The Ice Storm

Trump threatens the Insurrection Act and then goes TACO

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“We’re taking father/son bonding to a whole new level. JOIN.ICE.GOV”

Marc Cooper, Vińa Del Marc, Chile

Only a jackass as rock-stupid and incompetent a president as Donald J. Trump could, in the space of 11 months, convert his top winning issue into a dead-weight loser that threatens his MAGA movement in the midterms, and perhaps right into 2028.

A staggering 22-point downward polling swing on the issue of ICE since his inauguration is one of the greatest polling drops in modern history and further weakens an already battered presidency.

Just earlier this week I was arguing with friends that the Democratic Party would never in a million years endorse the abolition of ICE. I still think they lack the courage, but maybe not. Major polling this week now shows 46 percent of Americans want to shitcan ICE while 43 percent don’t. As recently as September, only 19 percent of Americans wanted to abolish ICE. And the abolition side is growing among elected officials.

So much so that the very funding of ICE is likely to become a bone of contention when the federal budget comes up for renewal in two weeks’ time. A few weeks ago, I would have said you’re nuts to predict this. I was wrong.

CNN reports:

“I think it should be a red line,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a California Democrat, told CNN when asked if his party should insist on changes to ICE in the funding bill. “I think we should take a hard stand against this funding.”

Another liberal, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, has already begun to press his party leaders on forcing the issue.

“I just don’t understand how we provide votes for a bill that funds the extent of the depravity. I know we can’t fix everything in the appropriations bill, but we should be looking at ways we can put some common-sense limitations on their ability to bring violence to our cities,” Murphy, a top Senate appropriator, told CNN.

Other liberal Democrats are supporting defunding, or reducing funding to ICE, and will be trying their hardest to make it a central point in the upcoming budget talks. More establishment and conservative Democrats don’t want the issue to even be brought up, as they fear—as they know—it will lead to another government shutdown for which they don’t have the courage..

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has offered his usual milquetoast position, stating, “I have lots of problems with ICE.” Period.

Schumer’s Democratic voter base, however, has a LOT more problems with ICE, as the demand to abolish it has quickly moved from the leftist fringe of the party to the mainstream. Multiple Democrat-dominated states and cities are passing local ordinances and laws to bar or restrict ICE operations.

Public sentiment has turned radically hostile to ICE, whose presence almost anywhere attracts loud, rowdy, and large demonstrations in the streets. Anti-ICE escalation has been stoked by the barbaric point-blank killing of Minnesota mother Renee Good and has been brought to a boiling point by the immediate public endorsement of her murder by Trump, JD Vance, and the grotesque DHS chief, “ICE Barbie.”

All three referred to the victim, her widow, and to anti-ICE protesters in general as “domestic terrorists” in a coordinated smear campaign. I write this from Chile and will tell you this is precisely the terminology used by Chile’s former dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. Either you were a patriot or a terrorist. There were no criminals. no dissenters, no opposition — only “terrorists.” It’s a dangerous slide that still raises the hair on the back of my neck,

On Thursday ICE agents shot and wounded a Venezuelan immigrant in a traffic stop that turned into a melee. The outbreak of new wave protest prompted Trump to threaten imposition of the Insurrection Act that would impose martial law on Minnesota,

So despised has ICE become that its extremist operations chief, the cosplaying Nazi field commander Gregory Bovino, had to swagger into a local Target to take a leak accompanied by an escort of a half-dozen combat troops with automatic rifles who stood guard at the door as the boss did his dribbling.

Tempers have been further elevated by the DOJ’s unprecedented decision to cut out Minnesota law enforcement from any role in the investigation of Good’s killing and its vow not to share any evidence with state or county officials.

Anti-ICE demonstrations blossomed from coast to coast, and a week after the shooting, Twin Cities streets are still the scene of brutal repression by ICE agents against demonstrators who have maintained round-the-clock protests.

And there’s more. DHS chief Kristi Noem is flooding Minneapolis with a reported 2,000 more ICE and armed federal agents. With the city police force topping out at 600 officers, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say the city is under military occupation.

She’s also flooding social media with millions of dollars worth of nationalist propaganda directly inspired by Nazi and Christian Nationalist imager produced by a close relative on the bonanza payroll.

DHS leader Noem has even appropriated an English translation for a plaque on her podium that was used by the SS and in German meant “Kill one of us and we will kill 100 of you.”

