“ICE Was My Idea”: The Kind of Moment History Writes About Later

The shift to fascism isn’t loud or obvious; it’s gradual, justified, and dangerously easy to accept...

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that ICE thugs have been following anti-ICE state legislators around in their cars and standing in front of their homes taking pictures, clear intimidative threats.

“They made a big show of pointing a camera way out their window so that I could see them taking pictures of my house,” three-term State Representative Brad Tabke told the newspaper. His child was home alone at the time, and the action, according to Tabke, frightened him. In an article written by Allison Kite, the newspaper added:

“Tabke said he saw what appeared to be federal immigration agents outside his home at least a half dozen times, sometimes with binoculars.

“Tabke is one of several Democratic lawmakers who said they were targeted or harassed during the Trump administration’s monthslong immigration crackdown in the state. One DFL lawmaker told colleagues that federal agents hurled misogynistic epithets at her, even after she informed them she was an elected official. Another DFL legislator said an agent — with whom she had never interacted — greeted her by first name, while another said agents walked around her home taking photos.

“‘It was all a way of threatening and being very menacing in a way that perhaps would inhibit us from advocating the way that we had been,’ said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.”

One of the things I’ve written about both here and in several books over the years is how authoritarian movements don’t suddenly stand up and announce themselves. They never pop up with a manifesto that says, “Hello, we’re here to end your democracy!”

Instead , they typically arrive on the scene complaining about a problem, one they’ve often manufactured or at least exaggerated themselves, and then offer a solution that — just by coincidence — happens to require them to have a little more power, a little more reach, and a little more presence in places they weren’t before.

Then they do it again. And again. Until one day the country’s people look around and discover the institution that was supposedly fixing a temporary crisis has become a permanent, unaccountable force operating everywhere, terrorizing the populace, and answerable to no one but the guy at the top. You could call it “creeping fascism”.

That’s exactly what’s happening with ICE at America’s airports right now. And when Donald Trump told reporters this Monday, with evident pride, “ICE was my idea,” he wasn’t just taking credit for solving a sudden logistical crisis. He was telling us what kind of country he’s building and what kind autocratic of leader he’s become.

A five-week Republican-caused partial government shutdown has left nearly 50,000 TSA agents working without pay. More than 480 have quit, thousands more call in sick daily, and airport security lines at Atlanta, Houston, and JFK have stretched to five hours or more. It’s a genuine crisis affecting millions of ordinary American travelers.

And it’s a crisis Trump has had the power to end every day since it started by simply demanding and signing a clean funding bill, which Democrats have repeatedly presented to Congress and Republicans have repeatedly blocked.

Instead, Trump and shadow-president Miller sent in their ICE thugs.

ICE agents were deployed to more than a dozen airports on Monday, according to the New York Times, wearing vests with their agency’s name, standing near identification processing locations, walking through terminal halls, generally scaring and intimidating people.

The Times notes that there was an obvious alternative if Trump actually wanted airport security help: U.S. Customs agents are already in airports doing security checks and passport verification, they’re trained for the environment, and deploying them to ID checkpoints would have been, as former ICE official Darius Reeves told the Times, “a less politically charged decision.”

But Trump didn’t want a less politically charged decision: he wanted ICE, which has become essentially his own private army, as he told us so himself.

That’s because, as the Times makes clear in its reporting, Trump has been openly using ICE to pursue goals that go far beyond immigration enforcement.

This past year he’s sent officers into large Democratic-run cities like LA and Chicago in highly visible operations to wreak havoc and terrorize those communities. He most recently rushed teams to Minneapolis specifically to pursue Black Somali immigrants he’d been trash-talking in comments widely denounced as nakedly racist.

And in a June directive he posted on social media, he told his masked, heavily armed ICE thugs that targeting Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would “help Republicans” electorally, describing those cities as “the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.”

That’s not immigration policy: that’s political warfare. And it’s a project the world has seen repeatedly in the past, one that has never, ever turned out well. This is, in fact, a fascist playbook with an astonishingly well-documented history.

When Heinrich Himmler took over the Schutzstaffel or SS in 1929, it had fewer than 300 members and its official job was protecting Hitler at his rightwing political events. The word itself simply means “protection force.”

Himmler, however, built it into something else entirely: an elite armed force whose members were screened personally for absolute personal loyalty to Hitler. Not loyalty to Germany, not even to his political party as an institution, but to the man. Similar to the way the Trump regime is now asking job applicants who they voted for and if they agree that Trump won the 2020 election.

And then, whenever a crisis arose, real or manufactured, the SS expanded into that vacuum.

Hitler rewarded the SS by letting it operate in a way that was largely independent, effectively subordinate to no law except his personal authority. It could shoot down a man or woman on a city street, for example, and simply seize the evidence with no obligation to share it with local authorities. It’s officers and executives routinely ignored the law, local official objections, and even court orders.

