ICE as a Paramilitary Instrument of Trumpism

America has long lived with the fantasy of an “internal enemy”; under Trump, that fantasy was given institutional form. By turning immigration into the centerpiece of a strategy to destabilize Democratic-led states, the White House instrumentalized ICE as a shock force—authorizing detentions without formal charges, trampling the rule of law, and targeting peaceful protests under the label of “domestic terrorism.” What is at stake is no longer merely a hard-line immigration policy, but a warning sign of an accelerated drift toward an illiberal model of governance, in which the “other” is recast as a foreign body and an existential threat.

The idea of foreign bodies does not originate with the nation-state; the latter merely amplifies an inherently human trait—since the moment humanity asserts itself, the “other” emerges as a danger, as a hostile element to the group. With social sophistication, or what the classics described as the transition from the state of nature to the state of society, and from the nineteenth century onward with the construction of the nation-state, this evolved into an ideology—a political-biological conception of the ingroup and the outgroup—thus planting the seeds of racialist and xenophobic ideas.

Clearly anchored in a rhetoric of affective polarization, Donald Trump turned immigration into a deeper political strategy of intervention in Democratic-led states, seeking to sow social chaos to enable military intervention to “restore order,” thereby paving the way for political change in favor of Republican leadership, particularly those aligned with MAGA. To this end, he instrumentalized ICE, the migration enforcement agency, which under the command of Gregory Bovino became a dangerous, authoritarian–fascist hybrid of Trumpist militia, morality police, and state repression apparatus.

The conduct of ICE—marked by practices typical of fascist policing, including detention without formal charges, disregard for civil rights and the rule of law, and the persecution and denunciation of peaceful protesters labeled as “domestic terrorists”—differs only in degree from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and reveals the United States’ accelerated slide toward an illiberal, autocratic regime.