Their stated mission is to protect the United States from cross-border crime and illegal immigration by enforcing federal laws. The problem is by definition it’s hard to find out “illegal immigrants” (people staying in the country without valid papers) because, well, they don’t have papers. By all aspects they don’t exist, so how can the government track them down?

Border control for the US has always been a sinking ship tbh, the famous border wall with Mexico is more of a colander.

Their other preferred method is arresting people at court and administrative functions, e.g. trials or citizenship hearings. But that’s not very effective either because realistically how many “illegals” actually go through these procedures? There’s a difference in methods between “law says to deport illegal immigrants” and “deport ALL illegal immigrants”, and they are set on the latter. But dialectically this is how their methods become more brutal as time goes on and they cannot reach their goal.

Then of course there’s the backrooms deal to deport people to CECOT in El Salvador, or arresting literally anyone. ICE has no oversight despite being a federal agency, they have carte blanche to do anything. A father and son were arrested and battered by ICE, and the teen’s phone who recorded the arrest was later found in a second-hand shop. Someone recently wrote for Salon how their ICE interview went. Even with their clear opinions about ICE and Trump they were offered the job without even doing any of the pre-hire tests they needed to (such as drug and medical). Then you spend 6-12 weeks training in office, then can go on the field. It’s clear from the videos the ICE agents are not trained in anything. Local riot cops do better kettling and cordon methods than ICE lol.

This is explainable dialectically as well, the method of random checks require an increasing amount of agents so they start getting lax - training is shortened, everyone is offered a job, and you can do whatever you want as long as you get results. Of course it is only complete in totality, and we see that these agents can be redeployed against other targets later. It’s a test run of what the US wants to become shortly. But conversely, their terror is only hardening the people’s resolve against them, and you even see suburban moms going head-to-head against armed agents (though we’ve long known women are at the forefront of revolutionary movement and moms are fierce!), they just don’t have any sympathy for ICE anymore.

It’s not what a winning empire looks like basically. Gives me late Japanese empire vibes.

I recommend people in the US (and outside too tbh) read this resistance manual btw: https://mega.nz/file/HrA1gYQT#fkwvQxea0jg5yAWM-pzgSGotAG0Syw8oZ_K1wdpLr3I. It was written in the 50s in case of actual armed occupation but many of the tactics presented would apply perfectly against ICE, both for people targeted and sympathizers to people targeted.