ICE: America’s Brownshirts
By 
Part of this funding increase would go to hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, and more than 8,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents. That would give ICE more agents than the FBI has in the field. It goes without saying that this would be a disaster for not only undocumented immigrants, who would be ruthlessly hunted down like fugitives, but also to any brown-skinned person in America, who can expect to be subjected to harassment by agents sent out to please Stephen Miller’s insatiable desire for public displays of racism at all costs.
It’s even worse than that. Think about this expansion of ICE in the context of the entire arc of Trump’s rise to power. This man falsely claimed to win the 2020 election, tried to have his supporters overthrow the government to keep him in power, came back and won again, and pardoned the people who tried to overthrow the government on his behalf. The main thing he learned from his first term was to surround himself only with fanatical loyalists. The entire top level of the federal government is now staffed with a buffet of lunatics, incompetents, and extremists whose defining characteristic is their loyalty to Trump above the law. This includes the military and the federal law enforcement agencies.
Within the ranks of the military and law enforcement, however, absolute loyalty cannot be achieved so quickly. Even though those constituencies are strongly Republican, there is also some significant level of anger at Trump as well. FBI agents have seen colleagues purged just for working on January 6 cases; Army soldiers were forced to march in Trump’s stupid parade; Marines, many of them from immigrant families, have been outrageously deployed to patrol Los Angeles. These things create dissatisfaction in the ranks that is hard to measure, but real.
So how can Trump be sure that the absolute loyalty he demands extends all the way down to his foot soldiers? By hiring new ones. Who do you think those ten thousand fresh new ICE agents will be? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that they will be people who are okay with the proposition of taking a job with ICE as it is run under Donald Trump. This is not a job anyone will take by accident. It’s on the news every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting against it. This creates a self-selecting pool. It will attract only those who are not repulsed by it. Job applicants will consist of those who see pictures of dudes wearing tactical vests and face coverings jumping out of unmarked trucks and grabbing people and think to themselves, “that looks cool.”
The new and expanded version of ICE will not just be immigration enforcers. They will be the most ideologically reliable armed branch of government for Donald Trump. They will be the 2025 parallel of the brownshirts. They will be the most obvious place for the president to turn for dirty work in the streets. Because of this, I guarantee, once they are in place, you will see their sphere of activities expand. Enforcing immigration laws will be defined to include “going after those who try to impede the enforcement of immigration laws”—a group that, according to Trump and Miller, includes protesters, journalists, and Democratic politicians. The increasingly outrageous expansion of ICE activities will certainly be rubber stamped by a Republican Congress which is already busy trying to make it illegal to report the identities of the masked men who have come to arrest your neighbor.
The question to ask yourself about what is coming is not, “Is that legal?” It is, “With Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fully in control of the government, and with no checks on their power within the government’s three branches, what is the next thing they need to achieve their agenda?” What they need is a loyal private army. And that is what they’re building. Be very afraid of this.
It’s so great to see our nation collapse into the national version of Jim Crow.