There is no gray area. There is no middle ground. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a violent paramilitary force waging war on migrants, families, and communities of color. Its agents are not neutral bureaucrats or misguided patriots, they are the armed foot soldiers of white supremacist empire. From an anarchist, radical-left perspective ICE is not an anomaly but a core expression of the fascist logic that underpins the U.S. state. It must be abolished, dismantled, destroyed, alongside every border, every cage, every cop.
ICE Is the American GestapoLet’s be clear.
ICE agents raid homes in the dead of night. They snatch people off sidewalks and buses. They separate children from their parents and disappear them into a system where many are never seen again. They hold human beings in freezing, filthy, overcrowded detention center, sometimes for years.
These camps are rife with sexual abuse, medical neglect, and death. Children have died of flu and dehydration in ICE custody. Women have been forcibly sterilized. People have been denied basic hygiene, clean water, and soap during a global pandemic.
This is not a metaphor. This is fascism.
The comparison to the Nazis is not rhetorical flourish it’s historical pattern. The Nazis didn’t begin with death camps. They began with registration, surveillance, forced removals, deportations, and internment camps. They began by labeling certain people “illegal,” “criminal,” “vermin.” ICE follows the same script. It categorizes migrants as threats, invaders, diseases. It uses militarized force to cleanse the national body of “undesirables.” This is textbook fascism. And like the SS, ICE agents *choose* to carry it out. They are not victims. They are perpetrators.
Borders Are Violence
Anarchists reject the legitimacy of all nation-states and their borders. Borders are not natural. They are imaginary lines drawn by colonizers and enforced by violence. Every border is a wall built on stolen land. The U.S., Mexico border is a militarized death zone where thousands of migrants have perished from heat, thirst, and exposure, forced into the desert by policies designed to kill them.ICE doesn’t “protect the border” it militarizes it. It wages war on refugees fleeing imperialism, climate collapse, gang violence (often caused by U.S. intervention), and poverty created by global capitalism. The same U.S. that destabilized their countries now imprisons them for trying to survive.The cruelty is the point. Border patrol agents slash water bottles left in the desert by aid workers. They destroy food drops and sabotage humanitarian efforts. ICE criminalizes humanitarian aid. In every way, this is a state machine designed to kill people not for what they’ve done, but for who they are and where they were born.
ICE Is White Supremacy with a Badge
The very foundation of ICE is white supremacy. Its job is to enforce the racial hierarchy of U.S. nationalism, to uphold the fantasy of a white, English-speaking, “law-abiding” citizenry by purging everyone who doesn’t fit the mold. It doesn’t matter how long someone’s lived here, whether they have family, whether they’re a child or a survivor of violence. If you’re undocumented, you are marked as subhuman.
This is racial cleansing in slow motion.
And the ideology that fuels it is the same that fueled Hitler’s Germany: nationalism, xenophobia, dehumanization, and blind loyalty to the state. ICE agents pledge allegiance not to people or communities, but to the machine of state violence. They will follow any order. They will raid churches. They will target schools. They will deport children. They will separate mothers from babies. They will leave people to die.
Sound familiar?
Reform Is Complicity. Abolition Is the Only Path.
Liberals talk about “reforming” ICE, about ending family separation, increasing transparency, or making deportations “more humane.” This is cowardice. This is moral failure. You cannot reform a boot on someone’s neck. You cannot reform fascism.
You destroy it.
From an anarchist perspective, ICE must be abolished. Not rebranded. Not relocated. Not limited. Abolished. Every detention center must be emptied and razed. Every agent disarmed and disbanded. Every border wall torn down. And beyond ICE, we must target the whole machine: CBP, DHS, police, prisons, the surveillance state, the corporate contractors profiting from every detained body.
This is not about “bad policy.”
This is about illegitimate power.
This is about settler colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and fascist control.We fight not just for undocumented people to live, but to live *free*. Without fear. Without cages. Without cops.-No Nations. No Borders. No ICE.
No Compromise.
ICE is not the exception, it is the rule. It is a symptom of the disease called the nation-state, which survives by creating outsiders to exclude, police to enforce, and prisons to disappear.We reject it all.To be radical is to get to the root. And the root is this: the United States government is a violent empire. Its borders are soaked in blood. Its agents are fascists in uniform. Its laws are lies designed to justify domination.There is no such thing as an “illegal” person. But there are illegal systems. ICE is one. The U.S. state is another. Both must fall.Until then, we resist.We sabotage.We protect each other.We refuse to let history repeat without a fight.