ICE Is Trump’s Standing Army Now
The new immigration surge proves the administration has learned nothing—except how to make less noise.
A new ICE surge is here. After reducing operations following national outrage at the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis this winter, the Trump administration has re-started its campaign to cleanse the interior of illegal immigrants.
The New York Times reports that in the final two weeks of June, the White House ordered agencies to sharply increase the number of arrests, with a target of 2,000 per day. This goal—which surpasses the previous high of an average of 1,283 arrests per day in December—was easily met. Over 10,000 people were detained in the five-day period up to July 1, all part of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s plan for “quieter and smarter” ICE operations, to contrast with the bellicose tactics of his predecessor, Kristi Noem. The hope is that Trump’s campaign promise of massive deportations will be met without the outrage and protests elicited by the previous surge, and with the legitimacy of ICE and border enforcement somewhat restored.
That plan has already gone horribly wrong. In an echo of the Good and Pretti killings, the surge has resulted in a double tragedy—two people, one in Texas and one in Maine, have been killed by ICE or Border Patrol agents in the past week during traffic stops. Neither one was the agents’ intended target. In both cases, the government claims the agents fired on the victims in self-defense or to defend others.
In Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who came to the United States illegally from Mexico 35 years ago and has a wife and three children, was driving to his work at a construction site in Houston when he was trailed and eventually pulled over by agents in unmarked vehicles, who incorrectly believed the van was carrying two men wanted by immigration officials. According to the DHS, Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” But this account was denied by the three other men in the vehicle, all colleagues of Araujo, who claim that the van came to a halt and an agent fired a single shot through a side window which pierced Araujo’s abdomen. Grainy CCTV footage from a gas station shows the van pulling over and an agent pointing an object—resembling a weapon, though this hasn’t been confirmed—at the side of the vehicle. “Seconds later,” according to The Times, agents are filmed, in footage from a passing car, bending over Araujo on the ground.
Less is known about the Maine shooting: Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant who according to his father had legal status, left his house early on Monday with his 3-year-old daughter and was confronted in his car by agents in an apparent case of mistaken identity. The DHS released contradictory information, first claiming that Guerrero was the subject of a removal order before retracting that assertion. Publicly, they claimed that “the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety an officer discharged his weapon.” But in a private statement to Congress, the Times reports, they claimed that Guerrero “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.” There is no video of the seconds immediately preceding the killing, but photos from the scene show at least four bullet holes in the front windshield.
The government’s claims about the circumstances surrounding the killings cannot yet be verified, because in neither case were federal agents wearing bodycams. This is despite Congress having earmarked $20 million earlier this year for the DHS to purchase them. Depressingly, the lack of video probably explains why the response to these two killings has been muted compared to the Good and Pretti killings earlier this year. In those cases, graphic video footage quickly gave lie to the administration’s claims that the victims were domestic terrorists who posed a threat to officers’ lives. The public pushback was immediate and severe, resulting in the firing of Kristi Noem and the reassignment of then-ICE head Greg Bovino, as well as a months-long lull in ICE activity.
This time, there has been some pushback, with protests erupting in both Texas and Maine. The administration seems to be preempting the fallout by instructing ICE to end most vehicle stops (although Trump today attempted to overturn the order via Truth Social). But it seems unlikely that the two recent killings will prompt any sort of fundamental reset of the sort we saw glimmers of following the Minneapolis events. The administration remains determined to make two thousand arrests a day, and by all accounts ICE is going about it in a way that will minimize bad press or accountability. If Mullin manages to enforce a less-flashy version of Noem’s immigration surge—and if he manages to keep a lid on the kinds of young, undertrained recruits apparently responsible for killing Guerrero—he may just succeed in giving Trump the kinds of deportation numbers he wants to see before the midterms.
One of the greatest worries for the Founding Fathers was the specter of “standing armies”—a permanent, professional military under the direct control of the president. James Madison declared, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.” He warned that “throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” Alexander Hamilton likewise wrote in Federalist No. 29 that “standing armies are dangerous to liberty,” which is why he preferred a peacekeeping force of local militias.
Two and a half centuries later, with permanent armies and police forces very much the norm, we view such statements as a relic of the 18th century no longer applicable to the modern world. Yet the Founding Fathers were right to draw a connection between standing armies and liberty—and in this case, Madison’s comment about an “overgrown Executive” is prophetic. Standing armies are only legitimate if they are loyal to the nation rather than to any individual, going about their important tasks in a transparent and accountable manner.
The problem is that the Trumpified form of ICE is neither transparent nor accountable. In the aftermath of the Good and Pretti killings, Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller lied through their teeth to frame the victims as terrorists who had attempted to mow down law enforcement. If the videos hadn’t been released and widely disseminated, nobody could have proven that they were lying. Operation Metro Surge proceeded with means that were at best legally obscure and at worst extrajudicial. (Last year, the feds simply changed the rules so that they could enter houses without a judicial warrant and… didn’t tell anyone.) And now Mullin’s “quieter and smarter” approach promises to add a further smokescreen. If ICE gets their way, nobody will ever know what happened to Araujo and Guerrero.
ICE also seems to lack real accountability. Congress is extremely weak and divided right now: the Republican majority lacks the will to supervise the White House’s control over ICE and the Border Patrol, while the Democratic minority lacks the means. All the Dems managed earlier this year was to threaten to shut down the DHS for a few weeks before Trump went ahead and funded it anyway. Likewise, the deaths of civilians have not resulted in firings or prosecutions. The officer responsible for killing Good was quietly reassigned to administrative work, while it remains unclear what, if anything, happened to the officers who killed Pretti. Despite ongoing FBI and DHS investigations, there is no reason to believe that the officers responsible for last week’s killings of Araujo and Guerrero—should they turn out to be equally unjustified—will be treated any differently.
What ICE in its Trumpified form is about is fear. Few would object if the feds were merely targeting the “worst of the worst”—the murderers and molesters and gang members. But the full target sheet runs into the millions, including anyone who is in the country illegally or who has overstayed their visa. The tactic of picking up immigrants outside churches, schools, courts, and now roadsides has already led to numerous cases of parents keeping children home from school, resorting to local help to buy groceries rather than face the uncertainty of going out onto the streets. And when arrested individuals reach a detention center, they may face some of the many documented instances of neglect, illness, and mistreatment. At least 21 people have died in ICE custody so far this year.
The administration’s immigration push is designed to make people fear that they could be torn away from their families regardless of how long they’ve been in the United States and what crimes they may or may not have committed. As ICE continues its summer surge, it is this cruelty and its tragic consequences which, more than anything else, characterize the second Trump administration.
Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.
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Good piece, Luke, but a paramilitary force like ICE is something different--and scarier--than the standing armies the Framers were concerned with. There was a Jonathan Chait line: "Trump isn't Hitler, but he's less not Hitler than any other President." ICE isn't the SS, but it's less not the SS than any other law enforcement agency we've had.*
*If anyone wants to bring up something like COINTELPRO, they had to be sneaky about it. They couldn't have gotten away with acting as openly as ICE.
Inurement to killing is the goal. ICE recruits kill a few people and we are outraged. When they kill a few more, we're upset. After a few more, maybe a dozen or two, then we shrug our shoulders and consider it commonplace and kind of normal and that we don't expect anything different from this government. Once we are habituated to murder, thugs can do whatever they want because . . . killing is the new norm.