America’s Most Lawless Agency: ICE Is the Prototype for Tyranny
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”—Justice Louis D. Brandeis
While the U.S. wages war abroad—bombing Iran, escalating conflict, and staging a spectacle of power for political gain—a different kind of war is being waged here at home.
This war at home is quieter but no less destructive. The casualties are not in distant deserts or foreign cities. They are our freedoms, our communities, and the Constitution itself.
And the agents of this domestic war? Masked thugs. Unmarked vans. Raids. Roundups.
Detentions without due process. Retaliation against those who dare to question or challenge government authority. People made to disappear into bureaucratic black holes. Fear campaigns targeting immigrant communities and political dissenters alike. Surveillance weaponized to monitor and suppress lawful activity.
Packaged under the guise of national security—as all power grabs tend to be—this government-sanctioned thuggery masquerading as law-and-order is the face of the Trump Administration’s so-called war on illegal immigration.
Don’t fall for the propaganda that claims we’re being overrun by criminals or driven into the poorhouse by undocumented immigrants living off welfare.
The real threat to our way of life comes not from outside invaders, but from within: an unelected, unaccountable enforcement agency operating above the law.
President Trump insists that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is focused on violent criminals, but the facts tell a different story (non-criminal ICE arrests have surged 800% in six months)—and that myth is precisely what enables the erosion of rights for everyone.
By painting enforcement as narrowly targeted, the administration obscures a far broader dragnet that sweeps up legal residents, naturalized citizens, and native-born Americans alike.
What begins with immigrants rarely ends there.
According to the Cato Institute, 65 percent of people taken by ICE had no convictions, and 93 percent had no violent convictions at all.
This isn’t targeted enforcement—it’s indiscriminate purging.
What ICE—an agency that increasingly resembles a modern-day Gestapo—is doing to immigrants today, it can and will do to citizens tomorrow: these are the early warning signs of a system already in motion.
The machinery is in place. The abuses are ongoing. And the constitutional safeguards we rely on are being ignored, dismantled, or bypassed entirely.
When legal residents, naturalized citizens, and native-born Americans are swept up in ICE’s raids, detained without cause, and subjected to treatment that defies every constitutional protection against government overreach, this isn’t about immigration.
It’s not about danger. It’s about power—unchecked and absolute.
This is authoritarianism by design.
Here are just a few examples of how ICE’s reach now extends far beyond a criminal class of undocumented immigrants:
- In Los Angeles, ICE agents detained U.S. citizens Jason Gavidia and Javier Ramirez during mass raids at flea markets—actions condemned by local officials as racial profiling.
- In New York City, ICE arrested mayoral candidate Brad Lander at a courthouse after he questioned the legitimacy of an enforcement action.
- In Arizona, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen with developmental disabilities was held for 10 days without charges.
- In Virginia, naturalized citizen Jensy Machado was handcuffed at gunpoint until officers reviewed his REAL ID.
- In Oregon, ICE agents arrested Moises Sotelo Casas—beloved vineyard manager and community member—outside a church.
- In Tennessee, teen soccer player Emerson Colindres was deported without warning, despite having no criminal background. His community was left reeling.
- ICE has even conducted raids at churches—sanctuaries meant to offer refuge—violating not just constitutional rights but community trust and religious protections.
This pattern of abuse is not accidental.
It reflects a deliberate strategy of fear and domination by ICE agents acting like an occupying army, intent on intimidating the population into submission while the Trump
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
