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ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants
(www.brennancenter.org)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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Might be cope, but isn’t the empire being a bit too hasty? Even the blandest vote blue anti-violence liberal hates ICE, and there isn’t a long-standing propaganda pipeline to sanctify ICE compared to the police or the military. Feels like the entire organisation is going to be politically toxic to all but the hardcore MAGA types.
I think they are banking on the average liberal to be too spineless to actually fight back, which may be true, but they have also convinced themselves that their only opposition are the liberals and not the majority of Americans, I really hope this backfires on them and leads to something big for Americans.
I just saw a yougov poll that was only 28% of repubs and 53% of Americans disapprove of ICE. I took away from it that you can show people mothers getting brutalized, families separated, and describe every last detail of the concentration camps and you'll still get a lukewarm reception from Americans writ large who would have to update their opinion based on evidence which is an impossible ask. You might as well ask your blind friend for pointers on your three point shot. I can believe that my premise is flawed. Do Americans care about ICE?
Key word here is "show"
A lot of people tune out completely. They're basically children, they only care about their slop and don't pay attention to anything else. As far as they are aware, ICE are just enforcing immigration laws. They know basically nothing about the specifics.
I hate them.
the big secret is movements are not majoritarian campaigns but pressuring society and the state (ruling class) to concede or make it too costly to continue w/ status quo.
Most Americans are go-along-to-get-along and don't have political agency outside a voting bloc.
At the very least, I think this could further radicalise a significant amount of people, and wasn’t there this gentleman who mentioned how quantitative changes accumulate into qualitative change?
It took literal boot-licking "God's voice on earth" tsar worshipers getting gunned down by the dozens to convince the masses the empire hated them enough to actually do something against the empire
I abhore bloodshed but I think the only thing that will awaken American class consciousness will be bloody violence on a scale that traumatizes the American people into action. So far the state is working towards doing exactly that.
I unfortunately agree with this. When my slowly becoming more disillusioned liberal friends ask what it will take to wake more people up to the reality of what's going on, I now send this gif every time.
I agree. They're tripping over their own dicks and giddy with power. If they push this, they're going to find that gun dealers don't do political compass tests.
It is the useual liberal reaction that they hate the vibes of ice. They have no real objection to ice but they do object to how they look doing it.
No they dont. Dems break records with how they fund ICE and no lib ever complained. Libs hate the optics of what ICE is doing.
If we assume that ICE/CBP are the only goons Trump will use into the future - I think they are being far beyond way too hasty. I think it's insane.
I saw online posts that said ICE has 20,000 employees. I don't know if that's true and I don't know how many employees CBP has. For the sake of simplicity - I'll make a liberal estimate that ICE/CBP has 30,000 goons they can put on the street. That's probably higher than reality but whatever.
Those goons can only do so much. I'm horrible at mental arithmetic so hopefully somebody will make a far better guess. But I'll guess they at the same time they can subjugate 2 (3?) cites similar to Minneapolis. It has a population of 430,000 and I have no idea what the population density is. Trump simply doesn't have the manpower.
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The problem is GOP SCOTUS. The justices could do all sorts of horrible and horrific stuff.
They could say Trump has the right to declare martial law anywhere at anytime simply by saying it's an "official act".
They could void Posse Comitatus and say Trump can use the military to maintain order. Trump could use stuff like attack helicopters to scare the shit out of people.
They could say Trump not governors has control over every state's national guard and he also can send them to other states at will.
They could - I don't know the term - federalize(?) the police so Trump could use them however he likes. In other words - Trump could take a cop-goon and send him 500 miles way into a whole other state.
They could say Trump has the power to make pretty much any goon with a gun in a federal uniform his tool.
They could define "maintaining order" as making it legal for any uniformed goon on an American street to use lethal force at will.
Etc. I'm sure there are more things but I only listed what I thought of off the top of my head.
At this point - I can't do the mental arithmetic at all. There are way too many variables for me. Maybe all those goons could try to subjugate ~50 Minneapolis-sized cites? I have no idea. Also - I know people would fight back but whatever happens - I expect the dems to do what they have been doing. Absolutely nothing.
I assume the democratic party machine would laugh at me and sat those are nonsense hypotheticals that can't happen. So they are in no rush at all to do anything. Maybe they actually hope for Trump's "overreach" because they only care about votes. They are focused on "kitchen table issues" and the upcoming elections. And - as always - they want to appeal to "moderate" republicans.
There were approximately 800,000 members of the SS throughout WWII. This included commandos, tank units, civilian clerks, doctors, lawyers, rifle platoons, concentration camp guards, and so on out of a total German population of 65 million. By the end of the war, several hundred thousand of those 800,000 were killed. They still murdered 17 million people as part of the Holocaust and killed millions of Allied troops. There were only 52,000 SS when Hitler assumed total control of Germany in 1933.
Even if ICE has small numbers, they get enough support from other law enforcement and the military to continue doing what they're doing. Trump will need to recruit massive numbers if he wants to create another Auschwitz and fight multiple countries carrying out multiple genocides. But to get the ball rolling? 30,000 may be all he needs given how much automation and computerization there is. ICE doesn't have to have dozens people going through records looking for undesirables' addresses. One person can just pull up census data and send an e-mail.
You can read what libs said about dhs creation at the time, and how it still exists today
Maybe they’ll ’Night of the Long Knives’ them when they stop being useful; have the military purge them and then just assume fundamentally the same role without the unpopular baggage?
I agree they hate ICE but will they do anything meaningful about it? The fash are betting on no