Trump's Tyranny, Part I: ICE's Reign of Terror

I often think about Brian Beutler’s very smart essay, almost exactly a year ago, about the “median experience of tyranny,” how for most people—the regime’s ordinary non-targeted citizen—the daily experience of fascism is pretty … ordinary. He wrote, “We need to remind ourselves, constantly, that in the median experience of tyranny, life is largely unchanged. Even the median experience of those being tyrannized can be free of intolerable forms of oppression. If we wait until the abuses become severe and widespread enough to register in our standard analytic tools, it will be too late.”

As we head into the final weeks before the midterm elections — when a lot of decisions about our country’s arc and fate as a democracy will be made individually and collectively across thousands of election races in every corner of the country — it’s important for us to take stock of the reign of Donald Trump and damage to our country.

We’ve already gotten used to a level of fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption that would be unthinkable and shocking to us just a decade ago.

How’s this for a summary of the state of America, circa October 2026:

Secret masked police are disappearing people off America’s streets, shooting people regularly, and killing them in concentration camps. Military troops are daily patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital. Our head of state is turning the capital into a cult of personality, bulldozing our collective memory and history and erecting grand celebrations of himself. The president’s political enemies are being persecuted by government agents, while his friends and families are enriching themselves at the public trough and demanding payment and tribute from favor-seeking private businesses. White Christian nationalists are consolidating control over our military and using it to execute innocent people in international waters and conduct illegal wars overseas, and then lying to the American people and covering up the true casualties and cost of those wars.

And yet, for the most part, for most Americans, life is pretty similar. I went down to my usual coffee shop this morning and got my usual cup of coffee. I spent the weekend at a family wedding, which was just like basically any other family wedding I’ve been to. Vermont is overrun this year by the usual crop of tourists up to gaze at our amazing fall foliage, pick apples, and eat cider donuts. Life’s mostly the same — except it isn’t really.

This, as Brian wrote last October and I wrote last August, is what fascism and authoritarianism looks like in its early and middle stages. As I wrote, “I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from ‘democracy’ to ‘authoritarianism.’ Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.”

We should take stock of where we are.

Over the next few essays ahead of the midterms, I want to specifically highlight five areas where I fear we’ve lost sight of the sheer scale and horrific departure-from-normality that we’re all living through: (1) The abuses of the regime’s secret police force, a.k.a. ICE and CBP; (2) the day-to-day petty crime and grand corruption infecting the operations of the US government; (3) the political weaponization of the Justice Department; (4) the president’s abuse of our “normal” process of government; (5) the squandering of our nation’s standing around the world.

In all five of these areas, I think the media — which is under immense un-ordinary pressures of its own — continues to fail to convey just how un-ordinary these developments and shifts in our daily life. Too often, these stories are covered individually, but not as a pattern. I’ve written about all of this over the last 20 months or so, but I think it’s worth trying to paint a larger picture too.

I am, for accuracy purposes, not a fan of the “boiling frog” analogy — frogs do, in fact, hop out of water as it gets hot — but given how pervasive and widely shorthand-able the analogy has become in our society, consider this essay and the following series a picture of how boiled we are as frogs.

First up, today, ICE.

The average American has lost track of the ongoing — and still mounting — terror campaign and tactics of the regime’s favored secret police. We shorthand the secret police as “ICE,” but it’s of course a wider umbrella that includes not just ICE but Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and officers as well as the broader misuse of the Department of Homeland Security. Last month, I did a special “Long Shadow” podcast episode about how, as the nation marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11, in many communities across the country people would today tell you that they’re more afraid of our government and DHS, the mechanism we created to combat terrorism, than they are afraid of the threat of foreign terrorism itself.

The appointment this spring of Markwayne Mullin as secretary of homeland security has had the clearly successful effect of lowering the day-to-day temperature of the Kristi Noem/Greg Bovino military-occupation-style attacks on major American cities, like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, that dominated headlines from the summer of 2025 through the early winter of 2026. But the reign of terror of ICE nationwide has, if anything, only increased — July was the highest month for deportations in DHS history and it’s increasingly relying on local police departments to avoid drawing headlines itself — and it’s taken the lives of dozens of people this year.

Mullin has in many ways perfected the boiling frog — overseeing ever-more aggressive, brutal, and political ICE operations on behalf of Trump and Stephen Miller, all without the flashiness and out-and-out corruption that sank his predecessor Kristi Noem.

