ICE is Eating the Soul of America

Welcome to Doomsday Scenario, my regular column on national security, geopolitics, history, and—unfortunately—the fight for democracy in the Trump era. I hope if you’re coming to this online, you’ll consider subscribing right here. It’s easy—and free:

A big part of this newsletter is trying to mark the moments when America changes — when today is different from before.

A big change happened yesterday, when the Supreme Court said it was okay for ICE and the Border Patrol to racially profile individuals walking freely on America’s streets. If you’re brown, speak Spanish, and work in a blue-collar job, you officially belong to a different class of citizen and according to Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s okay to racially profile you.

We have never in US history seen a federal law enforcement agency operate the way ICE has operated this summer — it marks the arrival of a new style of domestic policing, more in line with the infamous “brown shirts” of authoritarian regimes the world over than any regular policing tradition in the nation’s interior. Yes, we’ve seen similar abuses of civil liberties and due process stem from corrupt and racist state police and country sheriffs in the Jim Crow south, and plenty of local police departments even today suffer from localized corruption scandals, but never we seen what is happening with ICE right now take place the whole country over.

The day-to-day behavior and aggression of ICE is corrupting the soul of America. I encourage you to watch this video of federal agents policing the start of an elementary school in DC — there not to secure the school and children, but specifically to intimidate and punish schoolgoers. Tell me that isn’t the picture of authoritarianism? You know how you’re going to be the bad guy in the eyes of history? If school children and mothers have to push their way through your armed, masked gang while you’re carrying assault weapons in order to attend school. I can’t help but think how the Trump administration has turned the proud tradition of the US Marshals at the University of Mississippi or the 82^nd Airborne at Little Rock Central High on its head. Similarly, this video of a masked officer detaining a father outside immigration court in New York City — the masked officers are indistinguishable from Wild West bank robbers.

There are four things that have really struck me about ICE’s operations over the last month, all of them worrisome about the trajectory of that agency and the presence and role of federal law enforcement in American life. (Separately, I’m going to write about the warning signs already visible in ICE’s dramatic hiring surge.) Taken together, they paint a picture of an already rogue agency that feels it operates outside of the Constitution and owes nothing to the Americans it’s supposed to serve:

1) Everything is now ICE.

The most worrisome aspect of the quick militarization and turbo-charging of ICE is how American law enforcement across the board — and much of the government beyond — is being subsumed by ICE’s mission and lowering themselves, from hiring to behavior to tactics, down to ICE’s standards.

We have different federal law enforcement agencies for a reason — and moreover, as citizens, we as a country need and want federal law enforcement. The FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and the US Marshals all have their own lanes, authorities, and responsibilities, but right now we’ve watching the Trump administration turn all of federal law enforcement across both the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security into an faceless quasi-ICE auxiliary, blending all these agencies and agent into some amorphous anonymous blob of masked, brown tactical-vest-wearing federal law enforcement. I wrote recently about how this precisely is what authoritarian regime looks like — armed, masked, anonymous agents of the state jumping from unmarked vehicles and whisking people away 

The photos and videos from “occupied DC” all have a stunning sameness and banality to them — large squads of masked, heavily-equipped agents from various agencies mostly standing around while making some effectively meaningless arrest or enforcement action that until August would have been routinely handled without note by any of the literally dozens of local and federal police departments that already cover and overlap across all of DC, from the DC Metropolitan Police and Metro Transit Police to the federal agencies like the Park Police, Federal Protective Service, Amtrak Police, FBI Police, Bureau of Engraving & Printing Police, Capitol Police, Government Publishing Office Police, Postal Police, US Mint Police, Smithsonian Police, National Gallery of Art Police, and Uniformed Division of the US Secret Service.

Each of these video shows a stupendous and entirely performative waste of taxpayer resources. I’ve even seen badges from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and the criminal investigators of the IRS walking patrols on the streets of DC. It can’t be said enough what an absurd waste of very limited and precious resources — agencies that have specialized training, unique investigative responsibilities, and federal authorities are being deployed to generally intimidate the citizens of the nation’s capital (and, perhaps, in the days ahead, other cities).

All of these agents are being pulled from their active cases and investigations — again, big-deal cases like pursuing terrorism, money laundering, drug cartels, cybercriminals, fugitives, organized crime, and smuggling — to do a job where they have no training in street beat patrol, no training in local laws, and all meanwhile blending into the same banal brown blob of federal agents. WIRED’s investigation into the role of the State Department’s DSS in enforcing immigration is a case in point; these other agents have better things to do!

