AnarchoNinaAnalyzes<p>As far back as the first Trump administration, I was writing about the way the president's absolute power over immigration policy and enforcement, combined with Trump's ethno-nationalist worldview, and ICE's disturbingly broad powers to act as a private army for the executive, ultimately made ICE Trump's literal "Gestapo." I'm old enough to have been for abolishing ICE from its inception as a federal agency back in 2003, but now that we've actually seen what happens when an authoritarian president trying to establish a Christian Nationalist ethnostate gets ahold of a poorly regulated security force full of white nationalists, I think it behooves everyone who isn't a fascist themselves to advocate for abolishing ICE as a matter of personal preservation. If that sounds radical to you, please let me remind you that immigration officials and ICE agents are *already* arresting judges and opposition party politicians on made up "obstruction" and "trespassing" charges to ram through illegal mass deportations without interference from folks who care about things like "the law," or "human rights."</p><p> As this excellent article by Mehdi Hasan points out, the need to abolish ICE entirely wasn't always a "radical" left wing position in American politics; as recently as 2018 even "centrist" Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand and future Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris were both willing to publicly say the agency needed to be ripped down to the studs and "reimagined." So now that Trump has fully unleashed ICE to behave as his own private Gestapo, where is the Democratic Party on the subject of abolishing ICE today? As Hasan notes, nowhere at all; and that includes progressive firebrands like AOC and Bernie Sanders. </p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/democrats-abolish-ice-trump" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theguardian.com/commentisfree/</span><span class="invisible">2025/may/13/democrats-abolish-ice-trump</span></a></p><p>Ice has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished</p><p>"So where are the Dems on this? Why aren’t they calling for an end to a lawless, violent, deadly, institutionally racist, sexually abusive agency, whose employees’ union endorsed Trump for president in both 2016 and 2020, and whose former acting director, Tom Homan, has become this administration’s gung-ho “border czar” and “the face of Trump’s cruelty”, to quote my Zeteo colleague John Harwood?</p><p>Forget about talk of “reform”. At this point, there is no way to improve or “fix” Ice. It has to be abolished. Shut down. Scrapped. To quote Gillibrand in 2018, the entirety of immigration enforcement in the United States must be “reimagined”.</p><p>Meanwhile, as some Democrats obsess over opinion polls and worry about looking “soft” on the border, the actual experts on authoritarianism are sounding the alarm. The political scientist Lee Morgenbesser has compared Ice to a “secret police” and says the agency “is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism”. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls Ice the “foot soldiers” of the “fascists”. Even the “anti-woke” libertarians over at Reason magazine say Ice is on a “militaristic mission that effectively turns nonviolent immigrants into fugitives.”</p><p>On some level, it's mind-blowing to me that "we should dismantle the fascist regime's cracker supremacist secret police" is a controversial position in American politics, but here we are. I do not comprehend how anyone who has been watching the fascist activities of the Trump regime, and the operational centrality of the War on Terror era DHS (under which ICE operates) security structure to most of that fascist bullshit, can argue that an agency built to enforce American nativisim and "counterterrorism" police state repression, can be reformed somehow. Furthermore, even if it could be separated from the executive branch's far too broad immigration powers to reduce abuse, what would we be reforming it for? To hunt down brown people more "humanely?" That's absolute cracker nonsense, and while I know *why* the Democratic Party accepts that framework (they have rich racist donors who profit from the migrant carceral complex too), that doesn't make it any less nativist, or corrosive to our civil liberties when they do so. Hasan is right, the only politically and morally acceptable position here is "abolish ICE." </p><p>Even setting aside how strongly I agree with Hasan's argument, I'd like to note that this article is a wonderful work of evidentiary scholarship; there are no less than 56 source links documenting years worth of American political attitudes about ICE, the agency's numerous authoritarian abuses in the past month of the Trump 2.0 era, and why it's absolutely fair to describe them as Trump's personal (fascist) militia. Anytime you can spit so much truth "Very Serious People TM" don't want to hear that it requires your poor editor to spend an entire evening hunting down reference links, you're doing that work; game recognize game, Mr. Hasan. </p><p><a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Fascism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fascism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Trump</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/USPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USPol</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/ICE" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ICE</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/DHS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DHS</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/WarOnTerror" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WarOnTerror</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Democrats" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Democrats</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Gestapo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Gestapo</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/CivilRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CivilRights</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Nativism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Nativism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/WhiteNationalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhiteNationalism</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Ethnostate" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Ethnostate</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/TomHoman" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TomHoman</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/Immigration" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Immigration</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/PoliceState" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PoliceState</span></a></p>