In the United States, the backlash to President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration drive is in full swing. A major funding package in the Senate failed to pass a procedural vote Thursday, amid attempts by Democrats to rein in Trump’s deployment of federal immigration enforcement to the streets of U.S. cities. The separate killings of two Americans monitoring the activities of federal agents in Minneapolis this month sparked a wave of anger that has forced the White House to at least consider recalibrating its campaign for mass deportations.
Outside the U.S., the perceived havoc wrought by federal agents has also left its mark. This week, Giuseppe Sala, mayor of Milan, spoke out against the expected arrival of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as part of a routine deployment of U.S. personnel to the Winter Olympics in Italy. “I’m sure that the Milanese are unhappy with having this sort of militia” here, “which kills people in the U.S., entering houses without permission,” Sala told my colleagues, referring to recent events in Minneapolis. Of the Italian government, he asked: “Is it possible that you could say ‘no’ once to Mr. Trump? Once! Quite simply.”
On Tuesday, the Ecuadorian foreign ministry filed a formal protest with the U.S. in the wake of an ICE agent trying to enter Ecuador’s consulate in Minneapolis without permission — a violation of principles of sovereignty accorded to foreign missions and embassies by the Vienna Convention. The condemnation was conspicuous given the close ties between Ecuador’s right-wing President Daniel Noboa and the Trump White House.
Meanwhile in Germany, the country’s foreign office put out a travel advisory against going to parts of the United States. “In Minneapolis and other cities, demonstrations sometimes lead to violent clashes with the migration and security authorities,” the alert reads, advising Germans to “be vigilant and stay away from crowds where violence might occur.”
And in France, authorities are putting pressure on French tech company Capgemini to publicize information about its U.S. subsidiary’s dealings with ICE amid public outrage. “I urge Capgemini to shed light, in an extremely transparent manner, on its activities, on this policy, and undoubtedly to question the nature of these activities,” finance minister Roland Lescure told French parliament on Tuesday evening.
ICE and other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security have been the recipients of vast increases in funding by the Trump administration. ICE’s current budget alone is larger than the annual military expenditures of most armies in Europe. In ICE’s sweeping recruitment drives and spending spree on an array of cutting-edge technologies, analysts see the expansion of a new “paramilitary” force more aligned with the political dispensation in Washington — with grim implications for the rule of law in the United States.
“The current administration has transformed [ICE] into a force that occupies the streets,” noted an editorial in leading Spanish daily El País. “No one knows how far the tension might escalate in a country with hundreds of millions of firearms in private hands that transcend ideology. Public safety is not a marketing tool at Trump’s disposal. In Minneapolis, a sinister path has been opened for American democracy.”
“An extensive body of research shows that more militarized forms of policing are associated with higher rates of police violence and rights violations, without reducing crime or improving officer safety,” observed Erica De Bruin, a political scientist who studies civil-military relations around the world. She called out the ways “in which federal immigration forces in the United States resemble informal paramilitaries in other countries — operating with less effective oversight, less competent recruits and increasingly entrenched partisan identity.”
In its cover story this week on the excesses of ICE, the Economist pointed to three “warning signs” of states giving way to “paramilitarism”: “One is when governments start to rely on armed force as a first resort, rather than the last. Another is when internal disciplinary mechanisms cease to function properly,” noted the British publication. “A final red flag is when forces looking for bad guys treat local civilians ‘as support networks of the enemy,’ perhaps because polarizing politicians describe them as such.”
Trump officials balk at criticism of their actions, and have cast descriptions put forward by Democratic lawmakers and activists of ICE as a modern-day “Gestapo” as endangering U.S. federal officers. But viewed from afar, the developments in the U.S. seem familiar. “You have your own Interior Ministry,” an Arab business executive told me on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week.
They were gesturing to the all-powerful policing apparatuses that exist in other countries, especially autocracies where strongmen leaders lean on security forces distinct from the army to consolidate control and suppress dissent. During the upheavals of the Arab Spring more than a decade ago, for example, it was the notorious Interior Ministry of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak that was the focal point of popular rage.
The American founders had little interest in the creation of a similar authority in what was initially conceived as a loose confederation of former colonies. It was the attacks of 9/11 that prompted to the creation of DHS and, subsequently, ICE, which is one of the newest paramilitary forces to emerge in a modern Western democracy.
“The Department of Homeland Security has, in effect, become a tool of a dictator, our Ministry of Interior,” wrote Steven Cash, a former national security official with stints at the CIA and DHS.
“Its sprawling law-enforcement elements have been remade into a paramilitary force: heavily armed, lightly restrained, and increasingly insulated from meaningful oversight,” he added. “Immigration enforcement, in particular, has been transformed from a regulatory and investigative function into a domestic security apparatus operating in American communities with a posture that looks far less like civilian law enforcement and far more like internal security services abroad.”
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