This is the second of a three-part series on ongoing issues with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it reaches into our areas. -–Editor
Part 2: True designs of the administration
Let me be emphatic; all undocumented immigrants have committed a crime. They have all broken immigration law. All of the undocumented immigrants I spoke to frankly admitted this.
And almost all of them also expressed a real desire for immigration reform. That surprised me—at first. Although, on second thought, they would almost certainly benefit from any rationalized system—which would necessarily recognize their indispensable importance to the U.S. economy.
In all justice, it might trigger a second amnesty—like that signed into law by President Ronald Regan in 1986, granting 3 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. People who have served here in our hardest jobs for 20 years have earned it. Call it sweat equity.
Reform is badly needed. But Donald Trump’s new ICE is not the reform we need.
Surprisingly, it is not even effective at arresting the undocumented for deportation. “You’re not going to arrest illegal immigrants by marching down the street in full battle regalia,” Jason Houser, a former ICE chief-of-staff, is quoted as saying (The Economist, “Trumpforce,” Nov. 15, 2025).
Given the real danger and dire poverty of their counties of departure, ICE terror is unlikely to inspire mass “reverse immigration” either. As bad as things are, none of the people I spoke to spoke of fleeing. They spoke of hiding.
But mass deportation doesn’t appear to be the real objective of Trump’s terror campaign. It is doubtful that the Republican Party’s billionaire and trillionaire donor class or its millionaire Congress would ever allow for the mass deportation of 11 million undocumented workers—even if it were logistically or politically possible. They wouldn’t—their wealth and status depends on the mass exploitation of immigrant labor.
A showy surge in immigration arrests, emphasizing terror tactics, and the production of salacious anti-immigrant propaganda would deliver all the emotional “satisfaction” of Trump’s “build a wall” campaign promise, while actually deepening America’s economic status quo.
Thoroughly terrorized, the remaining mass of undocumented workers would be less visible in the public sphere, more silent and more compliant in their own exploitation. They would become much less political—and much more profitable. That is precisely the effect this deportation campaign is having, and I would argue, that is its intended aim. It fits the facts, and it fits all the political requirements. It fits.
Moving Targets
But it’s worse—much worse than that. Seemly, by design, the target of this terror is wider in its scope than undocumented immigrants. The target appears to be “all brown people” in America.
During a much needed break between our interviews, I asked my translator, “Marisol,” whether she felt targeted by ICE herself. A second-generation Mexican-American and an elected public official, she should feel safe. By way of answer, “Marisol” related a bitter joke to me, which illustrates how the campaign has been widely perceived in the Latin-American community. “ICE agents use ‘the brown bag test.’ They hold a brown bag to your face, and if the color matches—bam, you’re an illegal. Off you go to Alligator Alcatraz,” she said.
“Are you afraid?” is a question I asked all the Latino U.S. citizens I spoke to for this article. I quote “Marisol” because her answer is representative.
She spoke to me of the waves of fear within this American community touched off by each made-for-TV raid. The last and the biggest wave came when it seemed San Francisco would be next. That fear is still rippling and reverberating throughout the Bay Area. The chill is on.
There are still prominent Latino events in her district—she showed me photos from a Mexican rodeo the week before on her phone—but there are fewer now. And being out in the community now involves second guessing, precautions, some bravery—and political defiance. Many are choosing to keep their heads down.
To test the prevalence of the belief that ICE was using promiscuous, “brown paper bag” racial profiling, I asked a sample of Americans of Afghani, Indian, Egyptian, Brazilian, Filipino, Black, Chinese and Native descent. By degrees of severity, they all felt targeted by Trump’s ICE campaign—perhaps they would be harassed by gunmen at CVS or their status challenged. Several related ICE to the end of DEI visibility and their erasure from American history curricula.
The anxiety, isolation, concealment and dread now seeping through Black, Brown, Native and Asian communities—under pressure from a predominantly white enforcement apparatus answering to a white government that treats them as criminal—gives Trump’s open-ended mass deportation campaign the character of a white supremacist restoration in America. One abetted by billionaires seeking even greater economic power over us.
“National minorities” are the broad target … for now. By pretext of immigration reform, Trump now commands his own secretive police force operating throughout the country. It can target individual opponents or it can create economic and political chaos in whole regions. “Which political opponent, community or state in America will be targeted next?” was a live wire theme running through our taut private conversations. It is a question all Americans should be asking now. By pretext of the law, it could be anyone.
I, reader, am a white man. But I am also a journalist. Will armed presidential police bring a trumped-up charge of “aiding and abetting alien enemies” to my door? Who isn’t economically involved with illegal immigrants? Who hasn’t said a disparaging thing against Trump?
American Fascism
Whether white nationalist restoration is the express design or an approved byproduct, that is the outcome, and it tracks with what we’ve seen and what we know of an administration that canceled the observation of Juneteenth (marking the end of slavery in America).
This article is a table—crunch the numbers:
In this new, muscular ICE, there is now, for the first time in the history of America, a large national police force that answers solely to the president.
There are no democratic checks or limits to this new presidential power.
All the qualities and characteristics of this force appear chosen and calibrated to inspire terror. It is secretive and non-transparent to review. Its arresting officers are masked, armored, anonymous—often refusing to give their names or show their badges. They are heavily armed, militarized, aggressive—often violent; they are dismissive of Miranda rights, dismissive of warrants.
They violate declared sanctuaries, homes, schools, hospitals and churches.
They attack peaceful protestors.They stage political propaganda. They claim immunity from prosecution.
They strike in lightning raids at any location in the nation. Their deployment has been heavily partisan, a tool not for law, but for the consolidation of political power.
With charges of violating immigration law, they frequently carry trumped up charges of the most monstrous kind—rape, murder, treason. They dehumanize the most vulnerable among us.
They disappear people—that is their work. By a pattern that appears to be a policy, they often fail to inform families of these disappearances or their judicial process—family members just “disappear,” fanning the terror.
They disappear people into a dark judicial process that frequently violates human rights and international norms of due process before the law—some of our most important checks against tyranny.
They are linked with barbaric secret prisons.
By its practical effects, their mission takes on a white supremacist cast, suggesting a limited form of racial cleansing through forced removal and the political and economic subordination of nonwhites broadly through terror.
This is not a historical metaphor or a rhetorical flourish; the newly reformed ICE is being operated as an authoritarian secret police force. They are acting like Gestapo—albeit Gestapo adapted to a modern American context of ubiquitous smart phones, steroidal militarism, social media obsession, show biz politics, billionaire aristocracy, and stars and stripes iconography. If their use and tactical pattern is allowed to harden into the new normal, the United States will have crossed the line into a white supremacist police state.
Finally, of the one who wields this enormous power, Donald Trump—the billionaire president: ICE’s arbitrary and vindictive commander-in-chief is sustained by a nascent cult of personality; his crushing policies flatten institutional checks and exaggerate existing economic and racial hierarchies to concentrate power in his own hands.
He behaves in openly authoritarian ways, seeking to terrorize his many political opponents. He has already tried to overturn the result of one presidential election he lost, and his allies have spoken openly about seeking an unconstitutional third term. In ICE, he now has his terror weapon.
Their tactical masks are off, reader. In the scale and spectacle of this “mass deportation campaign,” the Trump administration’s intentions can no longer be disguised. If judged only by the all pervading fear, this is fascism—fascism in a new form, fitted to a new era. At the end of 24 interviews, the only question that remained to me was “Will the fascists win this time?”
It’s time to take our gloves off.
Next week, Part 3: Fighting Fear.
Learn more: linktr.ee/iceterrorANDamericandemocracy.
