The transformation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement into what increasingly resembles a paramilitary force reveals something fundamental about how democracies fail. It happens not through sudden coup but through incremental normalization—each transgression preparing the ground for the next, each violation establishing a new baseline of acceptable state violence.
When ICE agent Jonathan Ross fired three shots into Renee Good’s slowly moving vehicle in early 2025, killing the middle-aged white woman at her steering wheel, the incident crystallized what had been building for years. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem immediately claimed Ross had been “run over”—a lie contradicted by multiple videos showing him standing upright throughout the encounter. She labeled Good and other protesters “terrorists,” though a judge swiftly dismissed this characterization as baseless. Two weeks later, ICE killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse filming their actions on his phone. Again, federal agents claimed he “violently resisted” and refused to surrender a gun he legally carried. Wall Street Journal reporters reviewing bystander footage found something else entirely: Pretti holding his phone in one hand, his other hand raised and empty above his head, attempting to protect a woman ICE had shoved to the ground—all while being pepper-sprayed.
The pattern extends beyond these high-profile killings. ICE has recorded 32 detainee deaths during this period, with medical negligence documented in 88% of reviewed cases. The agency arrested a family of legal asylum-seekers as they rushed their seven-year-old daughter to emergency medical treatment, denying parental pleas to let the child receive urgent care. Federal agents seized children as young as five from Minnesota public schools. They forced their way into ChongLy Scott Thao’s home without a warrant, held the naturalized U.S. citizen at gunpoint in his underwear in freezing temperatures, drove him to interrogation, then returned him without apology after realizing their mistake.
A Quinnipiac University poll found 57% of registered voters disapprove of ICE's enforcement methods, with 64% of independents sharing this view. Yet the machinery continues expanding. Trump has converted ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country, with a budget surpassing most of the world's militaries, answerable primarily to executive will rather than public accountability.
The Anatomy of Institutional Capture
This transformation didn't emerge from nowhere. ICE's origins lie in the post-9/11 restructuring under George W. Bush, when immigration enforcement merged with national security imperatives. The agency received substantial budgets, expansive investigative powers, and partnerships with FBI terrorism task forces. What began as targeting security threats metastasized under Barack Obama to include border apprehensions, gang members, and those convicted of misdemeanors. Each administration expanded the dragnet, increased funding, and eroded due process protections.
Trump’s innovation was granting ICE a supreme mandate as a praetorian guard vested with executive power, operating under objectives so vague—apprehending those who “undermine the integrity of U.S. immigration laws”—that virtually any immigrant becomes fair game. This isn’t about who violated laws but who threatens some undefined cultural purity. Three-quarters of the 66,000 detainees by late 2025 had no criminal convictions; many had only traffic violations. The Cato Institute found just 5% had violent criminal convictions.
The legal architecture supporting this expansion reveals systematic circumvention of constitutional safeguards. Vice President J.D. Vance publicly declared ICE agents immune from prosecution following Good’s killing. Defense Secretary Kash Patel assigned military lawyers to issue “administrative warrants,” bypassing judicial oversight for home invasions. The DOJ asserts ICE agents aren’t subject to judicial review—a claim that, if upheld, places them beyond legal accountability.
The Familiar Architecture of Control
What makes this chilling for those who've lived under repressive regimes isn't the violence itself but the pervasive sense that anything could happen to anyone. Not imminent assault but constant possibility—that at a traffic stop where an officer dislikes your tone, at a gathering deemed to violate some regulation, or on social media where a thoughtless post triggers consequences, you could suddenly find yourself in jeopardy. This effacement of civil rights transforms government into a volatile, capricious overlord, as safe or dangerous as the individual enforcer who happens to wield its power at any given moment.
The American mythology of the soldier—granted an infinite mandate to use violence overseas in defense of freedom—now manifests domestically. ICE officers entering neighborhoods heavily armed appear indistinguishable from soldiers abroad. The merging of military and policing functions shows in domestic police arsenals: drones, explosives, armored carriers, and masked faces. Ross, who killed Good, served in Iraq—a career trajectory from foreign intervention to domestic enforcement that reveals the blurring of these spheres.
Several elements sustain this system: an unhinged right-wing media ecosystem relentlessly drumming fear of demographic displacement; plain racism hiding behind public safety rhetoric; military supremacy as a cultural foundation; and crucially, a nationalist philosophy treating immigrants as existential threats. The reality contradicts this narrative—immigrants commit fewer crimes and face incarceration at roughly 60% lower rates than native-born citizens, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Yet approximately 1.9 million people have reportedly self-deported since January 2025, fleeing not actual danger but the fear ICE detention creates.
The Profit Motive and Systematic Neglect
The Trump administration contracts private companies to operate detention facilities, creating perverse incentives. Investigations document consistent failure to provide timely emergency care. When violations are identified, operators rarely implement changes despite repeated documentation. At least a dozen congressional members were denied access to these facilities in 2025, despite federal law prohibiting such obstruction of oversight.
Is this cruel neglect strategic—designed to terrify immigrants into voluntary departure? The conditions suggest intentional dysfunction rather than mere incompetence. Private contractors profit from detention regardless of care quality, while the administration achieves its deportation goals through fear rather than due process.
Implications and Warnings
The legal sleight-of-hand employed reveals the architecture’s fragility and danger. Claiming ICE agents operate beyond judicial review while using military lawyers to issue pseudo-warrants represents unprecedented executive overreach. Whether the Supreme Court aligns with Trump or maintains judicial independence from military authority will determine whether constitutional governance survives this challenge.
For Britain and other democracies, warning signs flash clearly: relentless portrayal of immigrants as threats; glamorization of enforcement imagery in government propaganda; expansion of police powers, including vague definitions of public order violations; transformation of protest into dissidence; empowerment of border forces with intrusive powers like warrantless phone seizure; and underlying nativism. Add one charismatic, mendacious political leader and a right-wing press amplifying crisis narratives, and any democracy can cross this threshold—perhaps with fewer guns, but the same fundamental erosion of rights and accountability.
The American experience demonstrates how quickly authoritarianism can emerge in plain sight through institutional capture, legal circumvention, manufactured crisis, and systematic dehumanization of targeted populations. ICE's transformation from immigration enforcement to paramilitary force required decades of preparation but crystallized with shocking speed once political will aligned with institutional capacity and public acquiescence.
The question facing Americans—and observers in other democracies—isn’t whether this can happen but how to reverse institutional capture once it has occurred. When law enforcement operates beyond judicial review, when killings face no accountability, when legislators cannot inspect detention facilities, and when the executive claims military authority for domestic enforcement, traditional democratic guardrails have already failed. What remains is the deeper question of whether societies value democratic governance enough to dismantle the machinery of authoritarianism they’ve allowed to be constructed in their name.