It occurs to me that the piece I published yesterday on I.C.E. did little to explain both my outrage and my convictions about the actions the organization has taken over the past several months.
I wasn’t lying or hedging, I don’t believe that I.C.E. is the new Gestapo or the new Nazis. I also don’t like generalizing terms like thugs to be applied to 20,000 federal employees, most of whom are still career law enforcement who do their jobs judiciously and fairly.
So what is I.C.E. now? It’s certainly not the friendly officers who came into The Independent on many occasions. Those people mostly worked in customs, though a few did track down folks who were in Bar Harbor illegally. They were part of a subdued, daily experience of life on the island.
What it is happening now is something completely new in American life. It is a form of brutal and expressive totalitarianism. I’m honestly not sure totalitarianism is even the right word, because that is usually applied to nearly the entire population of a country, not just certain ethnic and racial minorities. It is brutal and controlling and while this is not its stated mission, it feels like it’s aimed at destroying people who don’t look like me.
Like most Americans, I believe that violence in our cities is something we should try to minimize, not exacerbate. There are criminals who are here illegally. There are people who have been repeatedly denied their appeals in court and know that their deportation is a matter of time. My heart goes out to these people for sure, but this is no longer what we are talking about.
There are dozens of videos of people, many of them American citizens, being followed, chased, detained, harrassed, and arrested by I.C.E. I’ve attached two below. It’s easy to find so many more of videos of I.C.E. randomly tear-gassing Americans, acting violently toward them, pulling people out of cars, aiming guns at pedestrian bystanders, racial profiling, and brutalizing people on the street.
There is a new kind of I.C.E. employee, hired with little experience, given little training, and then sent out into very stressful situations. There are videos of agents pointing their guns at protesters, of agents kicking a detainee in the head on a public street, of agents breaking windows, of agents reaching in and cutting a woman’s seatbelt to force her out of the car while she was on the way to a doctors appointment and trying to tell them that she had a traumatic brain injury.
My point is not to say that I.C.E. in its current form isn’t awful and doesn’t need to be reformed or maybe even rebuilt from the ground up. I understand the comparisons. The Gestapo were Hitler’s secret police. They had unlimited authority and enforced terror. They were allowed to abduct people off the street, detain them, and disappear them, all without any right to due process or judicial review.
To many it feels like I.C.E. is becoming Trump’s secret police. Last year The Big Beautiful Bill contained a huge increase in I.C.E. funding. It called for 12,000 new agents to be hired in the short term. It’s become difficult to find qualified applicants for federal officer jobs that start at $48,000 per year. I.C.E. has been accepting applicants whose most relevant experience is working at Wal-Mart or Walgreens. They have job counselors helping people work their way though A.I. generated resumes. Some of them have, according to some sources, been actively recruiting from groups like the Proud Boys. In some of the most horrific videos I’ve seen, new agents are waving around guns or spraying tear gas toward a crowd.
My point isn’t to say that any of the dozens of actions I mentioned above are acceptable in the least bit. My point is that the Gestapo or the Nazi Party are very different than what is happening now. As our knowledge of history decreases, we continue to grasp for analogies that don’t really fit.
We need new words for new things.
I.C.E. pulls an American citizen who was sleeping out of his house, refuses to allow him to get his identification, puts him in a car, drives him to a remote location, and demands he identifies himself.
A woman stops her car to avoid hitting I.C.E. agents. She thought if she drove towards them they would shoot her. When she did start to drive they grabbed her, cut her seat belt, and pulled her out of the car. She was on her way to see her physician for help with a traumatic brain injury.
There’s a new sheriff in town!