According to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by the Washington Post, the Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest. That’s pretty scary, but this humble spirit worries that Trump’s federalizing the National Guard could be the least of our problems. Not enough attention is being given to the potential for a greatly expanded ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to go rogue on Trump’s behalf, whether it be in 2026, 2028, or even sooner. While everyone’s focusing on gerrymandering congressional districts, if we’re not careful, democratically held elections could end up being a non-issue.
Thanks to Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), ICE now has a budget of $75 billion for arrests, detentions, and deportations. And under the leadership of the lovely, if not very talented, Kristi Noem, ICE is now in the process of recruiting thousands of new officers in order to meet Trump’s incredibly ambitious goal of deporting 13 million people. Putting aside the barbaric spectacle of rounding up that many (brown) people and sending them off to places like (the thankfully now defunct) “Alligator Alcatraz,” there’s the issue of significantly expanding an armed force that functions independently of the Army or the National Guard—and potentially answers to Donald Trump’s every beck and call.
Who are these people behind the onerous black masks, anyway? Or rather, who will they be as the number of ICE agents grows? Even if we give existing ICE employees the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re mostly just hard-working, non-political government employees, what about the new recruits? Some will probably be well-intentioned citizens wanting to serve their country and earn a good salary, but many will likely be MAGA foot soldiers motivated solely by loyalty to Donald Trump. We should not delude ourselves: the money allotted to ICE in the OBBBA was clearly intended to pay for the creation of a paramilitary force of MAGA loyalists. If we’re not careful, the next mob that invades the US Capitol won’t be a motley hodgepodge of vigilante groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers of January 6th, but a well-organized, taxpayer funded, armed force.
ICE has the Potential to Morph into Something Akin to the SS, Hitler’s Paramilitary Force in Nazi Germany.
Thousands of weaponized MAGA sympathizers who believe that undying loyalty to Donald Trump is the ultimate show of patriotism, make for a dangerous scenario. Trump’s MAGA minions have continually proven they don’t know their friends from their enemies, and despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence to the contrary, they continue to believe Trump is their friend and champion, if for no other reason than “he gets them.” These people may sincerely believe they’re patriots protecting the country from foreign invasion and liberal “scum” (as Trump likes to call his political enemies), but they have shown themselves to believe a lot of things that bare little relation to reality—and like the insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol on January 6th, they just might act accordingly. ICE employees take an oath to the US Constitution, no differently than do members of our armed forces, but for them that could mean swearing an oath of allegiance to Donald Trump and MAGA, not American democracy.
“Knowledge of the dangers posed by tyranny has never prevented any tyrant from becoming a tyrant.”
Hannah Arendt (in her last interview)