ICE brokers aren’t uncontrolled. They’re performing their designed position as fascism’s storm troopers.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest New York Metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander outdoors of federal immigration court docket on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, in New York.
(Olga Fedorova / Ap Photograph)
You’ve in all probability seen the video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers violently arresting New York Metropolis comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander.
The footage is disturbing not simply due to the thuggish means Lander is manhandled but in addition due to the brazenness. Listed here are federal brokers—not native cops—primarily kidnapping a high-profile elected official within the greatest metropolis in the US, on digital camera as he loudly factors out that they don’t have any jurisdiction or authorized grounds to carry him. The message is obvious: If they’ll try this to him, they’ll try this to anybody. (Lander was launched a couple of hours later.)
Brad Lander, the town comptroller and Democratic mayoral candidate, was handcuffed and detained by federal brokers Tuesday at a Manhattan immigration court docket. pic.twitter.com/vOyXTAjakF
— New York Journal (@NYMag) June 17, 2025
Lander’s arrest was so out of line that even his rivals within the metropolis’s upcoming mayoral major needed to defend him. Amongst them was prince of darkness Andrew Cuomo, who weighed in thusly:
That is the most recent instance of the intense thuggery of Trump’s ICE uncontrolled—one can solely think about the concern households throughout our nation really feel when confronted with ICE. Concern of separation, concern of being taken from their colleges, concern of being detained with out simply trigger. This isn’t who we’re. This should cease, and it should cease now.
On the floor, Cuomo’s response is nearly hitting the required beats. That is dangerous, it has to finish—sure, all true. However there’s one phrase that jumps out: “uncontrolled.”
The implication is that ICE has by some means slipped the bonds of respectability and is rampaging round with no supervision. No one’s minding the shop! Every part’s chaos! The place are the rule followers!?
However this isn’t what ICE appears to be like like when it’s “uncontrolled.” It’s what ICE appears to be like like when it’s in management—when it’s doing the job that it has been requested to do. That job, roughly, is to be the chief enforcement arm of US fascism.
And that’s why the company must be torn down—and why abolishing ICE should be a part of the platform of any politician who identifies as a progressive or leftist on this nation. For those who’re watching what’s occurring proper now and never demanding that this construction of repression be dismantled, you don’t deserve my vote.
Present Problem
Lander shall be positive. Being a big-deal politician isn’t sufficient to forestall your detention as of late, however it’s nonetheless sufficient to be allowed to get on together with your life. However the identical can’t essentially be mentioned in regards to the folks detained at their US citizenship hearings or rounded up at their workplaces or shipped off to a gulag in El Salvador or seized of their houses or kidnapped off the road. The identical can’t even be mentioned of Edgardo, the person Lander was escorting when the comptroller was assaulted; he stays in ICE custody. They’re the actual targets of the Trump administration, which has explicitly informed brokers to abduct as many individuals as they’ll, on any doable pretext. And there aren’t any indicators that anybody in ICE has an issue with any of this. Fairly the opposite: The company’s goons look like having fun with themselves. Simply after Trump received reelection, a Fox Information reporter spoke to a bunch of unnamed ICE and Border Patrol brokers about his imminent return to workplace. His sources had been ecstatic.
“It’s a complete 180, troops are lastly feeling just like the solar is popping out after a really lengthy storm,” one ICE officer gushed. “I really feel that folks know now they’ll get to do the work they signed as much as do. And that they wish to do. They know they’ll get the dangerous guys now,” one other one crowed. “Oh dude, individuals who had been going to retire should not, and everyone seems to be completely happy,” a Border Patrol agent mentioned.
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Whereas it’s tempting to level to this and say, “The issue is Trump,” that’s merely not true. The issue is ICE. It was created within the post-9/11 fever of 2003—one other time of rampant human rights violations at residence and overseas—and arrange particularly to be a almost-Police Power that might detain and deport immigrants. It has performed a malevolent position for so long as it’s existed, finishing up abuses below Democratic and Republican administrations, together with the Biden administration. It’s not an accident that Tom Homan, Trump’s psychopathic “border czar,” rose to prominence below President Barack Obama. It’s a measure of the fascist most cancers on the coronary heart of ICE. That most cancers might have metastasized below Trump, however it’s been there the whole time.
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There isn’t any accommodating such an organism. There’s no method to make such a virulent factor higher. There’s no method to make ICE match comfortably inside a democratic society. Simply the alternative: The one type of society one thing like ICE breeds is an antidemocratic police state. The focusing on of democratically elected officers like Lander lends this an particularly literal air, however ICE’s assaults on on a regular basis persons are no much less malignant to the functioning of a civilized nation. The one first rate, ethical resolution is to get rid of it—one thing folks have been strategizing about for years. We wouldn’t have to consign ourselves to be dominated over by a wicked company that, as Working Households Social gathering press secretary Ravi Mangla identified the opposite day, is youthful than Shrek. There’s no line within the Structure that forces us to maintain ICE round. This isn’t to say that tearing it down could be easy or straightforward—simply that we’re speaking about pruning a really younger department of presidency, not attempting to shift the earth’s orbit.
And that’s the place “Abolish ICE”—two phrases that had been in every single place over the last Trump administration—is available in. The Abolish ICE motion pale when Joe Biden took workplace—a sufferer of the partisan tendency to cease caring about a problem as soon as “your” man is in cost—and was despatched deeper into the political wilderness as Democrats stampeded to the fitting on immigration over the course of Biden’s time period. But when what we’re witnessing proper now reveals us something, it’s that abolishing ICE stays as necessary as ever. Not solely that—it’s an apparent litmus check for anybody looking for political workplace. You possibly can’t proclaim to combat Trumpist extremism and dodge its most seen, horrifying manifestation. You possibly can’t run for native workplace as a progressive and collaborate with this challenge. You possibly can’t vote to fund it and count on grassroots assist. You possibly can’t say you’re a supporter of immigrants and fail to face as much as their tormentors.
This isn’t a wild ask. It’s the least we must always count on. Something much less is unacceptable. Something much less is a win for fascism.
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Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Writer, The Nation
Jack Mirkinson
Jack Mirkinson is a senior editor at The Nation and cofounder of Discourse Weblog.
