ICE’s Reign of Terror in Trump’s America

Image - Chad Davis

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On January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse for the Department of Veteran Affairs, was thrown to the ground, repeatedly kicked by ICE agents, disarmed of his legally owned gun, and then shot multiple times. The Minnesotan was expressing his civic duties by filming ICE agents exerting excessive force upon a woman, and then intervening. This followed Minneapolis’ first general strike in 80 years. Businesses shut down, demanding ICE’s unprecedented number of agents leave their city, the ceasing of economic relations from corporate benefactors, and the arrest of Jonathan Ross who shot and killed 37 year old Renee Good.

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The Trump Administration’s response to the killing of two American citizens, captured on video and widely circulating online for all to see, was a damning attempt to reconstruct its narrative. Renee Good was proclaimed, by the President, as part of a left wing network of paid agitators against US law enforcement, and Vance reiterated the mother of three as ‘using domestic terror techniques’. Meanwhile, Kristi Noam defined Alex Pretti as ‘an individual [who] arrived at the scene to influence maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.’

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The responses of the administration’s leading figures to each of these incidents were indifferent, and filled with post truth reconstruction through fabrication, mischaracterisation and the prevention of investigation. The dehumanisation of victims who stand in the way of the Trump Administration’s fascistic playbook, however, is not an isolated incident. Rather it is part of their wider campaign in constructing a culture of fear and unpredictability in their mass deportation offensive. That even bystanders, not immediately threatened in their proximity to the unlawful seizure and arrest of immigrants, can too be othered by the state upon non compliance.

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Minnesota, as a Democratic state, being subjected to the clash between federal law enforcement and state authorities in Minneapolis, raises alarm bells about ICE’s presence looking forward to the midterms later this year. ICE and its extensive overreach upon state authorities could perhaps signal the constructed immigration crisis, and the public unrest it incites, as a means of engineering a state of exception that allows the continued federal overreach. This could set the precedent of deploying ICE agents at polling booths, to check citizenship status and coerce turnout through their intimidation toward immigrants. Trump has also threatened to invoke the insurrection act, to tighten his grip on state authorities and citizens further in a bid to consolidate his power.

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Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ injected more than 170 billion dollars of funding, over four years, for border and interior enforcement. 75 billion for ICE’s detention and removal process. Under Trump, the number of people in ICE detention centres rose nearly 75% in 2025, reaching unprecedented levels. More than 252 Venezuelans have been deported to El Salvador, without due process, where they experience severe human rights violations. Meanwhile, masked ICE agents enjoy, as claimed by JD Vance ‘absolute immunity’, in their ability to roam streets arresting and detaining immigrants under claims of illegal status. Arrests of people with no criminal record has exploded as well as extensive arrests made of those wielding legal status due to the sheer scale of unaccountable deployment of ICE agents patrolling round cities. Without due process, detainment camps such as the colloquially-known, 'Alligator Alcatraz', sees immigrants suffer in inhuman conditions for indefinite periods of time. All the while, they are unable to seek legal counsel in a bond hearing. Meanwhile, corporate interests continue to benefit from Trump’s systemic siege upon the rights of immigrants. Palantir was paid 30 million to create an immigration surveillance platform, while private prison companies continue to be enriched by expensive contracts.

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The mobilisation of Trump’s paramilitary army is the symptom of conditions conducive to fascism. The post 911 characterisation of immigrants, and the construction of ICE, was tied to security threats and discrimination in response to the attack. Therefore, ICE’s conception, and the long term expansion from following administrations on its emphasis on immigration containment, is inherently tied to the agency's foundation as one systematically constructed from a fearmongering perception.

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan manufactured consent for a war on terror that fed the public psyche of American identity as one of Imperial exceptionalism and national purpose. This enables the increase in militant and material excess in the state’s moral duty to determine who the use of force is to be allocated against. Such an environment induces the backsliding of democratic resistance in the nation’s federal identity as its very foreign policy internalizes itself within the state’s domestic identity. The roaming masked ICE agents are reminiscent of the practices of the US’ overseas militant forces. In image, practices and weaponry, Trump’s paramilitary force is the subject of overseas military catalysing within interior policing. The theatre of American imperial exceptionalism, engrained into the nation’s very streets under a refreshed national purpose. To cleanse and maintain the country’s identity.

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Social safety nets are dismantled in the face of an economy where the growth of GDP continues to fail the average person and their material living standards. The opposition party incites apathy in their inability to forge an alternative vision for the public psyche to latch onto. Post truth media constructs scaremongering narratives, shifting further and further the Overton window of public discourse toward normalised shock value and instability. Through this constructed moral panic, the seizure of civil liberties within one’s social contract with the state is ceded further and further. All for the maintenance of the ingroup and the dehumanisation of the immigrant out group, through narratives of violent crime and employment fearmongering, in order to reclaim the nation. To make America great again.

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