ICE has already been operating like a paramilitary kidnapping squad. Officers roam through neighborhoods, stake out hardware store parking lots, and even occasionally enjoy some ethnic food just so they can raid the source of hospitality later.
It’s nasty, disturbing, and definitely doesn’t resemble any of the things that have made America great. Now, the rot has spread. It’s not enough for ICE to engage in daylight snatchings on the regular. Now, its internal oversight office has abandoned any pretense of keeping ICE in line. In fact, it has completely gone in the opposite direction, turning this wing of ICE into another set of secret police, as this report from Wired makes clear:
Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good during the federal incursion in Minneapolis this winter, and calling for his indictment.
The agents at the poll site asked Gonyea to sign a warning notice that said it was unlawful to “threaten to assault, kidnap and/or murder” federal officials or their immediate family members in an effort to impede that federal official’s work. The form also requested that she remove her post “and/or discontinue” her behavior.
“My signature would have been an admission of guilt,” Gonyea says. “I refused to sign it.”
That’s just one person who’s been subjected to the OPR’s decision to stop investigating allegations against ICE officers to focus on allegations of external “threats” to ICE officers. There are more. Many more.
OPR was behind at least one of the flurry of administrative subpoenas sent to tech companies in recent months in an effort to unmask online critics.
[…]
In a court declaration filed in April, an ICE official said that between January 2025 and March 2026, OPR investigated 131 cases involving “incidents of doxing and threats directed towards ICE employees nationwide.”
That’s fucked up. This is definitely not what the Office of Professional Responsibility is supposed to be doing. According to the ICE OPR itself, its purview is limited to investigatingICE.
The ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) upholds the agency’s professional standards through a multi-disciplinary approach of security, inspections and investigations to promote organizational health, integrity, and accountability across the agency. OPR promotes organizational integrity by vigilantly managing ICE’s security programs, conducting independent reviews of ICE programs and operations, and impartially investigating allegations of employee and contractor misconduct.
To promote integrity, mitigate risk and uphold the agency’s professional standards, the OPR-led Integrity Coordination Center receives and assesses information it receives and refers any allegations of employee misconduct to appropriate offices for investigation, if necessary. This process ensures that allegations of criminal or administrative misconduct against ICE personnel are properly assessed and thoroughly investigated. OPR’s role permits the agency to focus on its larger mission of promoting homeland security and public safety.
Nothing in this says the OPR is investigating ICE critics. Nothing in this even minimally suggests the OPR’s directives can be expanded to cover external investigations of US citizens over social media posts, etc.
You have to scroll down the page a bit and expand a few things before you find ICE OPR’s justifications for being America’s ICE-focused Gestapo:
OPR protects the agency by detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating internal and external threats against the agency, ICE senior leaders and ICE headquarters facilities by managing the ICE Insider Threat Program and counterintelligence functions involving ICE personnel.
This is new language, specific to Trump’s version of ICE. It wasn’t there last year. There’s nothing in this December 2018 OIG report on ICE OPR operations that says anything at all about “detecting, preventing, mitigating and investigating external threats.” There’s nothing in this 2008 OPR directive that says anything more than that the OPR is tasked with investigating allegations against ICE officers or personnel handling its detention facilities.
So, it’s reasonable to believe this language was added shortly after (March 2026) the OPR was rerouted to hunt down ICE critics, rather than focus on what must be thousands of complaints about ICE officers and/or detention facilities.
And despite these efforts apparently being well underway by April 2026, acting ICE director Todd Lyons made sure he didn’t bring up that part of OPR’s operations up when publicly testifying before Congress.
In written testimony for an April hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, which helps set the budget for DHS, Lyons touted OPR’s work inspecting detention facilities, vetting job applicants, and overseeing the agency’s 287(g) program, but didn’t mention the office’s work investigating online posters. ICE did not respond to questions about why Lyons didn’t discuss that work.
First off, the OPR should not be doing this, full stop. There are plenty of federal law enforcement resources available to be utilized in the rare case where an actual threat exists. Second, the OPR has never done this prior to being run by this administration. Third, this rerouting of OPR’s resources makes it clear the administration is more interested in punishing critics (First Amendment be damned) than engaging in any minimal oversight of ICE’s activities.
