Security as a pretext: this is how Trump and ICE normalize state violence
In Minneapolis, a woman was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. According to the official version, the officers acted to prevent a terrorist threat, but the videos show something else: a driver tries to move the car that is blocking the road; shortly after, a masked officer shoots her in the face. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, she was 37 years old.
Was it the uncontrolled gesture of a single agent or is it the result of a trajectory?
Born as an agency responsible for enforcing immigration and border laws, with limited tasks and a predominantly administrative function, as of 2025 ICE has become a full-fledged internal security apparatus, equipped with extensive powers, outsized resources and margins of action that exceed those of any other federal agency. Migration enforcement is no longer its only horizon, but the legal pretext with which to exercise a permanent armed presence on the national territory.
Ice, Trump’s little army
Since Trump returned to the White House promising a crackdown on immigration, there has been a vast recruitment drive that, many critics say, has come at the expense of training. Ice now has 22 thousand units, more than double the approximately ten thousand in service at the beginning of 2025. Often supported by the ‘Sunday soldiers’ of the National Guard, the agency has been deployed in Democratic-led metropolises (Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, New York, New Orleans and Portland) with the aim of arresting the “undocumented” by threatening mass deportations. According to groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, they have a “paramilitary” culture, a perception fueled by the use of masks to maintain anonymity and the trigger-happy federal government. In Portland, Trump had sensationally used Ice in 2020 when the massive deployment of 1,500 feds had radicalized the protests, polarized public opinion and strengthened the Trumpian narrative of a city in the grip of urban chaos and the need for “order”.
ICE now operates as a true paramilitary force, with a chain of command concentrated in the executive branch, aggressive operational standards and a culture that rewards coercive initiative more than compliance with constitutional guarantees. The result is an institution that no longer resembles a rule of law body, but rather a security structure designed to carry out mass arrests and detain indefinitely.
This transformation was accompanied by unprecedented financial expansion. To the ordinary endowment, already in the order of 10 billion dollars a year, an extraordinary financing has been added which will bring the overall resources to levels comparable to those of the military budgets of regional powers.
From an institutional point of view, the ICE responds almost exclusively to the executive. Immigration judges are not part of an independent power, but are embedded within the federal administration. The leadership of the agency is entrusted to an interim director appointed without passing by the Senate.
On operational terrain, agents often act without identification and with their faces covered. Internal documents talk about the normalization of “collateral” arrests: unwanted people who are simply in the wrong place. The objectives are numerical, not legal. Thousands of arrests per day become a performance indicator, while constitutional guarantees slide into the background as procedural nuisances.
What makes the system even more disturbing is the technological infrastructure that supports it. ICE uses software developed by Palantir Technologies to fuse and analyze masses of heterogeneous data: federal archives, commercial information, digital tracking, location data. This architecture allows you to build profiles, identify connections, anticipate movements. Surveillance is presented as a defensive tool against so-called “internal threats”, but in practice it allows the selection and targeting of individuals before a crime has even been ascertained. It is no longer action that generates suspicion: it is suspicion that generates action. We are in “Minority Report”.
This approach coincides with the worldview of Palantir and its founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. In particular, Thiel considers the nation-state to be a structure in decline, blocked by democratic procedures, redistribution and legal constraints incompatible with technological acceleration. From this perspective, liberal democracy does not protect freedom, but hinders it. The ICE fits into this scheme as a device for the coercive management of human surplus: populations considered superfluous, unpredictable or incompatible with the new economic and social structure. Not an agency out of control, therefore, but a functional cog in a broader project, in which the public force prepares the ground for a power that is exercised less and less through law and more and more through surveillance.
Palantir, I’ll tell you the hidden side of the most powerful company in the world
In the present, ICE embodies the repressive function of a state that Thiel says he wants to overcome, but which in the meantime is being armed and radicalized. While democratic mediation is delegitimized, the apparatus of power is strengthened and automated. This is where the contradiction comes together in the Trump administration: the State should not be preserved as a space of rights, but used as a transitional platform of coercion, capable of guaranteeing security and discipline while real power moves elsewhere, towards private infrastructures, technological surveillance and cognitive oligarchies.
In this sense, the ICE is not an anomaly of the system, but one of its most advanced forms. And the death of Renee Nicole Good is the inevitable consequence of a structure that has moved the boundary of what is acceptable.
When an armed, technologically enhanced and politically protected federal militia operates without transparency or real counter-powers, the risk is not occasional abuse: we are faced with the normalization of violence as a method of government.
