ICE as Paramilitaries

ICE agents’ aggressive tactics in arresting people in their homes, workplaces, and from their cars have sparked nationwide protests, as they appear to be acting as the president’s paramilitary police rather than as a publicly accountable government agency. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) oversees ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is conducting raids in Minneapolis and other Democratic cities to find aliens who have not become citizens and are believed to be dangerous.

A Quinnipiac University National Poll of registered voters found that 57% disapprove of the way ICE is enforcing immigration laws. As expected, the two parties are far apart, with Republicans at 12% and Democrats at 94% disapproving. But Republican candidates this fall should be concerned that 64% of Independents disapprove.

ICE, justifying the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, released a font of misinformation.

A national wave of them showed ICE agent Jonathan Ross shooting three shots into a car driven by a white middle-aged woman, Renee Good, while she was slowly moving her car out of the way of Ross. He appears to be standing in front of or near the front of the vehicle.

Despite Kristi Noem, Secretary of DHS, immediately claiming after the incident that he was “run over,” all the videos posted on social media show Ross standing on his feet. He walked toward the car after it crashed, while Good apparently died at the steering wheel from his shots. The majority of those in the Quinnipiac poll who saw the video say the shots should not have been fired by the ICE agent, with 59% of independents agreeing that it was not justified.

The majority of those in the Quinnipiac poll who saw the video say the shots should not have been fired by the ICE agent, with 59% of independents agreeing that it was not justified.

Noem said that Ross was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding. That may be true, because if the side of Good’s car brushed him, even at a slow speed, the officer could have sustained bruises. By definition, bruises are minor, localized internal bleeding; the medical term is ecchymosis. The government has not released hospital information about Ross’s injury.

Noem labeled Good and other protestors as terrorists and said she would prosecute them as such. However, a judge threw out the government’s request to label her a terrorist suspect because it was too weak an accusation.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem regularly defends ICE’s arrests of immigrants as preventing potential violence from terrorists, not provoking violence from civilians monitoring or protesting ICE activities. Noem told reporters that “the brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our country safer.”

However, just over two weeks after killing Good, ICE’s aggressive actions led to the killing of 37-year-old intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti. He was monitoring ICE’s actions toward immigrants and protestors by filming them on his phone. As before, the federal government expressed no remorse for killing a civilian and relied only on the version of events from the five federal agents involved. They maintained that he “violently resisted” and that he refused to give them a gun he was legally allowed to carry, until the officers fired “defensive shots.”

Wall Street Journal reporters reviewed videos of the killing and concluded that bystander footage contradicts the agent’s account of what happened. Pretti held his phone in his right hand, and his left hand, empty, was raised above his head as he tried to protect the woman ICE had just pushed down, all while he was pepper-sprayed. This visual evidence shows that the federal government didn’t even look at the videos before concocting a story that Pretti was shot after he approached officers with a handgun.

Ultimately, Noem is responsible for ICE’s actions. The Quinnipiac poll showed that the majority of registered voters disapprove of how she is managing ICE. Noem has the FBI conducting the investigation into the Goods’ killing, not local authorities, because the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension withdrew from the investigation after the FBI denied them access to evidence. It’s assumed that Noem will again deny local authorities access to the evidence they release to embellish their narrative.

ICE tactics for apprehending immigrants are based on Trump’s portrayal of immigrants as either criminals or potentially dangerous. This objective is so vague that it allows ICE to meet Trump’s high quota for arresting and deporting immigrants.

Trump has effectively converted a process that provided orderly, regulated enforcement of immigration into an aggressive, unaccountable police force to expel as many immigrants as ICE can identify as potentially dangerous. In effect, he has his own paramilitary police force accountable only to him, not to the public.

Trump’s immigration agenda seems to reflect a nationalist philosophy that the “nativist” population needs protection from being subjugated by both legal and undocumented immigrants. But the reality is that immigrants commit fewer crimes and are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens. The Migration Policy Institute found that in 2020, immigrants were roughly 60% less likely to be incarcerated than native-born citizens.

While the deaths of Good and Pretti sparked national protests, they are not the only deaths attributed to ICE. The Trace,an American nonprofit journalism outlet, collected data from late 2025 and early 2026 showing at least 6 deaths attributed to ICE during the current Trump administration.

Have ICE Detention Centers purposefully become unsafe?

According to ICE detention data, 32 ICE detainees’ deaths have been recorded during this period. The majority of deaths were attributed to persistent failings in medical and mental care, including incorrect or incomplete diagnoses in 88% of reviewed cases.

Is that cruel carelessness a strategy to scare immigrants into self-deporting from America in fear of being sent to such facilities? Perhaps. According to DSH, approximately 1.9 million people have voluntarily left the U.S. (“self-deported”) since January 20, 2025. But those numbers have not been independently verified.

The Trump administration pays private businesses to operate HDS detention facilities for those arrested by ICE police. Investigations found that these facilities often fail to provide timely emergency care. Even when problems are identified, the private operators rarely make changes, even when multiple violations are documented.

This lack of public oversight is exemplified by attempts in 2025 by at least a dozen members of Congress to gain access to detention facilities, which were denied despite federal law prohibiting such denials for oversight.

At the end of November 2025, approximately three-quarters of the 66,000 detainees had no criminal convictions. Many of those convicted had only minor offenses, such as traffic violations, according to data collected by The Trace. ICE often classifies people with pending criminal charges as “criminal arrests.” This practice deprives these individuals of their due process rights by arresting them before a conviction. The Cato Institute’s review of ICE bookings shows that only 5% of all detainees had a violent criminal conviction.

