ICE: Now a lawless agency?

ICE’s operation in Minneapolis is looking “more and more like a siege on a city than an effort to enforce the law there,” said Zeeshan Aleem in MS.now. Eleven days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good on a residential street, masked immigration officers broke down the door of St. Paul resident ChongLy Thao—a 56-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record—and dragged him out at gunpoint in handcuffs and boxer shorts in subfreezing conditions. He was released an hour later. Shawn and Destiny Jackson, both 26 and both American, were driving home from a child’s basketball game when ICE blasted their car with tear gas and stun grenades, forcing them to perform CPR on their 6-month-old baby. Local police chiefs are reporting that their own off-duty officers—the nonwhite ones, specifically—have been stopped and asked for proof of citizenship. Nor are these aberrations, said Radley Balko in The New Republic. “It is now routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles,” and any bystander who dares protest or record ICE’s violence risks becoming a victim of it. To state the obvious, “this isn’t supposed to happen in a free society.” But under President Trump, distinctions between the U.S. and the despotic regimes of history “are getting harder and harder to make.”

“ICE is the biggest cog” in Trump’s repressive machine, said Roque Planas in The Guardian. But every agency under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is joining the effort. That includes the Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol, whose swaggering, pint-size “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino now regularly shows up in cities far from the border. When the department was first constituted, in the panicked aftermath of 9/11, there were bipartisan fears we might be gifting some future autocrat the tools to control the American people, said Nick Miroff in The Atlantic. A quarter-century later, Noem’s DHS has become exactly “what its critics feared.”

Americans, mostly, are “horrified by what they see,” said Kate Andrews in The Washington Post. Even before Good’s killing, ICE’s net approval rating was 14 points underwater—down 30 points in a year. And only 38% of U.S. adults now approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, down from 49% last March. With midterms looming, those numbers have spooked Trump’s “brain trust,” said Alex Isenstadt and Marc Caputo in Axios. Even Trump himself, according to one adviser, has “expressed some discomfort” over ICE’s conduct. Trump “wants mass deportations,” said the source. “What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing.”

Trump is uncomfortable, said Chris Brennan in USA Today, only because Americans aren’t taking the bait of ICE’s provocations. His ultimate desire, the unrealized dream of his first term, is to “invade America’s cities with America’s military,” putting Democratic strongholds and pivotal swing-state districts under his control. For that to happen, he needs ICE to provoke civil unrest, giving him “a pretext to trigger the Insurrection Act.” But so far, the only violence we’re seeing is from ICE, which leaves Trump stuck. ICE’s “stormtrooper raids” are not primarily about immigration, said Greg Sargent in The New Republic. This is “a campaign of deliberate terror,” designed in part—yes—to encourage illegal migrants to self-deport. But mainly it’s to “send a warning” to ordinary Americans: that if we resist Trump’s agenda, our citizenship will grant us no more protection than it did Renee Good.