ICE and the Architecture of Fear: America’s Modern-Day Gestapo.

In 2003, under the sweeping powers granted by the Homeland Security Act, the United States founded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The agency was framed as a necessary post-9/11 instrument to defend national security by targeting undocumented immigration and transnational crime. But over the last two decades, ICE has become a symbol of state surveillance, unchecked power, and racialized punishment.

Its evolution reveals something far more dangerous than mission drift. ICE has morphed into an institution that operates in the shadows of law — conducting home raids without warrants, detaining immigrants in secretive facilities, separating families without legal recourse, and expanding a private prison-industrial complex that profits from human suffering. These tactics are not unique in history. In fact, they resemble the operations of one of the most notorious secret police forces in modern memory: the Gestapo.

The Gestapo Parallel

The Gestapo — the secret state police of Nazi Germany — existed to maintain the illusion of security while suppressing dissent, controlling marginalized populations, and operating above judicial oversight. They relied on fear, raids, and arbitrary detentions to instill obedience.

While we must avoid flattening history into false equivalencies, the structural similarities between ICE and the Gestapo are deeply unsettling. Both function(ed) as extensions of state ideology, empowered to bypass due process in pursuit of “national protection.” In ICE’s case, the targets are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, and undocumented communities, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for decades, have families, and pay taxes.

From 2017 to 2020, ICE ramped up workplace raids, targeting undocumented labourers while leaving their employers largely untouched — a clear sign that punishment, not policy reform, was the goal. In 2018, the world watched in horror as thousands of children were forcibly taken from their parents and held in what were essentially cages. Some were never reunited. The justification was legal. The method was inhumane.

Case in Point: Mohsen Mahdawi

Consider the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian human rights advocate and graduate student at Columbia University. A lawful permanent resident with no criminal record, Mahdawi arrived at a routine naturalization interview in 2023 expecting to take the next step toward citizenship. Instead, he was detained by ICE, placed in solitary confinement, and issued a deportation order based on a rarely enforced technicality in immigration law.

His crime? Criticizing U.S. foreign policy and speaking out about Palestinian liberation. Mahdawi’s experience is not isolated. It is emblematic of how ICE has increasingly been weaponized not just against immigration status violations, but as a punitive response to political speech. In this way, ICE does not merely act as an enforcer of border policy — it acts as a tool of ideological control.

Whether consciously or not, the U.S. is drifting toward criminalizing dissent, particularly when it comes from non-citizens or people of color. The machinery of ICE, like the Gestapo before it, depends on secrecy, dehumanization, and the public’s indifference.

The Industrial Incentive to Dehumanize

Behind the tactics lies an economic engine: the private prison system. ICE contracts with dozens of private detention centers, many of which are run for profit. These facilities are paid per bed, per detainee, incentivizing mass incarceration over actual justice. Conditions are frequently abysmal — overcrowded, under-regulated, and dangerous. In 2022 alone, 24 people died in ICE custody, often due to medical neglect or abuse.

This structure mirrors the profit-driven motives of past authoritarian systems, where the state outsourced cruelty in exchange for plausible deniability. In today’s America, these abuses continue behind barbed wire and bureaucratic opacity. The victims are often voiceless, undocumented, and far from any media spotlight.

Surveillance, Silence, and Solidarity

The comparison between ICE and the Gestapo is not hyperbole — it is a warning. Institutions like ICE don’t start as instruments of repression. They become that way when laws are designed to criminalize identity, when courts rubber-stamp overreach, and when public scrutiny is drowned out by nationalism.

To defend democracy, we must name what endangers it. ICE’s pattern of behavior — extrajudicial detentions, disregard for civil rights, and the disproportionate targeting of communities of color — demands urgent reform, if not outright abolition.

History has taught us what happens when power is left unaccountable. It is now up to us — the public, the voters, the citizens, and yes, the dissenters — to remember that silence is complicity.

No one is illegal on stolen land.
No one deserves to live in fear of their government.
And no one should have to trade their voice for their safety.