiguity that the most craven and evil members of the administration are exploiting.

The onus will thus unjustly fall onto Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to engage in heroic efforts to pressure the courts, which in turn will need to wake up and realize that they are being absolutely mocked and ignored by the administration.

The normal response to mocking and ignoring a judge is to be held in contempt. Will the courts take that highly appropriate step? Judge Paula Xinis, in the Abrego Garcia case, and Judge James Boasberg, in the J.G.G. case, have now both opened the door to contempt proceedings. But will they be expedited? Will they be more than empty talk, more than giving the administration additional opportunities to make excuses and point fingers?

What will other leaders do in turn? Senator Chris Van Hollen, of Abrego Garcia’s home state of Maryland, stepped up to demand his release, even traveling to El Salvador to negotiate that release. And even though he was rebuffed, he received additional confirmation from the Salvadoran government that Abrego Garcia’s detention is being paid for by the Trump administration. Will members of Congress do whatever is humanly possible to use the legislature’s power of the purse, to halt any further payments for holding detainees outside the United States?

What are we going to do now that Trump’s Gestapo is fully revealed, no longer a proposal in Project 2025, no longer dismissed as a hyperbolic overreaction by the Resistance, but truly and terribly real?