Key points:
- ICE becomes largest law enforcement agency under President Trump’s second term.
- Trump administration plans to deport 1 million people a year with 10,000 new agents.
- Historians warn that ICE’s tactics may spark widespread civil disobedience.
As ICE morphs into the largest law enforcement agency in the country under President Trump’s second term, history offers a stark warning: states that rely on masked federal agents to kidnap people in broad daylight don’t hold onto their legitimacy for long.
Today’s deportation raids are dangerous to the very fabric of the republic. Moreover, we’ve seen this before and it did not end well.
The Trump administration’s new immigration mandate is staggering in scale: 1 million deportations a year, enforced by 10,000 new ICE agents, with $170 billion in congressional backing, including $45 billion for new detention centers.
But as historian Joshua Zeitz writes in Politico, it’s the method of enforcement — militarized, unmarked, and increasingly lawless — that may be Trump’s undoing. In the 1850s, a similar federal dragnet — the Fugitive Slave Act — backfired so spectacularly that it helped usher in the Civil War.
Today, the parallels are not just haunting -they are alarmingly precise.
ICE agents, often masked and unidentifiable, now routinely raid immigrant neighborhoods, workplaces, and even courthouses.
In San Diego, 30 heavily armed agents stormed a family-owned Italian restaurant using flash-bang grenades.
In Los Angeles, over 1,600 people were rounded up in a single weekend, many seized in places where they were trying to comply with immigration proceedings.
In rural Missouri, the seizure of Carol Mayorga — a Hong Kong-born waitress and mother of three — sparked protests and petitions from her Trump-supporting neighbors, eventually winning her release.
As Zeitz explains in his piece “ICE Risks Overplaying Its Hand. We’ve Seen It Happen Before”, these displays of brute federal power resemble the dragnet operations of the 1850s, when federal marshals hunted formerly enslaved persons under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Back then, white Northerners who once viewed slavery as a distant problem were radicalized by the spectacle of Black men marched at gunpoint through their streets. In Boston, the arrest of Anthony Burns prompted protests so intense that President Franklin Pierce sent in the U.S. Army and Navy to ensure the return of one man. The cost: over $5 million in today’s dollars — and untold political damage.
Today, Trump’s deportation state may be repeating those mistakes. According to a recent CNN poll, 55% of Americans now believe Trump has gone too far in targeting undocumented immigrants — a 10-point increase since February. As images of masked men detaining neighbors, coworkers, and friends proliferate, that number will likely grow.
There’s a deeper erosion at work, though.
As Zak Cheney-Rice reports in New York Magazine, the widespread use of unmarked, masked federal agents has made it impossible to tell who’s actually a cop.
ICE officers routinely wear balaclavas, bulletproof vests, and graphic tees — uniforms indistinguishable from those favored by hate groups like Patriot Front.
And now civilians bent on exploitation and crime are taking advantage of that ambiguity.
In Georgia, a woman posing as an ICE agent kidnapped someone at her workplace. In South Carolina, impersonators detained Hispanic motorists. In North Carolina, one assaulted a woman at a Motel 6, threatening to deport her if she reported it.
This is all by design.
As Cheney-Rice writes, “One of the most significant stages of the rise of a fascist society is… the conditions that the government creates for vigilante violence.”
Trump’s America has blurred the line between state power and mob rule. The pardon of nearly 1,600 January 6 rioters only deepens the message: brutality in defense of the regime is not just acceptable but honorable.
At the same time, this legal chaos has real consequences. It’s not just that immigrants are being swept up without warrants or probable cause. It’s that some are being deported to death camps or at the very least modern day gulags either in the US (Alligator Alcatraz) or abroad.
Gisela Salim-Peyer’s recent report in The Atlantic exposes the horrifying fate of Venezuelan asylum-seekers deported not to their home country, but to El Salvador — specifically to CECOT, the notorious prison built by strongman Nayib Bukele.
Designed as a “mega-prison” for gang members, CECOT is a dystopian hellscape where inmates are beaten, starved, and tortured for sport.
Several former detainees, sent there after being falsely flagged as gang members based on tattoos or Instagram posts, told Salim-Peyer they were held in dark punishment cells without water, forced to sleep on floors, and beaten naked by laughing guards.
One man, Tito Martínez, was pulled over in El Paso for an expired license plate. His Bible verse tattoos triggered a gang alert. ICE sent him to El Salvador. After a hunger strike protesting the beatings, Martínez suffered liver damage and began vomiting blood.
“If they’re going to kill us, I hope they kill us soon,” he said.
This is no longer just conjecture and conspiracy theory, in reality the United States is outsourcing torture.
Trump’s administration of course claims these people are “terrorists” and “criminals.”
But many, like Keider Alexander Flores, were simply workers and asylum applicants — DJs, carpet layers, family men. They were deported with no real due process and subjected to acts that any decent nation would recognize as crimes against humanity. When Flores was flagged as a gang member for flashing a peace sign in a social media photo, he was deported to a prison where guards beat him until he bled.
The Trump administration has shattered the distinction between enforcement and abuse, between law and terror.
The more ICE acts like a secret police force — hiding its agents, targeting the vulnerable, rendering people to torture sites — the more public trust it forfeits.
As one protester told Salim-Peyer: “If your friend was being beaten, would you leave him alone?”
Zeitz warns that we are seeing a replay of the 1850s, when law itself became so divorced from justice that citizens began resisting it — first with lawsuits, then with civil disobedience, and eventually, with arms.
In Christiana, Pennsylvania, a community of Black residents and white abolitionists resisted a federal slave raid with force. One slaveholder died. The government charged dozens with treason. The jury took 15 minutes to acquit.
If today’s ICE raids continue to escalate — in scope, in violence, in indifference to human dignity — the Christiana moment will come again.
Not because ordinary Americans want it, but because the rule of law, once weaponized, invites rebellion. The same cities that declared sanctuary in defiance of federal overreach may soon find themselves in open confrontation with Washington.
Perhaps this is what Trump and Stephen Miller want. Chaos justifies power. But the history of the Fugitive Slave Act shows where that road leads: not to order, but to schism. Not to national strength, but to civil war.
America is not there yet. But if ICE continues to raid restaurants like paramilitary gangs, if masked men continue abducting immigrants in front of their children, if people are sent abroad to be tortured — then history will not ask why resistance erupted.
It will ask: what took so long?
Links:
- ICE Risks Overplaying Its Hand. We’ve Seen It Happen Before
- ICE Agents Are Hiding Their Faces. So Are Impostors.
- The First Survivors of CECOT Tell Their Stories
“states that rely on masked federal agents to kidnap people in broad daylight . . . ”
Well who should that count on to kidnap people in broad daylight?