Is ICE bolstering a nativist strategy to limit immigration?

ICE claims they employ targeted arrests when they apprehend a suspected immigrant for allegedly breaking the law or lacking proper immigration papers. In effect, a targeted arrest allows them to arrest individuals at the workplace, while attending school, or while in a courthouse for some matter.

ICE’s mission statement states that by targeting, they can identify aliens who may pose a threat to national security or public safety or otherwise undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws. The breadth of these three conditions has led to the arrest and potential deportation of people who pose no national security threat and rarely pose a physical threat to public safety.

In essence, Trump is using ICE to deport as many immigrants as possible because they somehow “undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws.” Notice that it’s not that they have violated

These laws, but that they have “undermined the integrity” of them. That is a value judgment that reflects a right-wing nationalist belief that it is necessary “to protect the homeland,” to use a phrase from ICE’s mission statement, before too many foreigners displace “native” Americans.

This strategy has led Americans with darker complexions to feel that they need to carry an I.D. that shows they are citizens. This is exactly what the MAGA movement opposes: the requirement that U.S. citizens be issued national identity cards to prove their citizenship. Since ICE arrests have not affected the white MAGA base, it may not stir their concern.

Here are a couple of examples of how ICE is protecting our nation from supposed criminals. 

In the second week of January, ICE police arrested a family of legal asylum-seekers as they approached a Portland hospital to rush their 7-year-old daughter to emergency medical treatment. ICE police arrived in three unmarked vehicles and surrounded the family’s car in the hospital’s emergency room parking lot.

According to Oregon state Rep. Ricki Ruiz, “the parents pleaded to let their 7-year-old daughter… be released so she could receive urgently needed medical care. But that request was denied.”

Instead, they were driven for over two hours to Tacoma, WA, and then flown to the ICE detention facility, the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, run by the private company CoreCivic near San Antonio, Texas. Like other privately run ICE facilities holding detainees, this one had been accused of providing inadequate medical care for children and poor sanitary and health conditions.

Neither parent has a known criminal record and had previously been assigned a 2028 immigration court date to plead their asylum cases. Two weeks earlier, another instance of young children being placed in out-of-state holding-tank facilities occurred. Common Dreams reported that federal agents seized at least four children from Minnesota public schools, including a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, who were sent to the same Dilley facility.

According to the US Department of Homeland Security, 6,000 family units are currently detained, and about 5,000 children who were separated from their parents or relatives during Trump’s first term remain un reunited with their families.

It’s not just children who are subjected to ICE’s paramilitary intrusion into school buildings; they are also invading people’s homes. ICE agents forced their way into ChongLy Scott Thao’s home without a warrant and held him at gunpoint while handcuffing him. Thao is a naturalized U.S. citizen with no criminal record. Nevertheless, they forced him outside in his underwear, with only a blanket covering his shoulders, in the freezing Minnesota cold.

According to Thao, he was driven to the “middle of nowhere” while being interrogated. The agents then realized they had the wrong man. They drove him back without apologizing or explaining why he was shoved outside without being allowed to dress.

Trump has created an unaccountable paramilitary agency.

Trump, through his appointed Secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense, has converted ICE into a militarized agency that operates more like a private police force than a public one.

In fact, ICE agents are not trained to act as police because they cannot legally enforce local laws that police are trained to enforce. However, a federal statute (8 U.S.C. § 1357) allows them to arrest anyone who commits a federal offense in their presence or for whom there is probable cause to believe they have committed a federal felony. Neither condition concerns immigration status.

This means that ICE could be effective in carrying out Trump’s agenda of sweeping anyone into custody who is suspected of being an immigrant or citizen who has broken a federal law, such as hindering ICE agents from barging into a home, school, or church to arrest suspected criminals.

In practice, Trump is using ICE rather than the U.S. military in Democratic cities to sweep people into detention facilities for extended periods. Consequently, Noeme, with DOJ Secretary Bondi’s approval, could determine that ICE was not breaching the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the military from being used for domestic law enforcement. Those taken into custody may not be guilty, but the courts could decide their innocence. In the meantime, they are off the streets.

The clearest sign that ICE has become an unsupervised paramilitary force is that the DOJ has declared that its ICE agents are not subject to judicial review. Vice President J.D. Vance publicly said that ICE agents are immune from prosecution in the context of the killing of Renée Good. By extension, one can expect him to say the same about Pretti’s death.

In addition, to avoid obtaining a judicial warrant to enter a home, Secretary of Defense Kash Patel has assigned military lawyers to serve as administrative judges who then issue administrative warrants. This sleight of hand relieves ICE agents of the need to go to civil court to obtain permission to invade a home.

However, legal scholars say this move represents an unprecedented expansion of the executive branch’s authority. This arrangement could reach the Supreme Court. Will it align with Trump or with a judicial system, independent of the military, to dispense justice?

Because these shortcuts circumvent our nation’s customary practices that require police and military personnel to be accountable to the public, we have an organization accountable only to the person who controls it. That would be President Trump.

With his insatiable appetite for stamping his name on everything from golf courses to the Kennedy Center, will the public see TRUMP ICE created, as he did with the new Trump Kennedy Center? Democrats in Congress could introduce such a resolution. Would Republicans vote for it? Why not, if they support ICE actions?

The post ICE as Paramilitaries appeared first on CounterPunch.org.