{"id":14766,"date":"2026-04-16T08:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14766"},"modified":"2026-04-25T01:45:02","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T05:45:02","slug":"ice-and-the-police-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/04\/ice-and-the-police-state\/","title":{"rendered":"ICE and the Police State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tempest Collective:<\/span> We have seen mass deployment of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the country\u2014but also mass resistance to this, notably in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. This has opened some conversations about how we understand the role of ICE agents in the context of a broader shift in policing strategies after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alec Karakatsanis:<\/span> The most important thing to do in this situation is to understand that whatever institution of repression we’re talking about\u2014whether it’s a local police force, or state troopers, or the traditional federal so-called intelligence agencies, or border patrol, or what’s now called ICE\u2014these are all very similar institutions that have very similar goals, functions, and purposes. If you take a longer historical view and if you take a more functional, materialist perspective on what role these institutions play in any unequal society, they’re all essentially doing the same thing.<\/p>\n

So, I think it’s a mistake to talk about ICE as if it’s separate from all of these other institutions of repression. Speaking, obviously very crudely, the main function of these institutions is to preserve distributions of inequality along various dimensions. Some of these institutions are targeted at preserving inequality along more narrow, specific dimensions, each of these institutions has their focus on a different segment of marginalized people, and each has a different kind of justification in terms of the mythologies that are told to society about why a particular institution, like ICE, exists. In general, they’re all doing the same thing. They’re trying to control people who don’t have any power and to preserve the ability of people who own things in our society to exclude other people from the things that they own.<\/p>\n

I think we’re in the middle of a couple of big overall shifts. Again, speaking in broad brushstrokes, we are seeing a shift from an era of mass human caging to an era where that kind of mass human caging is seen by people in power and powerful institutions as less necessary than before, and we’re moving into more of an era of control through increasingly centralized forms of surveillance. They are all deploying these technological platforms\u2014the databases, the cloud computing, the artificial intelligence, the voice recognition, the face recognition, the body cameras, all of that stuff\u2014and all of the same vendors and multinational corporations, and investors and are involved at every level of the policing and ICE continuum. And that’s happening across what I’ll call the repressive bureaucracies.<\/p>\n

The second big shift over the last few years and in the next five to ten years is from a focus on mass criminalization through the formal domestic legal system to a focus on borders and exclusion and capacity for mass detention through less formal means.<\/p>\n

I think that we will see more and more of the oppressive architecture of the state directed at preventing the chaos that is being unleashed around the world in terms of climate catastrophe, in terms of the so-called foreign policy decisions of the Western countries. We will probably see a lot of energy focused on blocking all forms of human mobility and migration and militarizing the borders through that surveillance, primarily.<\/p>\n

National ID databases provide more and more ability to exclude anyone you want\u2014as India is doing, for example\u2014from voting, from opening a bank account, from essentially having any kind of economic life. We’re gonna see that kind of system create these digital borders, as well. And then there will need to be large concentration-camp like facilities to warehouse those people who are prevented from living any kind of flourishing life.<\/p>\n

In the process, I think domestic criminalization becomes a little bit less of the focus of the widespread obsession of their oppressive bureaucracies, but redefining who is part of the political community and then excluding other people from that community is going to be an increasing focus of these bureaucracies.<\/p>\n

brian bean:<\/span> I would describe the expanding presence and role of ICE agents as a component of the broader trend of a shifting intensification of the police state, of the police, of the different tools and institutions used for repression, and the other \u201cmain function[s]\u201d that Alec describes. Since 2008, the always crisis-prone system of capitalism has been in a period of protracted crisis, which has continued to unravel. The inability to resolve this crisis on the level of global politics meant that more and more of the impact has fallen on regular working people, the exploited, and the dispossessed. It has created political shockwaves paving the way for the rise of far right political parties around the world. The instability has also been met with global waves of revolt and uprising against states and governments that are more and more seen as illegitimate.<\/p>\n

In that context, the police are more and more the main \u201csolution\u201d being used to keep things in check, ensure that the wheels of profit keep churning, and squelch any resistance. This is the trend that we see in the increase of police funding overall. One example of this is that under Biden, police budgets went up 40 percent, with a third of that being on the federal level. Another is the terrifying expansion of forms of surveillance that Alec mentions, and a general centralization and militarization of existing police bodies. The massive funding increase for ICE\u2014a federal police agency\u2014is mind boggling. Trump has increased the budget to $85 billion, 14 times what it was ten years ago, putting the annual spending for ICE on par with the total military budget of the country of Brazil.<\/p>\n