The president’s recent assignment of U. S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers (ICE) to help Transportation Security Administration agents (TSA) at U.S. airports during the government shutdown begs our attention. It is extraordinary and deserving of scrutiny for what it says about the administration’s mindset about governing and for where it might lead in the near future.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second administration, ICE has increasingly taken on the role of a paramilitary answerable only to the president. Initially it was employed principally along the border to control immigration, arresting illegal migrants and maintaining border surveillance. In carrying out its duties, ICE agents sometimes were overly zealous and violated human and civil rights. It was their deployment to cities across the nation, however, that raised the specter of an out of control federal force beholden only to the president and his lackey the Secretary of Homeland Security. ICE increasingly looks like the president’s personal guard much like the Allgemeine SS that enforced racial policy and general policing for the Nazis.
Comparing ICE with the Schutzstaffel or SS becomes inevitable given the statements and behavior of MAGA officials. This is especially evident in the case of Minneapolis. There, ICE seemed to run amuck abusing and attacking people, killing two and arresting American citizens as well as illegal immigrants. It was a disgraceful scene that played out on television for all Americans to see. The revolting experience of Minneapolis and elsewhere has led directly to the ongoing government shutdown as Democrats and others have refused to sanction fund continued ICE depredations.
Some who read these words might take issue with comparing ICE to the ruthless SS of the Third Reich but remember the adage, “if it walks, swims, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”*
*The “duck test,” attributed to American poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916), was popularized by labor leader Emil Mazy in 1946 to identify suspected communists.