There Is No Reforming ICE, It Must Be Abolished

You’ve seen the videos. Men in tactical vests, their faces hidden by masks and sunglasses, grabbing people off the street. They don't have visible badges or nameplates. They shove their targets into unmarked vehicles and speed away. This isn't a scene from some South American dictatorship in the 1970s; it’s happening right now, in the United States. These are the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that has metastasized into an American Gestapo, operating with impunity and serving a clear fascist agenda.

As Heidi Bayrich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, puts it, "I don't know of any publicly available information on who exactly these masked men are... The fact that they won't identify themselves... makes this all the more ominous." This anonymity isn’t an accident; it’s a feature. It’s designed to create fear, eliminate accountability, and allow for the exercise of raw, arbitrary power. To understand how we got here, we have to look at what ICE is and what it was built to do.

The Birth of a Monster

ICE was forged in the paranoid fires of the post-9/11 era. The 2002 Homeland Security Act ripped immigration enforcement from the Department of Justice and placed it under the new, sprawling Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This wasn't just a bureaucratic shuffle; it fundamentally reframed immigration as a national security threat.

While people use "ICE" as a catch-all, the agency has several components. The one terrorizing communities is Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). This is the arm responsible for apprehension, detention, and deportation. Under the Obama administration, while deportations were high—earning him the moniker "deporter in chief"—enforcement was at least ostensibly focused. The priorities were national security threats, individuals with serious criminal convictions, and recent border crossers. There was a hierarchy.

That all changed the second Donald Trump took office. Within his first week, he signed an executive order to "ensure the faithful execution of the immigration laws of the United States against all removable aliens." The priorities were gone. The new policy was to target virtually any undocumented person, regardless of how long they'd been in the country or their ties to the community.

The numbers tell the story. In the last year of the Obama administration, ICE conducted 5,940 interviews and screenings of U.S. citizens. In Trump's first year, that number skyrocketed to 27,540. What does that tell you? It tells you that agents were simply driving around, looking for people who looked Latino, and rounding them up. It’s state-sanctioned racial profiling, plain and simple.

A Dual State, an Invasion Fantasy

To justify this brutal campaign, the Trump administration has constructed a completely false emergency. Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s immigration agenda, laid it bare: “No, we were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered... If every foreign trespasser gets to have their own federal trial prior to removal, then there is no liberation.”

This is insane, balls-out fascism. It’s a transparent attempt to invoke emergency powers and suspend the rule of law. Miller isn't using "invasion" as a metaphor; he's claiming it as a legal reality to bypass due process. It’s a playbook straight out of the 1930s. The German political scientist Ernst Frankel described how the Nazi regime operated as a "dual state." On one hand, you have the "normative state," with its courts and laws that maintain a facade of order. On the other, you have the "prerogative state," which "exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees."

Inside the Camps: Dehumanization as Policy

The prerogative state requires a place to put its victims. The U.S. now has an archipelago of over 500 ICE detention centers, jails, and prisons—a massive estate for churning through human lives, many run by private, for-profit companies. A congressional mandate initially set a quota of 34,000 beds, but under Trump, the daily population has swelled to nearly 60,000, cramming people into facilities that cannot handle the numbers.

The conditions are a deliberate exercise in dehumanization. Detainees report being chained at the wrist, waist, and chest for hours on a bus with no access to a toilet, told by guards to defecate on the floor. One woman told USA Today they were packed in like "sardines in a jar," denied showers for days, and left unfed for 36 hours. Her conclusion: "We smelled worse than animals."

This is a tactic as old as tyranny. You strip people of their humanity by forcing them to live in filth, and then point to their condition as justification for your cruelty. It’s no coincidence that a 2018 investigation by The Intercept found that sexual assault and harassment are "not only widespread, but systemic" in ICE detention. The agency is legally required to release data on these abuses. It never has.

These are not merely prisons. They are concentration camps. The term has become associated with the Holocaust's extermination camps, but its original meaning is precise: camps for concentrating a civilian population. That is exactly what these are.

Who Joins the Gestapo?

So who are the people carrying out these orders? Who are the masked men? We don't really know, and that's the fucking point. They are an unaccountable force, much like Putin’s "little green men" in Ukraine. Many are not even wearing official gear, just a t-shirt, jeans, and a medical mask—the very masks they decried as tyranny during a global pandemic.

The pay for an ERO agent starts at around $50,000. For comparison, the NYPD starting salary is over $60,000, and they still can't fill their open positions. What kind of person is attracted to a lower-paying job with a culture of extrajudicial thuggery? You get the people who couldn't get into a real police force. You get the bullies, the sadists, and the ideologues. You get the Proud Boys and the January 6th insurrectionists that Trump has promised to pardon.

And now, this force is getting an unprecedented cash infusion. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" hands ICE a budget three times larger than the FBI's. It includes $45 billion for new detention facilities and funds to hire an additional 10,000 new agents. We are witnessing the creation and funding of a massive internal army, loyal not to the Constitution, but to a single man and his fascist movement. Unlike the military or the FBI, which have deep institutional traditions that can sometimes serve as a check on executive overreach, ICE is a new entity. Its only culture is one of cruelty and allegiance to Trump.

There is no reforming this. You cannot fix an organization whose very purpose has become the violent enforcement of a racist ideology. The call to "Abolish ICE" isn't just a slogan; it's the only rational and moral response. The agency must be dismantled, its functions broken up and returned to accountable bodies. Anything less is an acceptance of the simmering, ambiguous violence that marks the slide into authoritarianism. This is not a drill. The secret police are already here.