Very much like how ICE is now doing with the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, refusing to give Minnesota or Minneapolis police and prosecutors access to evidence.

From that point forward, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum documents, Himmler received authority directly from Hitler to carry out “ideological policies that the laws of the state might not permit.” Within two years, the SS was completely immune from control by any normal police force in Germany.

It had its own separate funding. It ran the detention camps, had full access to all domestic intelligence on immigrants and protestors, and operated in any city it wanted with no regard to the desires or complaints of local law enforcement. It became, as historians describe it, a state within a state, answerable only to one man.

The parallels to what Trump is doing with ICE aren’t incidental. They’re both intentional and shockingly structural.

UCLA immigration law professor Hiroshi Motomura identified two sweeping changes to ICE under Trump’s second term: first, the agency now operates under rules traditionally lawful and accepted only at the border, not inside the USA. Now they’ve gone national.

Second, ICE has been given a separate $75 billion budget, specifically insulated from the shutdown that’s starving the TSA. The legitimate airport security institution, TSA, was deliberately defunded.

But Trump’s personal enforcement force is flush with cash and expanding its footprint daily. Himmler ran the SS on a separate budget track too, precisely to keep it outside the legal and constitutional constraints that bound every other German institution.

And then there’s the matter of the masks. Trump told reporters Monday that he’d suggested ICE agents at airports not wear the face coverings that have become standard in their domestic operations over the past year. The masking, he said, “was not good for travelers coming off planes.”

So now president of the United States is personally directing the aesthetic presentation of what appears to be his own personal federal “protection force” law enforcement agency to calibrate how intimidating its presence should be in any particular given context.

He wants the masks on when ICE is smashing in doors and dragging people out of their communities in the middle of the night. But he wants the masks off when ICE is standing in airport terminals full of spring break families.

It’s the same force. But the performance changes based on the political effect he’s going for.

That is not how a law enforcement agency in a constitutional democracy is supposed to work. But it is how a personal army like the SS worked.

Former senior ICE official Deborah Fleischaker, who served in the Biden administration, told the Times flatly:

“President Trump cannot help himself and is using ICE as a political battering ram.”

And former Baltimore ICE office head Darius Reeves, no liberal, predicted it will become “the most hated federal law enforcement agency.” Or, I’d add, like the SS, the most feared.

The Times notes that even within ICE, something has shifted:

“[T]he swing in the second Trump administration has aligned the agency with Mr. Trump himself.”

Not with the law, Congress, or the Constitution. With one man, Donald Trump. That’s the SS model.

That’s precisely what “My honor is my loyalty” meant when Himmler put it on the SS’s belt buckles as the organization’s motto. The loyalty wasn’t to Germany; it was personal, to the Führer (absolute leader), and it placed the organization categorically above and outside of the normal rule of law.

As I’ve written before, historians who study how democracies become dictatorships point out that the most dangerous moment is always when the authoritarian leader’s moves are still “just barely” within the range of what people can rationalize away.

The TSA crisis is real, for example, albeit manufactured by the Republicans in Congress. People want their airports to work. Trump says ICE is “just helping out.” All of that is arguably true, and yet it’s precisely what made the SS’s early expansions into various security and “helping police” situations so easy for ordinary Germans to rationalize.

You don’t see the 40+ deaths in Trump’s prison camps so far this past year when you’re watching orderly men in uniforms keep a crowd moving. It just seems like order is being restored.

But look at what’s actually being built here. ICE has a $75 billion budget that insulates it from democratic accountability through the normal, constitutional appropriations process. It’s deployed against Democratic cities to create terror for explicit political purposes, according to the president’s own words.

It’s directed by a “border czar” who reports personally to Trump. Its agents are being sent, at the president’s personal instruction, into the country’s most public spaces, now including America’s most high-profile airports. And its most visible recent operations have included killing American citizens in Minneapolis with zero accountability, collecting DNA from protesters it’s arrested, and smashing car windows and front doors to make arrests without the warrants the Constitution requires.

This isn’t an immigration agency anymore, any more than the SS was a bodyguard unit by 1938. It’s now a personal enforcement force, and the president just told you so himself. “ICE,” he said, “was my idea.”

The solution here is straightforward: Congress must pass a clean funding bill to pay TSA agents today. And Democrats have been trying to do exactly that for weeks. And then, when the spineless Republicans are out of office, the agency needs to be eliminated or reformed from top to bottom.

Tomorrow’s No Kings 3 protests are our opportunity to let our opinions be known; show up in the streets. They’re working hard to build a force that doesn’t have to answer to voters at all and the next nine months or so may be our last chance to stop it from becoming a full-blown American version of the SS.

This is the moment they’re counting on you to stay home. Don’t.

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.