Is ICE the first harbinger of a ‘secret police' in the US?

The National

9 hours ago

The Iceman Cometh, the 1939 drama by American writer Eugene O'Neill, has at various times been described by reviewers as set in a stark, ruthless world and a play that 'blisters with intensity'.
In the eyes of some, such ­observ­ations could just as easily apply to today's ­America, a country where, under the ­presidency of Donald Trump, there is an almost palpable sense of unease and ­potency.
Today's America too is a country where that phrase 'The Iceman Cometh' has taken on an all too real and equally ­menacing connotation.
For the ICE men of today's ­America – agents from the Immigration and ­Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have ­become the calling card of the Trump ­administration's immigration crackdown.
US president Donald Trump has in effect created a personal army, experts warnThough ICE now occupies a '­noble' place in Trump's hierarchy of law ­enforcement, its detractors view it very ­differently. A modern-day 'Gestapo' or 'domestic stormtroopers for the MAGA agenda', say some. 'Trump's de facto ­private army – his security state within the state and a threat to democracy', say ­others.
What's certainly in no doubt is that Trump has propelled ICE into America's best-funded law enforcement agency.
As the Financial Times (FT) US national editor Edward Luce, recently highlighted, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB) signed into law by the president on July 4, ­lifted ICE's budget to an estimated $37.5 billion a year, a sum higher than Italy's entire ­defence budget and just below Canada's.
Writing a message of 'THANK YOU!' to the ICE workforce over the ­Independence Day holiday, Trump made clear that the BBB spending ­commitment would give the agency 'ALL of the ­Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History'.
The money set aside for ICE is ­eyewatering. The $37.5bn a year for ­operations aside, the spending bill ­includes a $170bn package for Trump's border-and-immigration crackdown, which includes $45bn for new ­detention facilities, including hiring ­thousands more officers and agents.
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In the eyes of Trump, ICE officers can do no wrong. 'The toughest people you'll ever meet,' he insists. His ­gushing ­reverence for ICE is also reflected in what Abigail Jackson, a White House ­spokesperson, described as 'well-deserved bonuses'.
Trump officials have said they'll ­provide $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE ­personnel as well as Border Patrol agents, along with $10,000 for new hires.
As Nick Miroff, staff writer at The ­Atlantic magazine who covers ­immigration issues, recently pointed out, as far as Trump sees it, the '20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They're the Untouchables in his (Trump's) MAGA crime drama'.
So just what is ICE, what exactly does it do, and perhaps more significantly, to what extent are fears over its growing power and perceived threat to democracy justified?
Established in 2003, ICE is one of the agencies under the Department of ­Homeland Security (DHS) created in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks.
Initially, the DHS's focus was ­counterterrorism. But soon, the presence of certain foreign groups began to be framed as a national security issue.
DHS encompasses two law ­enforcement directorates: Enforcement and ­Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland ­Security Investigations (HSI).
ERO is charged with enforcing US ­immigration laws and has 6100 ­deportation officers. HSI has about 6500 special agents who conduct transnational criminal investigations and do not ­usually participate in domestic ­immigration ­operations.
ICE was also created alongside Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP controls the borders, while ICE operates inside the country and it's this operation across America that has become the focus of controversy.
According to the agency's own website, ICE, along with its ERO officials, are tasked with identifying, arresting, ­detaining, and removing immigrants ­without authorisation in the US.
Back during his 2024 presidential ­campaign, when outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants, Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But since ­entering office, this has rapidly widened to include anyone without legal status, ICE officers, often masked and not wearing uniforms or displaying badges, have now been arresting people ­outside courtroom hearings, during traffic stops in workplace sweeps, and even from ­hospitals.
The agency's aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout America's ­immigrant communities, especially in Democrat-run cities.
Just these past weeks, Trump ­ordered ICE to step up its arrests and ­deportation ­­efforts in Democratic strongholds, ­doubling down on a politicised ­anti-immigration drive after major ­protests against ICE in Los Angeles.
'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,' Trump said on his Truth Social platform.
(Image: Win McNamee, Getty Images) 'These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power ­Centre,' Trump claimed, citing debunked ­right-wing conspiracy theories that ­undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections in significant numbers.
With every week that passes, ICE ­operation are gathering momentum. For its part, the administration says its moves – which include hundreds of deportation flights, the expansion of third-country removals, and Trump's invocation of the seldom-used 1798 Alien Enemies Act – are necessary to stem unauthorised ­immigration to the United States.
The law is a wartime authority that gives the president sweeping powers to detain or deport noncitizens with little or no due process, and ICE have become its enforcers, much to the disquiet of many Democrat politicians, human rights ­activists and ordinary citizens.
ICE is now arresting four times as many non-criminals as those with ­criminal ­convictions each week, ­according to ­David Bier of the Cato Institute, a ­libertarian think tank that was cited by the FT.
The number of immigrants in detention with no criminal charges or convictions jumped 1300% from January to mid-June, he wrote in an analysis.