I’ve previously said that this is like the New York Mets being assigned to work as ball boys in a minor league, but a reader corrected me: The Mets would know something about the game being played. This is more accurately like the Dallas Cowboys working as ball boys in Single A minor league baseball. It is as if our government has decided that there is no crime in the country worth pursuing other than immigration enforcement. 

The reassignments are huge numbers. According to the CATO Institute, “This diversion is not a small part of many of these agencies. It includes one in five US marshals (650 of 3,892), one in five FBI agents (2,840 of 13,700), half of DEA agents (2,181 of 4,620), over two-thirds of the ATF (1,778 of 2,572), and nearly 90 percent of Homeland Security Investigations (6,198 of 7,100).”

And it’s not just law enforcement. We’re seeing the Department of Defense detailing its own employees to serve ICE’s mission, and military lawyers dispatched to serve as civilian immigration judges and adjunct prosecutors in civilian courts — a move that is likely illegal, but certainly unprecedented and a dangerous blurring of the lines between civilians and the military. Other civilian agencies are also being assigned to help: CISA, the nation’s civilian cybersecurity agency, has sent scores of its staff to help, among other DHS components, as have more than 4,000 civilian personnel from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services — an agency whose normal role is actually to help keep people in the country, not disappear them to foreign torture gulags. All told, it appears some 33,000 employees from OTHER federal agencies have been dispatched to help support ICE. Add in state and local police who work on various federal task forces that have also been reassigned to support ICE and there are over 42,000 people who have other jobs doing important and necessary work, that have been subsumed by ICE. 

None of that, though, counts the National Guard, who are being mis-used in this effort perhaps more than anyone. I was in D.C. this weekend for the National Book Festival, and it’s astounding how wasted the National Guard is. They’re standing around and walking patrols, appearing to help absolutely no one anywhere. They don’t know what they’re doing — they’re not doing much at all and, worse, often seem to be doing jobs, like spreading mulch in federal parks, that other federal workers are supposed to be doing more cheaply, without being ripped away from their workplaces and families for 29 days a time, a time period precisely chosen by the Trump administration to cheap out on paying the troops what they’re rightfully owed. It’s a recipe both to undermine the respect of the military in the public’s eye — as well as crater morale of the force itself, who signed up to help and serve their neighbors, not police and occupy them. Locals are regularly mocking the Guard.

Everything is ICE and all agencies are now just ICE hangers-on.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to work in the US. And at least one federal judge has tried to draw the line, saying it was illegal for Trump to use the National Guard in Los Angeles, and warning that Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

It is striking to me that the leaders of these agencies are comfortable letting their agents be misused in this way; there’s a different universe where, for instance, FBI director Kash Patel had surged the FBI agents currently patrolling capital streets to focus on what they can actually do to help — building cases against gang-bangers and drug dealers as part of a targeted violent crime task force. But none of this is about really fighting crime — it’s just about intimidating Americans and stroking Trump’s authoritarian ego.

Just think of the crime that isn’t being investigated and prosecuted across the United States right now because of the diversion of these resources. Moreover, the US government has paused non-immigration law enforcement training in order to shove through as many new ICE agents by the end of the year — meaning that the 75 other federal law enforcement agencies that rely on the national training academy are all effectively at a hiring standstill for months. 

2) Collapse of Moral Legitimacy.

I wrote earlier in the summer about how in a democracy policing requires moral legitimacy and the permission of the policed. That’s been one of the hallmarks of policing ever since Sir Robert Peel built the first modern police force in London’s Metropolitan Police. One of his core principles of policing was: “To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.”

The DC police department was literally created originally in Peel’s image, which is why it too is known awkwardly as the “Metropolitan Police.” Now, in a historical irony, it is ground zero for the erosion of the moral legitimacy of federal law enforcement writ large.

Social media on a daily basis is filled with videos of the public shouting at masked officers, asking unsuccessfully for IDs or badges, shouting passing expletives at officers on patrol, and crowds driving federal officers from their neighborhoods. Social media feeds are filled with videos of ordinary citizens resisting and questioning ICE, tips on how resist and monitor ICE — and even outright civil disobedience, like blocking ICE facilities — trolling federal agents, and raising concerns about the aggression and seemingly abusive use-of-force by ICE officers.

No, really, the stream of these photos and videos is almost endless.