And this is bad news for the nation, obviously. If this OPR can be turned into literal speech police, the same can be expected from any other law enforcement agency with an in-house OPR. That’s tyranny. That’s fascism. That’s an entire administration treating Trump like a king and 325 million Americans subjects. It’s not only unacceptable, it’s antithetical to everything America once stood for. And all of this news arrives shortly Trump presided over the Republic’s wake on July 4th. We had a good run, but it’s probably time to stop pretending we don’t have a second King George that needs to be shown the door.
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.
Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.
“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”
One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”
And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”
During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.
Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.
Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.
And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.
One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”
The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”
Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.
The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.
The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.
The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.
Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.
“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”
Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”
“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”
Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.
In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.
“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.
McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”
“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.
Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.
The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.
“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”
“Authoritarian Playbook”
Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.
“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”
Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.
And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”
U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.
Where the Fallout is Felt
The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.
The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”
Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.
“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”
In the raid, a Texas trooper secured a search warrant that allowed law enforcement officers to breach the home, an Airbnb rental on a vast stretch of land in the Hill Country. Becerra told ProPublica he believes the suspicion of drugs at the party was a pretense to pull people out of the house so ICE officers who lacked a warrant could take them into custody. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has yet to produce evidence supporting claims of gang involvement, said Karen Muñoz, a civil rights attorney helping families track down their relatives who were jailed or deported. While some court documents are sealed, nothing in the public record verifies the gang affiliation DHS cited as the cause for the birthday party raid.
“There’s no evidence released at all that any person kidnapped at that party was a member of any organized criminal group,” Muñoz said.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Hays County and other raids where families and attorneys allege a lack of transparency and due process.
In Plain Sight
Months after ICE’s widely publicized raids, fear continues to envelop Santa Ana, a majority-Hispanic city with a large immigrant population. Amezcua, the mayor, said the raids have complicated local policing and rendered parents afraid to pick up their children from school. The city manager, a California-born citizen and Latino, carries with him three government IDs, including a passport.
Raids of car washes and apartment buildings continue, but the community has started to “push back,” Amezcua said. “Like many other communities, the neighbors come out. People stop in the middle of traffic.”
With so few institutional checks on ICE’s powers, citizens are increasingly relying on themselves. On at least one occasion in nearby Downey, a citizen’s intervention had some effect.
On June 12, Melyssa Rivas had just started her workday when a colleague burst into her office with urgent news: “ICE is here.”
The commotion was around the corner in Rivas’ hometown, a Los Angeles suburb locals call “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its stately houses and affluent Hispanic families. Rivas, 31, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, belongs to Facebook groups where residents share updates about cultural festivals, church programs and, these days, the presence of Trump’s deportation foot soldiers.
Rivas had seen posts about ICE officers sweeping through LA and figured Downey’s turn had come. She and her co-worker rushed toward the sound of screaming at a nearby intersection. Rivas hit “record” on her phone as a semicircle of trucks and vans came into view. She filmed at least half a dozen masked men in camouflage vests encircling a Hispanic man on his knees.
Her unease deepened as she registered details that “didn’t seem right,” Rivas recalled in an interview. She said the parked vans had out-of-state plates or no tags. The armed men wore only generic “police” patches, and most were in street clothes. No visible insignia identified them as state or federal — or even legal authorities at all.
“When is it that we just decided to do things a different way? There’s due process, there’s a legal way, and it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore,” Rivas said. “Where are human rights?”
Video footage shows Rivas and others berating the officers for complicity in what they called a “kidnapping.” Local news channels later reported that the vehicles had chased the man after a raid at a nearby car wash.
“I know half of you guys know this is fucked up,” Rivas was recorded telling the officers.
Moments later, the scene took a turn. As suddenly as they’d arrived, the officers returned to their vehicles and left, with no apology and no explanation to the distraught man they left on the sidewalk.
Through a mask, one of them said, “Have a good day.”
