“Brother, I am American. You are twisting my arm.”— Man shouts “I am American” while ICE agents detain him
Masked gunmen. Tasers. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Unmarked vehicles. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Racial profiling. Children traumatized. Families terrorized. Journalists targeted. Citizens detained. Disabled individuals, minors, the elderly, pregnant women, military veterans—snatched off the streets. Private property destroyed.
This is not a war zone.
This is what now passes for law-and-order policing by ICE agents in Trump’s America—and it is not making America safer or greater.
What began as an agency tasked with enforcing immigration law has metastasized into a domestic terror force.
From coast to coast, ICE goon squads—incognito, thuggish, fueled by profit-driven incentives and outlandish quotas, and empowered by the Trump administration to act as if they are untouchable—are prowling neighborhoods, churches, courthouses, hospitals, bus stops, and worksites, anywhere “suspected” migrants might be present, snatching people first and asking questions later.
Sometimes “later” comes hours, days or even weeks afterwards.
No one is off limits—not even American citizens.
Make no mistake: this is not how a constitutional republic operates. It is how a dictatorship behaves when it decides the rule of law—in this case, the Bill of Rights—is optional.
Journalists are being shoved to the pavement, forced into chokeholds, teargassed, and brutalized—in violation of the First Amendment. U.S. citizens, including toddlers, are being snatched up and carted off—in violation of the Fourth Amendment. People with no criminal records who have lived, worked and paid taxes in this country for decades are being made to disappear—in violation of habeas corpus.
This is not public safety. It is domestic terrorism, carried out by masked, militarized, lawless bounty hunters.
Each of these incidents is presented as routine immigration enforcement. Yet collectively they reveal a government agency that has abandoned the principles of restraint, accountability, and due process in favor of brute force.
Justifying extreme measures—martial law, mass surveillance, suspension of constitutional safeguards— as necessary for “national security” has always been the refuge of tyrants, and this American police state is no different.
Under Trump, however, things are so much worse.
The rationalizations have become bolder, the violence more normalized, and the lies more transparent.
The biggest lie of all is the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that its costly, ego-driven, and unnecessary military invasion of Chicago—Operation Midway Blitz—rounded up “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.”
In fact, DHS’ own data shows that out of more than 1,000 people rounded up, only 10 had criminal records.
Nationally, more than 70% of individuals rounded up by ICE nationally have no criminal convictions. Many have lived in the U.S. for decades, raised families, paid taxes, contributed to the economy, and worked the jobs most Americans refuse to do.
Even Trump’s insistence that certain states or cities are overrun with crime, thus necessitating his military invasions, collapses under scrutiny: crime remains at record lows nationwide.
The data simply does not support the rhetoric.
Clearly, this is not about crime, safety, or jobs.
So what is really driving this campaign of terror?
What we are witnessing is the weaponization of fear.
A government that profits from panic and rewards blind obedience has turned immigration enforcement into a spectacle of domination—part deterrent, part distraction, and all political theater.
The timing is no coincidence.
The Trump administration has just announced its fifth military strike on a Venezuelan vessel it claims—without evidence—was engaged in illegal activity. The propaganda might scream about “foreign threats,” but these spectacles serve a different purpose: to divert public outrage away from falling poll numbers, a faltering economy, and growing unrest over the regime’s corruption and incompetence.
At home, ICE raids perform the same function as those boat strikes abroad—they keep the public frightened and the cameras fixed on the wrong enemy. Meanwhile, the scandals that should command national attention—the Epstein files implicating powerful allies, the graft, the insider enrichment—sink beneath the noise.
Each new show of force, each televised arrest or explosion, is meant to remind the populace who holds the power and how easily it can be turned inward.
This is not about border control or law enforcement. It is about control, period.
Against such a backdrop, ICE’s strategy is predatory and deliberate.
Lower court rulings have affirmed that ICE, DHS and the Trump Administration are willfully trampling the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.
Yet for an administration that mistakes might for right, the law is whatever justifies the hunt.
“Everything we’re doing is very lawful,” Trump declared. “What they’re doing is not lawful.”
Martin Luther King Jr. offered the clearest rebuttal to that logic more than sixty years ago.
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written while jailed for participating in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, King reminded the world “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’”
King’s message was not about politics but about principle. His words remind us that legality and morality are not always the same — and that a nation that abandons moral law will soon find itself without any law at all.
A government that chains pregnant women, assaults journalists, and detains citizens without cause has lost its moral authority to govern.
Tyranny always cloaks itself in the language of welfare and safety. And constitutional abuse transcends party lines.
Every regime that seeks to entrench its power begins by promising to protect the people from chaos, crime, or foreign enemies—then proceeds to manufacture both.
The raids, the strikes, the distractions are all part of the same design: to condition obedience, erase accountability, and cement totalitarian rule under the pretense of “law and order.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.
The Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.
If ICE—and by extension, the DHS and the entire Trump regime—cannot operate within those limits, if it must hide behind masks and military might to exercise its power, then it has ceased to be lawful.
It has become exactly what the Framers of the Constitution feared: a government that wages war on its own people.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
