Case Explained: US President Donald Trump’s goon squad ICE has terrified America, replacing law with a state of panic – Legal Perspective

In what felt like a single moment, the world became witness to the shooting of Renee Good. In the depths of a Minnesota winter, she parked her car to observe ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, her right as a US citizen. Multiple videos of the incident show a verbal altercation no worse than you’d see outside any bar on a weekend night, something we’d expect a trained officer to brush off. Instead, despite facing no risk from a car moving at a crawl, a masked officer fired three shots. Good was killed just eight blocks from where George Floyd was asphyxiated by a police officer five-and-a-half years ago.

In the six minutes after the shooting, ICE agents prevented first responders from providing aid that could have saved the 37-year-old mother’s life. They drove their cars away, obscuring evidence. Instead of following protocol that required officers involved in a shooting to separate, they huddled together to, seemingly, co-ordinate their stories before facing scrutiny.

Trump’s political identity is tied, as much as anything else, to a browbeaten fear of immigrants. ICE has become the muscle in a massive overcorrection from the lax immigration enforcement of the Biden era that has targeted migrant communities regardless of their legal status. We have seen a pattern emerge over the past year, in which Trump sends in ICE to conduct raids, which terrifies communities, provoking protests that Trump then uses as a prelude for further crackdowns. We saw this in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles – all led by Democratic mayors and governors.

In these raids, which began on the day Trump took office, we see masked agents deployed to the streets of American cities to round up anyone who might be a migrant and ship them off to harrowing prisons in Florida and El Salvador.

To add insult to that injury, Trump acolytes like Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, pose for photos in front of prisoners like it’s the cover of Vogue. They have deported legal US residents to countries where they knew lives would be at risk. When they get stopped by the courts, they re-assess and send their prisoners somewhere else, hoping the world will forget and move on.

There is of course value in enforcing immigration laws, but what Trump has done goes far beyond any reasonable process, making a farce of a country whose motto on the door reads, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. ICE now has a budget on par with that of the entire Australian Defence Forces. As Joe Biden once said, “don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

In autocratic regimes, security forces become instruments of the leader’s political project. To defy them is not mere civil disobedience but an attack on the state itself.

The rule of law is replaced by an obsessive and relentless focus on an enemy identity – whatever best serves the leader. For Rodrigo Duterte, it was anyone who had a passing association with drug traffickers, emboldening Philippine police and people linked to police to kill thousands. For Vladimir Putin or the ailing Ayatollah, it’s anyone associated with the powers of the West.