ICE’s Mission Is Murder

It is a genocidal organization and it will keep killing people.

Image source: Paul Goyette, CC

Yesterday ICE agents shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old man for whom ICE did not even have an arrest warrant. A few days earlier, ICE shot and murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who has lived in the US for decades. In both cases, ICE agents claimed that the men they killed were threatening to ram them with their cars. ICE has used this excuse before, and been caught lying. In Araujo’s case, witness testimony already contradicts ICE accounts. Immigration agents have now killed at least eleven people during enforcement activities; at least another 54 have died in ICE custody.

Every one of those deaths should be investigated; every one of the perpetrators should be tried and held accountable. It’s also important to realize, though, that these deaths are not accidental, nor are they best understood as failures to follow sober, professional law enforcement procedure. ICE agents who murder immigrants, or brown people, or those standing near immigrants and brown people, are deliberately and dutifully following the clear directives of the president and his fascist goons. Said goons have made it clear, over and over, that they want immigrants (and brown people, and Black people) ethnically cleansed, either through removal or extermination.

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Genocidal rhetoric

Trump and those around him have regularly put forward sweeping, terrifying proposals for the mass elimination of immigrants and those associated with immigrants. In 2024, Trump said he would target 18 million undocumented immigrants. Other officials in his administration said the number might actually be 30 million undocumented immigrants. This is more than twice the actual number of undocumented people, which is around 11 million.

This inflation was not a misstatement. It was deliberate hyperbole intended to frighten and motivate voters, and to justify huge funding increases (Congress has given ICE and CBP around $145 billion in Trump’s term so far.)

The ridiculous 30 million figure was also meant to facilitate the mass removal and targeting of individuals who Trump wants to declare illegitimate no matter what their status. Those individuals again including (just for a start) undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, brown people, Black people, and Democrats. The population of the US is about 340 million; when Trump talks about deporting 30 million people, he is laying the groundwork for seizing one in every 10 people in the country. As a comparison, the Armenian genocide only involved the expulsion of some 2 million people.

The Armenian genocide was, as the name indicates, a genocide; the expulsion was accompanied by 1.3 to 1.5 million deaths. This linkage of ethnic cleansing and genocide is inevitable. Mass expulsions are built on the devaluation of the lives of the people expelled; targeted people are pushed out because they are viewed as other or innately traitorous or innately degraded. States that have decided that a population is other, or traitorous, or degraded are not going to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that that population is treated kindly or humanely. The goal is elimination, and everyone understands that sometimes the easiest form of elimination is murder. (See also the Trail of Tears.)

You don’t have to extrapolate the dehumanization from Trump’s program and priorities, though. He and those around him have made their disdain for the humanity and lives of immigrants very clear.

During the presidential campaign, Vice-President J.D. Vance enthusiastically endorsed false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people’s pets—a form of blood libel that (as intended) led to a spate of death and bomb threats against city and school buildings and relentless harassment by neo-Nazis. Trump has said that Somali immigrants turned Minnesota into a “hellhole” and ranted, “They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain.” Trump has also said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Stephen Miller, the White House policy advisor and malignant racist who has driven Trump’s immigration policy, has said that birthright citizenship—the Constitutional provision that means that children of immigrants born in the US are US citizens—is tantamount to “national self-obliteration.”

When national leaders say that a particular group is murdering innocents, that they are a threat to the nation, that they are an infection, that they are ungrateful and undeserving and will destroy us—those words are not just words. They are a call for discrimination, for violence, and ultimately for genocide.

ICE agents understand the message

Those tasked with ICE immigration and enforcement understand the message and embrace it.

Gregory Bovino, the former CBP commander-at-large who led the disastrous enforcement operation in Minnesota has referred to immigrants as “scum,” “trash,” and “filth” and has said his goal was to “dominate the border.” ICE agent Jonathan Ross called Renee Good—a legal ICE observer in Minneapolis—a “fucking bitch” after he shot and killed her. Other officers in Minneapolis used Good’s death as a threat, telling protestors, “‘Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch!” Brian Palaricos, an ICE agent who murdered Keith Porter, a Black Los Angeles man, has a history of using racial slurs against Black and Latino people. An agent in Chicago shouted “do something, bitch” at Marimar Martinez, before CBP agent Charles Exum shot her five times in the arm.

Again, this kind of rhetoric, accompanied by violence, indicates that immigration management and immigration gestapo troops all understand that they are to view immigrants, non-white people, and anyone aiding immigrants and non-white people as an infection to be eliminated, rather than as individuals with moral standing to be served or protected.

These actions and attitudes are consistent with (as just one example) the treatment of people in ICE’s concentration camps, where people are denied adequate food, clothing, water, and medical care. “We’re treating these people like animals, not like human beings,” California Representative Ro Khanna told local outlet KQED after inspecting one ICE detention facility. “Whatever you think about the consequences for people who are undocumented, we should all agree that you treat people with dignity.”

Obviously, though, we do not all agree that you should treat people with dignity. The Trump administration has made their views very clear, not least by repeatedly attempting to prevent Congress members from inspecting the detention centers. The villains for Trump are not the people who dehumanize immigrants, but those who attempt to treat immigrants as neighbors worthy of respect and care.

Similarly, after CBP agents Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Stephen Miller rushed to social media to lie that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” This immediate demonization of agents’ victims is a clear, loud signal to those agents that they are doing their job when they terrorize and kill immigrants and those who stand with immigrants.

So, to sum up, the Trump administration has said that it wants to commit mass ethnic cleansing and has made it clear it views immigrants as refuse and debris; immigration agents have acted on these orders by dehumanizing and terrorizing immigrants; administration officials have backed them up and reiterated their support. In this context, acts of murderous violence are not aberrations or accidents. They are a considered and deliberate policy.

Abolish ICE

Trump’s genocidal plans are very unpopular, and that has meant that he and Miller and Vance have sometimes had to back off and disavow their intentions. Bovino was removed from command; DHS secretary Kristi Noem was fired after failing to defend Trump policies adequately before Congress; the horrific Minneapolis ICE surge in which Pretti and Goode were killed was drawn down. For the last few months ICE activity has been quieter.

But the recent upsurge in kidnappings, detentions, and murders is a reminder that these strategic retreats did not change the fundamental genocidal commitments of the administration. New supposedly kinder gentler DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin is not in fact kinder and gentler; he is defending the agents responsible for the killings in Maine just as administration officials have knee-jerked defended other murderous ICE agents because they all believe that murder is an accepted and even encouraged part of the job.

ICE and CBP act as, and are intended to act as, a terrorist gestapo eliminating targeted populations and any political enemies who happen to get in the way. You cannot reform a fascist gestapo by demanding that its agents identify themselves, or by demanding they wear body cameras or by giving them better training in how to handle people in cars. A fascist gestapo is not making an error when it tortures and murders non-white people and political opponents. A fascist gestapo murdering non-white people and political opponents is fulfilling its purpose—a purpose, again, clearly articulated by Trump and his loathsome henchthugs.

If ICE and CBP continue in any form, they will function the way local police departments function—as unaccountable political actors with guns who work to increase their own power and to deliberately destabilize regimes which are not sufficiently brutal and racist. There is no path out of fascism that involves the continued funding and empowerment of a massive, bloated fascist state militia. ICE is a violent, racist, genocidal institution. It needs to be abolished and its funding used to provide reparations to its victims—those victims including, at this point, every immigrant community in the US.