ICE Gets Compared to the Brownshirts - And It Sticks

ICE has been publicly compared to the Brownshirts in Minneapolis and after Gregory Bovino’s appearance, that comparison has stuck. Right, so ICE carried out an operation in Minneapolis that ended with a civilian being shot, in public, during enforcement, and the system closed ranks around it. But since then, federal leadership has now turned up, visibly, unapologetically, dressed for command in their heads, but inviting some rather unfortunate, but perhaps also accurate comparisons to the Brownshirts of Ernst Röhm. Immigration enforcement too often gets sold sold as paperwork, warrants, process — something that happened quietly, somewhere else. Once you put lethal force on the street and defend it as routine, that story is finished. And once senior figures arrive afterwards dressed up in a manner evoking memories of the SS, performing authority rather than caution, people don’t need persuading anymore. That’s when the comparisons start appearing on their own. Not as insults, but as recognition. Because at that point this stops looking like law being applied and starts looking like power being asserted, and once enforcement is read that way, it doesn’t wait for permission to escalate — it carries on under its own momentum and that’s a stain they’ll never scrub clean. Right, so ICE has been deployed in American cities in a way that no longer looks administrative, no longer looks procedural, and no longer relies on consent to function. Border Patrol has been folded into that deployment as well, with senior figures choosing to present themselves as commanders rather than civil servants. That combination is not abstract, and it isn’t rhetorical. It is on the street, it is being filmed, and it is being felt by the people living underneath it, which removes the option of pretending this is just routine enforcement operating as it always has.