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ICE NOW EXPANDING INTO LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AS SPEARHEAD OF TRUMP
REPRESSION.  
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Marc Cooper
June 4, 2025
The Coop Scoop
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_ It’s time for a national information campaign against ICE and for
those physically able to come up with strategies to non-violently
confront these jack-booted tin soldiers in their street operations.
The demand to disband ICE must be a priority. _

,

 

Trump’s violent ICE agency is about to escalate its war against any
or all “illegals” in a dramatic fashion while engaging local law
enforcement in its repression. And this should come as no surprise to
us.

Every authoritarian regime in recent history has formed its own elite
corps of feared special police and/or military units to suppress
dissent and act as the spearhead of state repression.

The Revolutionary Guard and the Morality Police in Iran. The GRU and
the Spetsnaz in Russia. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. The GOPE
in Mexico. DINA in Chile. The AAA and the Federal Police during the
Argentine dictatorship were inseparable from the horrific death
squads. And, of course, the SS in Nazi Germany.

All these elite special forces had or have one thing in common –
though they were created as relatively small special elites under the
command of the central state, they eventually and progressively grew
to influence and even dominate the broader, more common local law
enforcement units.

The SS is the most singular example of this. Originally a small corps
described as Hitler’s bodyguards, the black-uniformed agents came to
control all law enforcement in Germany and even expanded into fully
formed fighting units inside the German Army.

No, I am not about to declare that Donald Trump’s ICE are the new SS
– not yet. But its heavily armed unaccountable tactical units are
unquestionably starting down this same path and are becoming Trump’s
special hammer in his domestic repression campaign.

And the anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner crusade is becoming the central
prong in Trump’s power base as his economic policies flounder and
his popular support weakens. A weaker Trump is more likely to ratchet
up his repression rather than begin to back down. The most violent
dictators, especially rock stupid ones like Trump, are never wildly
popular and they all eventually wind up clinging to power through
intimidation, fear and violence.

As Trump loses popularity, and as his garbage-ridden domestic policies
continue to falter in confrontations with the courts and public
opinion, his grip on Federal power and on myriad civil institutions
has only tightened. Be it within the Justice and State Departments,
the DHS and the FBI, he now has total personal dominance.

And out in front of this parade now marches the shock troops of ICE.
And it’s going to get worse.

We have all seen the video clips of machine gun-toting masked agents
in full tactical gear swarming completely harmless suspected
“illegals” and foreign students as if they were engaging the SS
itself. But how many of these detentions have not been video-taped?
ICE has become one of the least transparent agencies in the Trump
regime. When its street agents are masked and wearing no badges or ID,
what sort of accountability can we expect from their superiors?

ICE has ceased posting daily arrest counts but on social media it
claims about 350 arrests between May 26 and June 2, eons away from the
White House goal.

Those numbers are likely to zoom upward as ICE is opening a new
repressive front.

NBC News has broken an exclusive story on Wednesday, detailing how
under pressure from the White House, ICE has incorporated some 5,000
officers from other agencies and 21,000 National Guard to undertake
the massive “Operation At Large” already underway.

This comes on the heels of Deputy Chief of Staff, and top Trump toady
Stephen Miller chewing out senior ICE officials that if they did not
meet certain detention quotas they would be fired. Miller is demanding
at least 3,000 detentions per day, more as much as ten times of more
the current level.

Some officials from these other agencies are privately complaining
that their being swept into the ICE campaign is preventing them from
working on other more important criminal activities traditionally in
their purview.

Like the crazed Air Force general in _Catch-22_ who was only
interested in the symmetry of post-op bombing patterns and photos,
Miller is focused only on the ICE arrest body count, no matter how
strategic or how pointless the arrests are. So much for “getting the
worst of the worst.” It’s now grab anyone you can.

Operation At Large, according to NBC, is a sprawling multi-agency push
concentrating enormous power in the masked rangers of ICE and boosting
the arrest count.

“The plan calls for using 3,000 ICE agents, including 1,800 from
Homeland Security Investigations, which generally investigates
transnational crimes and is not typically involved in arresting
noncriminal immigrants; 2,000 Justice Department employees from the
FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement
Administration; and 500 employees from Customs and Border Protection.
It also includes 250 IRS agents, some of whom may be used to provide
information on the whereabouts of immigrants using tax information,
while others would have the authority to make arrests, according to
the operation plan.

The Department of Homeland Security has also requested the use of
21,000 National Guard members to provide support in ICE operations,
according to two additional sources familiar with the request, though
that number has yet to be approved by the Defense Department or by
governors who would be deploying their state’s units, multiple
sources cautioned.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, responding to the Miller
meeting, said, “Keeping President Trump’s promise to deport
illegal aliens is something the Administration takes seriously. We are
committed to aggressively and efficiently removing illegal aliens from
the United States, and ensuring our law enforcement officers have the
resources necessary to do so. The safety of the American people
depends upon it.”