Numbers matter here, for ICE is ­under tremendous pressure to make more ­arrests to meet quotas set by senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown.
Miller set an aggressive quota of 3000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal have pushed ICE officers into more communities and businesses.
Not everyone within the ranks of ICE are happy with this and other aspects of the policy.
According to The Atlantic magazine's immigration writer Nic Miroff, who has interviewed many current and former ICE agents who spoke on condition of anonymity, many described 'a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials ­demanding more and more'.
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Some ICE employees according to ­Miroff 'believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe'.
With deportations becoming a top ­domestic priority for the Trump ­administration, some Homeland ­Security Investigation (HSI) officers along with those from the FBI, the Drug ­Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the ­Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and ­Explosives have been put on ­immigration enforcement duties. It's a shift in duties many do not agree with.
One veteran HSI agent complained to Miroff that his division which ­usually ­focuses on cartel drug-trafficking ­operations have had agents moved to immigration-enforcement arrests as part of ICE operations.
'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' the agent told ­Miroff. 'It's infuriating,' adding that he is thinking of quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners'.
But complain as some ICE agents do, many Americans currently reserve their sympathies for those being targeted by the agents. Stories emerging from ­detention facilities where those arrested by ICE are being held are only adding to that ­sympathy as well as a sense of outrage.
Earlier this month, Trump held a tour of one facility that's been dubbed '­Alligator Alcatraz'. Its name is a reference to both the local reptile population and the ­former maximum-security Alcatraz ­Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California.
An aerial view of the migrant detention centre dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' (Image: Chandan Khanna/AFP) Constructed in a little over eight days and meant to accommodate up to 3000 detainees, since then accounts and ­reports from the facility point to ­appalling ­conditions. They suggest too that the ­design of the site is flawed and will ­compromise the safety of people ­being held there.
Stories relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in the makeshift Florida detention centre for migrants in the Everglades made for grim reading about the conditions detainees endure.
'Toilets that didn't flush. ­Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. ­Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less ­confidential calls with attorneys,' were among some of the accounts detailed by the Miami Herald.
The newspaper also told of lights ­being left on inside the facility 24 hours a day, with detainees saying there are no clocks and there is scant sunlight coming through the heavy-duty tents, making it difficult for them to know whether it is day or night.
Currently, ICE is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, even though funding until the ­latest boost was available for only 41,000 ­detention beds. This means that ­processing centres are packed with ­people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells.
Worrying as such reports are, it's the growth of ICE, its increasingly ­politicised role and the fact that it appears beyond accountability that concerns many ­Americans.
Earlier this year, ICE's in-house ­watchdog was scrapped and for the time being, America's lower courts are ­hamstrung in their efforts to rein it in.
As the FT's national editor Edward Luce recently observed, given that the ­Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping ­immunity from 'official' acts he takes as president … 'that makes ICE Trump's de facto private army – his ­security state within the state'.
Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making, insist some ­experts on authoritarian regimes.
Lee Morgenbesser is an associate ­professor with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane, and fellow with the Australian Research Council.
Having studied historical and contemporary secret police forces, Morgenbesser says they typically meet five criteria.
First, they're a police force targeting ­political opponents and dissidents.
Second, they're not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator.
Third, the identity of their members and their operations are secret.
Fourth, they specialise in political ­intelligence and surveillance operations.
And finally, they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, ­indefinite detentions, disappearances and torture.
In a recent article in the online ­platform The Conversation, and using these criteria to assess how close ICE is to ­becoming a secret police force, ­Morgenbesser ­concludes that 'overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria".
While ICE has yet to target political opponents, which Morgenbesser defines narrowly as members of the Democratic Party, and it is not directly controlled by Trump, he maintains that ICE's ­'current structure provides him with plausible ­deniability.'
In short, he says that while ICE is 'far from resembling history's most feared ­secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates'.
'When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast ­becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism,' Morgenbesser warns.
As ICE makes its presence felt in a ­growing number of American ­communities, the controversy over its role is likewise certain to escalate.
While a majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children or who arrived many years ago to stay.
Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov in mid-June showed that only 42% viewed ICE favourably – an eight percentage-point drop from February and the start of Trump's term.
For now, the ICE men continue to cometh and America, a nation of ­immigrants, faces an altogether ­different reckoning over its future democratic ­credentials.