Will use ICE to ‘harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections’
The Left is very unhappy that the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” drastically increases funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
The Nation’s Chris Lehmann, for example, writes that the “more than $150 billion” in total outlays will “expand the horrific surveillance, detention, and rendition regime” as ICE agents continue to wreak their “terror.”
Newsweek reports the new budget is “higher than most of the world’s militaries, including Israel’s.” According to a chart within the article, only the defense budgets of the U.S. and China are greater than ICE’s new funding.
For Harvard’s Theda Skocpol (pictured), a professor of sociology and government, the monster ICE budget is the “Miller-Trump ethno-authoritarians’ devilishly clever” method of getting around federalism.
In a response to Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, Skocpol noted that when she and a colleague taught a course last spring on “democratic backsliding,” the examples of 1920s-30s Hungary and Germany had “slightly reassured” her about the current state of the U.S.
In Germany’s case, the pre-Nazi government had “nationalized the Prussian police and bureaucracy” which Hitler then turned into his “Gestapo core.” Skocpol believed the U.S. “was somewhat protected against any similar coerceive [sic] authoritarian takeover by its federal structure, given state and local government rights to control most U.S. police powers.”
However, “immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice.”
Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources – much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. The Miller-Trumpites are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants. They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements use to harass Democrats, citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.
Skocpol concluded by saying “governors, civic groups and media outlets” need to understand this “imminent threat” and “push back against the emerging ICE police state.”
Skocpol has been at Harvard for 50 years, excepting a brief five-year stint at the University of Chicago in the 1980s.
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IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: Theda Skocpol/Cornell University