Thanks to passage earlier this year of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, the Department of Homeland Security is already funded for an eye-popping $170 billion and is growing into the 5th or 6th biggest army in the world. Its ranks have grown from 10,000 to 22,000 in just the past six months.

One thing is for certain: the massive backlash against ICE has persuaded Republicans to drop earlier plans to try and squeeze an additional appropriation into the January 30 budget talks. They are reticent to bring up anything about immigration.

After five combined years of Trump in office, the brutality of ICE is the first political issue to shatter the shield of immunity behind which a criminal president and his gang of associates have fended off other crises. It has, to use the cliche, broken through.

The actions of these past two weeks, shown in hundreds of viral videos viewed by nearly 90 percent of Americans, have made it legitimate to describe the force as Trump’s private militia of Nazis and Gestapo. While this jackbooted thug enterprise appeals to some American boys and man-boys, it has sickened an even greater number of Americans horrified by the emergence of a masked secret police who—falsely— according to Trump, Vance, and Noem—have “absolute immunity” and are accountable to nobody except Trump, I suppose.

It will be only a matter of days before this preposterous notion is directly challenged here or there, or probably in Minnesota, when the first arrest of an ICE agent by a local cop on charges of aggravated assault takes place and rounds of litigation follow.

It’s obvious that Trump has now sidelined the National Guard as his preferred weapon against American cities in favor of the much more militarized, much more ideological, and certainly much more brutal and violent ICE. The intimidation wrought by these faceless gangs of thugs and the fiery official rhetoric backing them up affects millions more than those they physically tangle with. It’s a stark reminder that around the corner may lurk an unidentified gang of masked thugs itching to beat you, gas you, “mistakenly” deport you, and now fire three shots point-blank into your face.

The disgust with Trump’s unhinged repression has spread into the Department of Justice itself. Six top prosecutors in the criminal civil rights division quit this week after being cut out of the homicide investigation by Pam Bondi’s completely corrupt Department of Justice. Another four to six Minnesota state prosecutors have also resigned for similar reasons.

Border Patrol officials, meanwhile, have so far failed to recruit the goal of 300 agents to join up with Trump’s massive surge planned for the Twin Cities in the coming days. And while the outcome of such a move is highly uncertain, House Democrats are gearing up to impeach DHS Chief Noem. After talking about invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump has now backed off, according to the New York Times, but not before 200 National Guard troops were placed on alert.

Meanwhile two former ICE agents have come out to the Daily Beast to say they are embarrassed by the action of their agency, once held in high regard by the public but now feared. The Border Patrol, tasked with backing up ICE, is having trouble finding recruits, according to a report by investigative reporter Ken Klippenstein on Substack.

A leaked internal ICE memo calling for the construction of an archipelago of new ICE detention camps to hold tens of thousands of detainees is also setting off a furor. My friend Micah Sifry of The Connector attended a town hall meeting the other night in the suburb of Chester, New York—a sleepy village 90 minutes out of Gotham and a fairly conservative hamlet where one of the proposed camps is to be built.

Even the county executive Steve Neuhaus, a Republican, who recently won re-election 60-40 percent, told News 12 that he had concerns. “The federal government is hunting people down,” Neuhaus said back on January 2. “They say they’re mostly bad people, but if there are families with children, that’s a problem. We owe it to ourselves to come up with a better solution than to round them up as cattle in a temporary center in a warehouse.”

Micah Sifry, in The Connector

I spoke with Micah when he was on the way to the meeting, and we speculated about whether the objections would be limited to basically NIMBY complaints. Well, hardly. Hundreds swarmed the meeting saying they opposed being home to a Gestapo force. It’s a fascinating and uplifting read.

The year before us is going to be consequential. With every passing hour there is another lurch by Trump into authoritarian and dictatorial rule with a growing disregard for the rule of law. There is also mounting opposition. I could argue both sides of the midterms. They might make a big difference for the better, or they could push Trump to simply sidestep the other branches of government.

It’s up to us. As 2026 is shaping up to be a momentous race and eventual collision between dictatorship and democracy, there is no middle ground left. The brave citizens of Chicago and now Minneapolis are lighting the path for us.

Really? Well, kinda. The $50K signing bonuses are only if you have previous military or law-enforcement experience in a leadership position. The $60K student loan repayment is $10K per year and only if you have a degree in a field applicable to a government job outside of ICE. If you quit before six years you have to pay anything you got back. The 25% premium pay is a trick to get you to agree to OT with no cap on OT hours. Bait and switch.