I am confused about the sheer volume of seemingly illegal actions these fascists are getting away with. The amount of US citizens unlawfully detained, the warrantless surveillance and raids, the refusal to identify themselves, and the clear pattern of violence though indiscriminate physical assault.
Where are the class action lawsuits?
Why are no Democratic politicians calling for ICE’s leadership to be investigated, impeached, imprisoned? Even if Democrats are kinda feckless and racist themselves, surely they’re not as stupid as the Republicans and can see the threat that ICE represents to the economy, if nothing else?
I’m just astonished by the absolute dearth of any resistance to these squads of lead-poisoned idiots who don’t follow any rules and are seemingly only motivated by a desire to hurt people.
Moreover… I want to believe in rehabilitative justice, and if we ever want to see former ICE agents get treatment and re-enter society as productive upstanding citizens, it would be best to stop them before they’re too far gone. Not to make it out like they’re the primary victims here, but I do believe what they’re doing is actively harming themselves.
The refusal to identify themselves is one that I struggle with on a basic level. Unless I’m being naive, it would seem to open the door for people to easily imitate law enforcement for any number of malicious reasons. That’s bad for the public, but it also erodes the legitimacy of law enforcement, and that legitimacy is a critical tool and force multiplier. If people start pretending to be federal agents to get away with crimes, it’s only a matter of time before actual federal agents start getting shot for very understandable reasons. Once that starts, there’s nothing they can do to stop people from doing it unless law enforcement go back to identifying themselves properly. They can put people in prison or shoot back or whatever, but that’s not going to stop it from happening.
I get that the terror and confusion is the point blah blah blah but this is a very real issue with serious potential consequences for both individual law enforcement agents and for law enforcement as a whole. It seems like a very high-risk tactic for what seems like a pretty minor payoff.
To be clear, I’m mostly talking about the reports of plainclothes agents in unmarked vehicles making arrests. Wearing masks and refusing to identify is cowardly, but failing to identify openly as law enforcement at all strikes me as extremely stupid and dangerous at a fundamental level. Visibility is a factor in force projection. It’s a big part of enforcing their monopoly on violence in a practical, rather than just legal, sense. Why would they give that up just to be able to sneak up on people?
No only that, it has at least been theorized at various points in the past is that part of the reason for them refusing to even show proof that they’re lawful government agents is that they sometimes aren’t and are instead basically just private thugs hired by the state who are bluffing that they are actual agents.
And I think it’s kind of weird, if anything, that we’ve seen so few cases of violence in self-defense against these guys. If you don’t have any proof you’re an agent of the state and I’m not committing any crime, then you can’t arrest me, what you’re doing is kidnapping and I have every right to use proportional force to stop you, which can easily mean killing you. If you refuse to prove you’re a cop by even the most mundane standard of evidence, you don’t get any of those protections regarding “assaulting an officer,” “resisting arrest,” or any other expectation that I defer to your authority, because that authority is predicated on me having adequate reason to believe that you’re a real cop! Even in relatively conservative areas, I don’t think a judge would challenge this idea (though some would in really reactionary areas, of course).
If these are real ICE agents, I think the answer is literally just cowardice, like the IDF sending in tanks without infantry because some fools think it’s safer to just “bully” Palestinians with a heavily armored vehicle, with no appreciation for how much less safe the tank is without infantry protecting it.
That’s the unbelievably frustrating aspect of the Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez shooting. ICE agents jumped out of an unmarked car and looked like carjackers to this innocent guy who had just dropped off his kids at school, so he reversed his car and tried to escape and was then shot dead. That’s not even self-defense, just self-preservation. And you don’t really hear anything about it, despite the fact this guy was an innocent man murdered by ICE for no reason. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/police-records-witness-accounts-complicate-dhs-narrative-fatal-chicago-area-ice-2025-09-24/
cw doomer
If you kill a fed you’re going to federal court. Acquittal rate is 0.4%. Assuming you make it to court at all and aren’t summarily executed by masked feds in the middle of the night.
Even with acquittal being that uncommon, it’s not like they just decide it by rolling dice. There are better and worse cases, and this is one of the better cases you can possibly get.
You are totally right about risking summary execution, though.
Reinoehl style
Ngl in this racist ass country it makes it even more confusing when you remember that like half or more of ICE agents are Latino
On top of “How has no one shot at the random gang trying to kidnap them?” I’m wondering how some 2A freak hasn’t shot at them because he “saw a bunch of Mexicans jump out of a van and try to kidnap an old woman, assumed they were MS13, and started blasting”
This has to happen at some point, right? You don’t even need to be a freak, per se. A well-meaning person who carries a gun might easily look at that situation and try to intervene. “Bunch of scary guys in masks assaulting someone” is probably like top 3 good-guy-with-a-gun fantasies. They made 6 Death Wish movies, including one fairly recently. Are you going to tell me that there aren’t plenty of people out there just itching to shoot at a gang of anonymous thugs? It feels inevitable.
It already has: CNN: ICE impersonator incidents rise during Trump’s second term
It would help if companies like fucking Amazon didn’t sell fake ICE gear to anyone who wants to impersonate the gestapo.
Amazon. Same company that flooded strikers with freezing water in sub-zero temperatures in NYC.
Trump seems to have had connections to human trafficking, not only through Jepstein but possibly his own network. During his first term there was a lot of people who went missing both at the the border which some theorized was murders and cover-ups but could have just as easily been kidnappings. During the Floyd protests there was this same thing happening of unidentified masked men in unmarked vehicles grabbing, seemingly random, people. Again, this was thought to be simply feds doing extrajudicial arrests. There could be a darker thing happening here. It could be by design to give cover for one or several human trafficking networks. It would be extremely difficult to separate “legitimate” arrests from wanton kidnappings. As long as there is enough on-the-books chaos with real ICE and feds eating up attention, it would be hard to notice random abductions. The US already has a terrible track record with missing persons of color. These networks would be opportunistic feeders whenever there is social chaos. Even if officials don’t have any knowledge of this happening, or direct connections, the networks that do exist could still use the opportunity.
I don’t have any real evidence other than “people intimately involved in a widely known human trafficking scheme coincidentally do the thing that makes kidnapping super easy.” But it’s also the thing that nobility, royalty, and fascists have been doing. Alexander III deported people like this because he accused them of terrorism (and killing his dad). So it’s not like they need the trafficking reason to do this.