Those endless streams herald how much of the country has turned on federal law enforcement generally and ICE specifically — I’ve been at sporting events where mentions of ICE has been booed, seen businesses post signs saying ICE isn’t welcome there, and homemade anti-ICE lawn signs sprout across neighborhoods. Chicago has been prepping for weeks now to resist ICE at all levels — again, a statement that would seem astounding except that it feels so normal now.

This is an unprecedented public rejection of federal law enforcement (and, increasingly, by extension, the National Guard as well, civilian-soldiers who joined to help support their neighbors in times of need).

It is not hard to see why the public is reacting so strongly to ICE’s abrupt takeover of daily life in America — the Trump administration initially promised that it’s going after the “worst of the worst,” but given the scale of the operation and the hunger to meet Stephen Miller’s arbitrary quotas, ICE has to go after the nation’s low-hanging fruit — landscapers, grandmas, delivery drivers. Many of the people swept up in ICE’s dragnet are not criminals; in one Border Patrol sweep, 77 out of 78 targeted individuals had no criminal record. Many of the arrests are of immigrants who are actually following the law and pursuing the valid legal process for being in the country. Recent numbers show 70 percent of the record number of ICE detainees have no criminal record.

The tactics of immigration enforcement are turning almost comic-villainy evil — take, for instance, the Border Patrol raid on a team of wildland firefighters actively fighting a forest fire. You know how you’re on the wrong side of history? When you’re intervening on the side of helping the forest fire!

When the average blond woman in yoga pants is shouting at federal law enforcement, you know something has changed in the fabric of our country. And there are a lot of those videos too.

Now ICE, the FBI, and right-wing social media accounts are coming after people who attempt to peacefully protest ICE or organize citizens to know their rights, undermining the most basic of protected First Amendment speech. ICE is even posting boosterist videos of its officers ripping down community signs protesting their presence. And agencies who work alongside ICE — like the Federal Protective Service and the US Park Police — seem to be adopting some of the worst tactics of abusive force and masking.

The fact that DC grand juries are now regularly refusing to indict people charged with impeding or assaulting federal officers — including, famously, sandwich guy, who is now a local folk hero — should cause more concern in the ranks of federal law enforcement and the Justice Department than it apparently is.

Yes, I know that a portion of the country is cheering ICE onward. (More on that in another column this week!) But we should all fear a future where large swaths of the country turn their back on cooperating with federal agents. The day-to-day work of the FBI, ATF, DEA, Secret Service, and even the very good work of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations side — who work complex human trafficking, antiquities smuggling, copyright enforcement, national security cases, and even nuclear proliferation cases — rely on the routine help of all manner of citizens and businesses. We are watching the Trump administration burn years and decades of community bridge-building, outreach, and public relations that will make the work of every federal agent in the country harder every single day — and, in turn, make it easier for actual criminals to prey upon Americans.

3) Operating without due regard for civil liberties and due process. 

In my essay at the end of August about how America has tipped in fascism, I wrote, “America has become a country where armed officers of the state shout ‘papers please’ on the street at men and women heading home from work, where masked men wrestle to the ground and abduct people without due process into unmarked vehicles, disappearing them into an opaque system where their family members beg for information.”

Few of the videos that have surfaced since have indicated otherwise; normal ICE procedures barrel right past normal due process and civil liberties; here, after wrestling someone to the ground, officers lose interest the moment he makes clear he’s a US citizen. Here masked officers start pushing a man before he can even provide proof of citizenship. Is this what America has come to?

One way to think about what has changed at the core of ICE’s operations is that until January 2025, broadly speaking, ICE officers operated with “prosecutorial discretion,” going after specific targets to arrest and deport. From 2003 to 2025 — again, broadly speaking — an ICE officer would wake up knowing the name of the person he or she was trying to target and arrest that day. Now most ICE officers — and most other federal agents seconded to ICE’s mission — wake up having no idea the name of the person or persons they’ll try to arrest today.

It is clear that ICE is simply profiling people on America’s streets — hey! A brown person driving a moped! I was horrified watching this video where an ICE officer casually explains to a passerby, “Hey, we’re taking this guy, but if he’s legal, we’ll just bring him back!” Oh, no problem! Except that’s not how freedom, due process, and civil liberties is supposed to work in the United States. (Except, of course, that as of yesterday that’s evidently exactly how it works for brown people, according to the Supreme Court.)

In ICE’s new America — a dystopian vision for America now embraced officially by the Supreme Court — Let’s be clear about what’s happening: The Trump administration wants non-white people to be afraid to walk their own streets, be in public, go to school, or work a job, whether you’re a citizen or not. Schools in DC are telling non-white teachers to carry their passports to school lest they get swept up en route to teach. That’s not normal, and — until recently — it wasn’t something that was supposed to happen in the United States.