Immigration status has now become Priority One in vast swaths of daily
law enforcement agencies as their work is being progressively folded
into ICE campaigns. FBI agents who should be investigating white
collar crime and domestic terrorism are being taken off routine and
forced to accompany ICE agents on their field raids, adding nothing to
the enforcement process except for a greater factor of intimidation.

U.S. Attorneys are also escalating charges against those detained and
misdemeanor immigration violations are now flooding federal courts who
have more important things to do.

“And prosecutors say cases without immigration components have
stalled or are moving more slowly, according to documents seen by NBC
News and conversations with six current and former prosecutors and a
senior FBI official, who described how immigration is now a central
part of discussions around whether to pursue cases.”

Other reports in the last few days say that Miller has told ICE that
it need not worry about warrants in detaining immigrants and that
arrests of so-called “collaterals” be encouraged. A collateral is
an individual found in a place where ICE has a warrant for somebody
else who is not there but the collateral is also undocumented and
should be arrested.

No need, however, for ICE to bump into them. They are actively seeking
them out by raiding the street corners around Home Depots and similar
outlets where immigrants congregate looking for day jobs. Restaurant
raids are also taking place, further underlining the falsehood that
ICE is searching only for the worst of the worst.

Only last Friday, a squad of fully armed and masked ICE agents were
met with a community uproar when they swarmed without warning a
popular San Diego Italian restaurant. Witnesses say that initially ICE
operatives, dressed in full battle attire, handcuffed the whole
restaurant staff as they checked IDs. Of course, there is no word on
how many were arrested.

As the heavy-duty raid drew neighborhood attention, locals came
outdoors to protest in the faces of the ICE agents, yelling they were
“fascists.” When one protester tried to block an ICE vehicle, the
agents responded with smoke bombs and flash stun grenades.

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This is but prelude to what is coming. And it certainly occurs to me
that Trump opponents and human rights defenders should now begin
targeting ICE with non-violent passive resistance. ICE is now a much
more dangerous and worthy target than Tesla dealerships, given
Musk’s waning influence in the administration – to put it
politely.

ICE is the cutting edge now of the Trump Show. And while I might be
wrong, it just might make the most political impact if it is focused
on. Medicare cuts are pernicious and inhumane and must be opposed, but
they cannot be seen or felt unless you are one of the victims.

Just like the televised murder of George Floyd had a much more
galvanizing political effect than abstract slogans about White
Privilege, the deployment of military force by masked operatives
dragging away local service workers could possibly be one of the best
ways to expose the immorality of the Trump gangster regime. Nobody,
except the Truly Lost, are comfortable with armed troops violently
snatching peaceful immigrants from our midst. Remember that
immigration violations are a civil, not a criminal issue. And in the
case of the San Diego restaurant, if there were suspicions of
undocumented workers, it could have been handled by one or two
civilian-dressed agents meeting privately with the owners to review
employment records. Not that I think is a great idea either, but more
humane then the militarized raid that too place.

Not de-escalating is no oversight. The use of brute force is
intentional. The xenophobes and fascists who surround Trump know very
well they will never be able to arrest or deport more than a tiny
fraction of the millions of undocumented. They prefer high-profile
intimidating militarized operations to primarily instill fear and then
hope for “self-deportation.” And just as importantly, to at least
create the impression of Trump keeping his mass deportation to the
hard-core MAGA base, especially to those knuckle heads who have bought
his lies that we are suffering a violent invasion by gardeners,
dishwashers, maids and nannies.

In the weeks between the November election and the January
inauguration of Trump, I heard a lot of well-meaning but naïve
liberals saying we had to “offer help” to those unfortunates who
will be arrested. A twinge of _noblesse oblige_ ran through these
convos.

That time, my friends, is over. It’s time to put your ass on the
line and offer resistance to the fascist vanguard that ICE has become.
It’s time for a national information campaign against ICE and for
those physically able to come up with strategies to non-violently
confront these jack-booted tin soldiers in their street operations.
Neighborhood and workplace networks must be built and trained and
ready to immediately respond to any ICE incursion. The demand to
disband ICE must rise to the top of our wish list.

Might this entail some danger and sacrifice? You bet it will! Avoiding
confrontation and repudiation of ICE at every level disqualifies you
as an oppositionist. But fascist forces are never defeated with just
slogans and thoughts and prayers. Time to get real.

_I’ve been a journalist for 50 years having worked for everybody
from The Nation to the Los Angeles Times and the Guardian, from The
Progressive to Harper’s, and the New Yorker, to the L.A. Weekly and
Village Voice among many other outlets. I have produced and reported
radio and TV documentaries for Pacifica, the CBC, BBC, Christian
Science Monitor Television, PBS Frontline and CBS News. As a younger
man, I worked as translator to Chilean President Salvador Allende and
escaped Chile 8 days after the 1973 coup under UN protection._

_The Coop Scoop by Marc Cooper is a reader-supported publication of
opposition. To receive new posts and support this work, consider
becoming a free or paid subscriber._

* immigrant rights
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* ICE
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* Fascism
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* resistance
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* California
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