The latest headline we saw was the shooting last week of an immigrant in New York City. The incident underscored many of the problems we continue to see, including:

• Reckless tactics, unbecoming a professional law enforcement organization of any kind — in this case, a couple of officers, in masks and plainclothes—one disguised as a construction worker—bum-rushing a man and his son with guns drawn with no visible law enforcement markings, flashing lights, or any sign that they’re anything more than car-jackers.

• Officers involved in ongoing patterns of misconduct, seemingly with impunity — in this case, the “construction worker” was “Brenden Cuni, an ICE supervisor, has been accused of excessive force and tackling a pregnant woman to the ground. Several of his arrests were later found to be unlawful in federal court.”

This same pattern of brutality and lawlessness has played out across the country, in community after community.

We see the same thing happen over and over again. ICE agents recklessly target and ram vehicles, open fire, and then lie about what happened — even when there’s video evidence to the contrary. They lie and cover up wrongdoing and stonewall investigations in their brutality. DHS routinely labels US citizens “terrorists.” It lies blatantly and repeatedly; its brutality is met with a near-total lack of accountability. Often the “target” in shootings and beatings isn’t who ICE thought it was anyway — and too often ICE doesn’t even bother determining whether someone it’s detained is a US citizen.

More than 506 US citizens have been detained incorrectly. Some have been beaten, including even while trying to enlist in the US military. Agents and officers are using brutal force on nonviolent offenders. Its officers assault bystanders who are doing nothing but exercising their constitutional rights, and they repeatedly have attempted to intimidate anyone who tries to document their abusive tactics. One US citizen was shot from behind while he tried to warn ICE agents about nearby children. It disappears people from the streets, sometimes releasing them later without charges. And tries to disappear witnesses to its wrongful shootings.

Agents and officers act and kill with impunity because history has taught them they’ll never face consequences.

ICE has had plenty of time — and plenty of money — to adjust its “bush league” tactics at this point. It has had plenty of time and plenty of money to buy its officers real uniforms and train them in how to do thoughtful takedown operations that minimize the risk to its officers, its targets, and the general public. The fact that it hasn’t done so is a real choice and an indication that its goal is neither effectiveness nor public safety — it’s terror.

Time and again, we see every public safety justification from the administration for the immigration crackdown is a lie. This is a terror campaign, targeting anyone in the country who isn’t white. It’s tactics are so terroristic that it’s unclear across much of the country who is ICE and who is just a criminal pretending to be ICE.

ICE has repeatedly promised it will deploy body cameras to its officers, but somehow — totally coincidentally — body cameras never seem to be on when ICE shoots someone. (When the body cameras are on, they repeatedly document stunning racism and slurs from officers.) But while it can’t seem to get body cameras on, it is surging ahead with buying electric-shock gloves for its officers.

ICE has been turbocharged with tens of billions of dollars and is breaking down at every stage of its process. Its hiring surge is — entirely predictably — a disaster. To speed the hiring of thousands of new officers, it — entirely predictably — cut training standards and vetting. As an AP investigation rounded up, “Two bankruptcies and six law enforcement jobs in three years. An allegation of lying in a police report to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman — an incident that led to a $75,000 settlement and criticism of his integrity. A third job candidate once failed to graduate from a police academy, then lasted only three weeks in his only job as a police officer. Their common bond: All were hired recently by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

As the Dropkick Murphys proclaimed in a song this year, ICE is becoming identified as an agency filled with wannabe gangsters who are “Too scared to join the military / Too dumb to be a cop.” Or, as I’ve reported before, other federal agents and law enforcement joke that the quality of the average ICE officer is so low that they are hired “by the pound, from the pound.” 

Amid the most recent surge, a Washington Post investigation last month found — entirely predictably — that “basic processes weren’t even followed” and “In recent months, the agency has begun quietly firing some of the recruits, according to three former DHS officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters shared with them privately. They said ICE has cited red flags that should have been identified earlier, or poor performance. Concerns about vetting exploded into public view this summer, after relatives and court records described the volatile history of a different recruit alleged to have been involved in the fatal shooting of an immigrant in Maine.”

Just as CBP’s previous hiring surge led to a giant tidal wave of crime and corruption, ICE officers are proving themselves a one-agency crime wave, incapable of policing its own ranks. Recent weeks have seen an officer arrested for entering an ex-girlfriend’s apartment; another allegedly drunk ICE officer fell asleep on a lawn in Fresno over the weekend and then was arrested after assaulting the 72-year-old man who woke him up.

