ICE is to police what the SS was to the army: sure they wear uniforms and they kill people with firearms, but they’re a lawless bunch of thugs with no rules and total impunity.
ICE is Trump’s paramilitary. They’re not regular police. They just share many of the police’s nasty traits.
Their vests say “POLICE” right on ‘em.
My cap says Redskins and I’ve never touched a football in my life.
ICE isn’t police, but I guess this fits here.
I personally call them the American Tonton Macoute: it’s accurate, it doesn’t reuse the overstretched Nazi parallel and never runs afoul of Godwin’s law, the Macoute name is unused enough these days that it’s ripe for repurposing, and it teaches people about the atrocities of the Duvalier regime as a bonus.
Fascist Paramilitary Invader
Is that how we call them now? I did Nazi this coming…
There are only about a few thousand ICE agents. Every No Kings protest is hundreds of thousands of people, furious at illegal ICE bullying
You forget one key point: a few thousand heavily-armed, unaccountable, state-sponsored goons with complete immunity vs hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians who can’t afford a lawyer and don’t want to be sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador without even the option of seeing a lawyer - if they don’t get executed in the street right there and then.
Agents fear the public revulsion toward the heavy-handed approach of ICE under President Donald Trump, and the administration’s efforts to cover its own tracks as it did in the wake of Good’s shooting, is already causing problems securing criminal convictions. One former agent told the Daily Beast that he and his colleagues fear it has become more common for juries not to believe evidence they are presenting to the court.
I call BS. ICE never goes to court. Everything they do is totally unconstitutional and extra-judicial. When was the last time you heard of DHS trying to secure a conviction the legit, legal way?
I’m probably splitting hair here, but I should point out that ICE goons aren’t police (because this story has been posted in The Police Problem). As bad as the police generally is, it’s 3 notches above the gormless ICE paramilitary.
DHS officers and ICE agents in particular are the scum of the Earth, and incredibly, they manage to make the police look like a better alternative.
The regular police has rules and pretends to abide by them. Agreed they don’t pretend very much but they do pretend. And every once in a while, a bad cop gets convicted.
None of those things apply to ICE: they officially have zero rules, they openly practice racial profiling, they brutalize people with zero consequences (and I mean ZERO, not very low chances of consequences), they’re masked like the cowards they are, and they very officially have complete impunity.
That’s the difference with the police. We are still free to hate both the police and ICE intensely, but ICE is a different beast to hate.