Dissenting in yesterday’s decision, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The [Supreme Court’s new ruling] relegates the interests of U.S. citizens and individuals with legal status to a single sentence, positing that the Government will free these individuals as soon as they show they are legally in the United States. That blinks reality. Two plaintiffs in this very case tried to explain that they are U. S. citizens; one was then pushed against a fence with his arms twisted behind his back, and the other was taken away from his job to a warehouse for further questioning. More fundamentally, it is the Government's burden to prove that it has reasonable suspicion to stop someone. The concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that they deserve to walk freely. The Constitution does not permit the creation of such a second-class citizenship status.”

As one lawyer wrote on social media, Americans now need to carry “freedom papers” to leave your house — at least if you’re brown. That is not a free country. That is an authoritarian regime.

4) Avoiding transparency and accountability.

Add up all of the above and you have a portrait of a rogue agency, which is what leads me to my final dangerous warning sign: This agency clearly knows that it can do no wrong in the eyes of the White House and administration — there is no level of violence, brutality, or abuse of civil liberties that would get any of these agents or officers in trouble with their bosses. Earlier this summer, I wrote about how ICE is acting as if it will never face accountability again. We’ve seen ICE flaunt federal law that requires congressional oversight — and, instead, it has tried to arrest and charge federal lawmakers, a bright line if there ever was one.

At every turn, though, the agency is going out of its way to make it harder to hold officers accountable. ICE officers don’t routinely wear name tags or easily visible badge numbers (in this video, check out how you have to zoom in on his badge on his belt to even begin to identify his badge number.) Moreover, though, despite the fact that we’re weeks and months into this national ICE takeover, the agency has made no effort to make its masked officers on the streets identifiable to either the public — or even to itself.

This is a problem the US and other countries have solved in the past. For instance, in the turbulent George Floyd protests in 2020, “unidentified” federal agents actually generally weren’t — they used unique uniform identifiers so that the agency knew who the officers were. These identifiers weren’t standard “name tags” but had on them unique codes (think “X7WQ”) that the Justice Department could use to track and identify an officer if there was a civilian complaint, photo, or video of an abuse of use-of-force or civil liberties. ICE officers aren’t using that system or anything similar at all.

While ICE and White House officials keep saying the masks and anonymity is important to stop officers and their families from being “doxed,” there’s precious little evidence of any meaningful increase in assaults on federal officers.

In fact, ICE’s level of aggression on America’s streets comes even as being an ICE officer is actually a very safe job: As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick says, “The last on-duty homicide of a detention and deportation officer was 1949. The last time there was even a non-COVID death on duty was 2016, when an officer had a heart attack during a foot pursuit. Before that, a training accident in 2003, then a fall down an elevator shaft at a jail in 1975.” In other words, the landscapers and groundskeepers being targeted by ICE are far far far more likely to face injury and death on the job than the ICE officers wrestling them to the ground. Heck, working in retail, which faced 94 workplace homicides in 2023, is far more dangerous than being an ICE officer, but the only people kitted out with tactical gear to go to Home Depot is ICE, not the clerks themselves!

What’s so troubling about this is how ICE doesn’t seem to recognize or acknowledge how its own loss of moral legitimacy in the public’s eyes is precisely what is leading to the harassment of its officers in the streets. ICE operated for nearly twenty years in the United States, under both Republican and Democratic administrations — including the first Trump administration! — without having to stoop to these anonymous and brutal tactics. What has changed since is how ICE is operating in this specific moment.

In a healthy agency, that cared about public opinion, that understood the tenets of policing in a free and open society, that felt that it owed accountability and transparency to the American public, the agency would have adjusted course in recent months to allow its agents to be masked but mandate that they wear clearly visible law enforcement insignia — like the FBI’s iconic blue “raid jackets” — and unique identification patches to ensure that agents and officers were at least accountable after the fact if there was a civilian complaint or video evidence emerged of an abuse of force or civil liberties. It’s not that ICE doesn’t have these jackets — they do. It has evidently made a conscious choice NOT to use them.

Put all of that together, and it’s clear this is an agency that is going out of its way to make it nearly impossible for anyone — including the US government itself — to investigate any official misconduct, abuses, or assaults. I can’t think of something more corruptive to the soul of a free, open, and democratic society than a federal law enforcement agency that has put itself above the law.

GMG

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