CBP is still swamped by crime and corruption too — like the CBP officer convicted last month of raping and robbing Chinese sex workers, a Border Patrol who went viral for arresting a US citizen who then was arrested for drunkenly assaulting police officers and then died later of a drug overdose, or what WIRED found to be “hundreds of allegations of Customs and Border Protection workers misusing internal tools to look up romantic interests and track colleagues’ cell phones.”

In fact, the Ohio Immigration Alliance report in August found more than 152 ICE officers and CBP agents accused of sexual and physical abuse. It found “86% [of that group were] charged with or convicted of sex offenses, more than half targeted children, and many remained employed for decades despite red flags.”

And then we come to the horror show of ICE’s own facilities.

Throughout the year, we’ve seen a steady drumbeat of warnings and investigations into the inhumane conditions of ICE detention facilities. Mother Jones in August wrote a heartbreaking piece about how many people are dying in ICE custody — numbers that are up dramatically from the past as the administration transforms a process meant for purely civil detention into something that better resembles concentration camps. Reporter Isabela Dias wrote, “A staggering 55 people have died in ICE custody since Trump's return to office.” The numbers are unfortunately even higher today. Human Rights Watch wrote in June, “The mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody is at its highest level in over a decade and has more than doubled since Trump’s second term began. The rate is nearly four times that of the Biden administration, and more than two and a half times as high as that of the first Trump administration.” People are dying after being denied critical medical care. Conditions in these facilities are terrible.

We all remember last year, when Trump and DHS renditioned people — including US citizens — to a foreign torture gulag in Central America. This year, we’ve paid less attention to the fact that the Trump administration is rounding up Somalis and holding them at Guantanamo Bay, mostly, apparently, out of spite — at a cost of $118,000 per detainee. ICE is shuffling detainees between facilities to make them untraceable and last month began “disappearing” people from official records to make them impossible to locate.

DHS has built a mindbending air fleet of overpriced, high-end jets for detention, deportation, and executive travel. It’s not clear why DHS need such spacious accommodations for their executive travel.

At the same time, it’s been steadily expanding its monitoring of critics, weaponizing social media, investigating protest groups, and creating databases of political dissidents. DHS is monitoring and targeting people for travel even inside the United States. Even its own internal watchdog, the very unit that’s supposed to be policing ICE, is instead policing its critics. DHS’s own general counsel has been publicly posting an “enemies list” of federal judges the department doesn’t like. As Lisa Needham wrote in Public Notice in August, “The administration had engaged in utterly unprecedented surveillance in service of its theory that somehow everyone in Minnesota was engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy to make ICE thugs feel sad.” Protesters today are being prosecuted as “terrorists.” And, to top it all off, DHS has changed its own record retention policies to make it nearly impossible to ever recover text messages among agents and leadership.

And none of this is making us safer. Most head-smacking-ly of all, the Trump administration’s blinded focus on immigration has led to an actual decrease in its investigation and prosecution of crimes that are actually harming Americans. Federal gun and drug enforcement in Minnesota hit all-time lows amid the immigration crackdown there.

ICE and DHS also are clearly being used as the president’s praetorian guard, pursuing his conspiracy theories and made-up allegations of voter fraud in a way that Trump clearly hopes will sway the midterm elections. Election officials across the country are gameplanning for how to response if and when ICE officers show up at polling places.

This is all very un-ordinary.

Put all of that together and it’s easy to conclude: We are living through a reign of terror on America’s streets by a masked secret police force, loyal specifically to the president, who have been promised impunity as long as they target the regime’s enemies.

The fact that it is and was all so predictable — everyone who paid attention knew exactly how bad ICE’s hiring surge would go; everyone has seen the same playbook of bad tactics result in the deaths again and again of innocent, nonviolent Americans; everyone foresaw these concentration camp conditions would result in the deaths of nonviolent detainees — makes clear that the administration literally doesn’t care if ICE kills people. It’s not trying to build a well-run modern law enforcement agency. It’s not trying to hire people worthy of the public trust in a democracy. It’s not trying to build a culture of accountability and transparency, one respectful of the Constitution and beholden and responsive to thoughtful judicial and congressional oversight. It’s not even pretending to care about any of those things.

The Trump administration is building and running an unaccountable masked secret police.

It is a level of daily fascism and authoritarianism and terror that would have been unthinkable to us a decade ago.

And yet as terrible as this parade of horribles is, it might just represent the start. Mullin is under immense pressure to boost deportations even more and orders are floating around to ramp things up.

We need to be clear about how very un-ordinary all of this is. Daily life in America is not the same as it was two years ago.

GMG