A Schutzstaffel of His Own

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When the Gestapo Becomes Something Worse

Six months into the second Trump presidency, the enduring symbol of politically-empowered American fascism has become the masked, gun-toting Gestapo agent, cruelly and brazenly conducting an ethnic cleansing operation on the streets of our cities. Armed to the teeth, contemptuous of American civil rights law, and empowered by War on Terror-era counterterrorism policies, Customs and Border Protection, and especially Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, are loyal only to the executive branch Department of Homeland Security, and suffer under little of the oversight applied to other law enforcement agencies in the American government. Here in the early days of the Trumpenreich’s authoritarian transformation of American society, ICE is already a militarized secret police force, and the tip of the spear for Trump’s fascist agenda; it is the Pork Reich’s own private Gestapo.

Unfortunately, Trump, and the cultish Republican Party, seem to have a preternatural talent for making everything already awful about America objectively worse in ways that impact the largest possible number of people from groups they’d like to purge from society. The recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” a class war, theft and murder bill that enriches billionaire GOP donors while guaranteeing labor class Americans will literally die due to gutted healthcare and social safety net programs, is an obvious case in point. Although the bill’s slavish devotion to funneling wealth to the upper class while implementing extreme austerity policies proves my point on its own, the now-passed Act also contains enough funding to transform ICE from Trump’s secret police force into the Pork Reich’s own private army. For more information about the ways this will not only supercharge the administration’s ethnonationalist mass deportation project, but also fundamentally alter the American way of life under a fascist regime, let’s turn to this July 9th, 2025 reaction piece by Judith Levine, writing for The Guardian.

Ice is about to become the biggest police force in the US

“The colossal buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) will create the largest domestic police force in the US; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. Ice will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, Ice – perhaps under another name – will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable. It is hard to imagine any president dismantling it.

Ice will receive $45bn for immigrant detention, to be spent over four years – more than the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined. The agency says it is planning on a total of 100,000 beds. But grants to the states loosely slated for “enforcement” total $16.5bn. If they use the money to build and lease more detention camps, the American Immigration Council estimates, capacity could reach 125,000, just under the population of the federal prisons.

Dipping into a pot totaling $170bn, the Department of Homeland Security intends to hire 10,000 new Ice agents, bringing the total to 30,000, as well as 8,500 border patrol agents. For comparison, the FBI has about 23,700 employees, including 10,000 special agents.”

I want to be clear that when Levine says that the US government is now spending more on the Gestapo than many countries spend on their entire military, she is in no way exaggerating. Taken overall, the GOP budget reconciliation bill provides over two hundred billion dollars ($200,000,000,000) in funding for various aspects of immigration enforcement, including hiring more ICE goons, building out Trump’s cherished border wall, and constructing more migrant concentration camps to house the dangerous grandmothers and agricultural workers we’re protecting American society from. This level of funding transforms Border Czar Tom Homan’s fantasy of ICE lurking “everywhere” in American life into an achievable goal, while giving rocket fuel to Stephen Miller’s nazi ambitions and ongoing ethnic-cleansing project. This means more racist Gestapo workplace raids, more deportation flights, more silencing of political dissent under the guise of fighting terrorism, and more of the armed muscle the white nationalist regime needs to make its vision of a whiter, and righter America, a reality.

All of which simply presupposes that the massive funding increase for a militarized police force loyal to the executive branch is only, or even primarily, about immigration enforcement. As the author notes, when a fascist regime that has already abused its power over immigration enforcement to punish its political enemies, gives its private Gestapo more than enough money to deport every immigrant in America, legal or otherwise, it would be foolish to believe the regime is going to stop at hunting down migrants. We are talking about a government that routinely links protest with terrorism, kidnapped and attempted to deport foreign anti-genocide student activists under the guise of protecting US national security, and pretends America is being invaded by narco-terrorist gangs, all to grant the regime extraordinary and legally dubious authoritarian powers. Between targeting campaigns like Project Esther, Trump’s attempts to create an AI-powered surveillance state, and DHS preparing ICE agents to kick in the front doors of American citizens, we don’t have to ask if an ICE the size of an army will be turned on American citizens and Trump’s political enemies, because the Gestapo already is targeting those people without all this additional funding now.

At this point in the second Trump era, we have seen Downmarket Mussolini and the larger Pork Reich go to great lengths to obtain control of an army capable of enacting and enforcing Trump’s fascist agenda. From repurposing federal agencies that have nothing to do with immigration towards his mass deportation ethnic cleansing project, to actively recruiting American law enforcement to act as a force multiplier for the Gestapo in Democrat-run cities, and even sending in actual military personnel from the US Marines and the National Guard, the Trumpenreich has explored every avenue available to them to obtain a force capable of making Trump’s dictator dreams come true on the streets of America. Without such a force, it will be entirely impossible to control a nation of just under three hundred and fifty million people who think they’re living in a democracy, and the regime knows it.

Now, with the stroke of pen, the Swine Emperor has access to his own private army and an already terrifying ICE police apparatus is about to grow into a whole new type of nightmare with even more ominous historical precedents. After all, Hitler used the Gestapo as his secret police force, while he relied on the Schutzstaffel, or SS, as his private army.

 

 

– Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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