Trump’s Secret Police Are Here

Commentary by Heather Delaney Reese

They stormed Canal Street in New York City yesterday, flipping vendor tables, chasing people through crowds, terrorizing a community, and leaving carnage behind. The police stood by helplessly, watching it play out, unwilling or unable to stop it. The sound of boots and shouting echoed through Chinatown like a memory the city had hoped never to hear again. Mothers held their children close. Vendors wept as their work, their dignity, their safety, were dragged away in the name of “enforcement.” This wasn’t a raid. It was sanctioned kidnapping. It was a warning.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about another street, in another time. Berlin, early 1930s. When brown-shirted men marched through Jewish neighborhoods, smashing shop windows, ripping open carts, beating citizens in broad daylight. The police watched then too, pretending it wasn’t their jurisdiction, pretending it was normal. They called it “restoration of order.” They called it “cleansing.” But it was terror. It was the beginning of something that looked like politics but was really the death of it. People thought they were watching street thugs. But they were watching the early machinery of fascism learning how to walk, and soon, how to write laws.

And those days, those early days when it was “just” a few broken carts and bruised faces, when the terror wore armbands and smirks, they didn’t stay contained. They evolved. They became codified. Because the violence is meant to break you down, but the lasting change starts with laws. And by then, you’re too scared and tired to notice, or to fight back.

In 1935, Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, unveiled the Nuremberg Laws, a set of regulations that stripped Jewish citizens of their rights, their professions, their marriages, their personhood. It turned neighbors into suspects and discrimination into legislation. It made persecution look official. Legal. Clean.

That’s how fascism survives its infancy, by convincing people that cruelty written in ink is somehow order. And once those laws were in place, the rest followed easily. The ghettos. The camps. The ash.

And I look at these ICE raids, at what happened on Canal Street, and I don’t just see a street crackdown. I see the spark. Because they said they were coming for “illegal immigrants.” They said they were coming for “criminals.” But they’re not just doing that. They’re showing up at protests. At courthouses. At schools. At train stations. They’re following people home. They’re detaining vendors, chasing teenagers, tearing through communities like they’ve been told it’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I want to scream: I can’t believe we’ve let this happen. I can’t believe we have let it go this long and get this far.

And I can’t believe we live like this. That we wake up and drive to work, go out to dinner, plan vacations, post pictures, and answer emails, while this is happening. While people are being taken, chased, and dehumanized. And part of me wants to yell: We should stop what we’re doing right this second. Every single one of us. Every city, every block. Shut it all down. Sit in the streets. Lie in front of the vans. Block the raids. Surround the courthouses. Flood the sidewalks. They can’t arrest us all. I keep saying that, they can’t arrest us all. And I mean it. We should be putting our bodies in the way of this machine. And some people are. I see them. I honor them. I want to be one of them every day. And I wonder how long we can be expected to live a normal life inside a moment like this? How do we play along with a country that keeps pretending it’s not happening?

Sometimes I sit here and wonder if I’m still writing about America at all, or if I’m just documenting its fall in real time. Because what kind of country spends billions arming a domestic agency to act like a military? What kind of country looks the other way while its own government storms a city street like an occupying force? What kind of country hands that power to the same men who once tried to overthrow it with an insurrection and then calls it justice?

ICE is no longer the immigration agency it pretends to be. It has become a weaponized force, unaccountable, overfunded, and deliberately used to instill fear. It targets the vulnerable, silences the dissenting, and answers to no one but the man who gave it permission. It’s simply a loyal, unaccountable force for a president who sees dissent as treason and protest as a threat. ICE is a private army in everything but name. And the worst part? It’s working.

They’re invading Blue states and cities. This is Trump’s retribution tour, a calculated punishment aimed at every region that defied him. And ICE is his weapon of choice. They no longer coordinate with local officials. They no longer ask for consent. In city after city, officials are blindsided, police departments left out entirely. Because ICE doesn’t need permission. That’s the point. They act alone now. Operate in the shadows. And carry out missions no one voted for, missions designed not to protect, but to intimidate.

That’s the point.

No warrants. No oversight. No rules anyone voted for. Just men in black vests, identity hidden with facemasks and unmarked vehicles carrying out a mission the public never approved. If that sounds like a dictatorship, it’s because that’s exactly what it looks like. And if it doesn’t scare you yet, it should.

Because ICE now has an estimated annual budget of nearly $29 billion, a staggering number that dwarfs what they had back in 2019, under Trump 1.0, when they were jamming children into cages. And now, thanks to the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, they’ve been handed a war chest: $170 billion over the next four years. That’s not law enforcement funding. That’s regime-building money. That’s a blank check to fortify, expand, and militarize. No hearings. No accountability. No explanation. Just billions they can use to terrorize whoever they’re told to, with no questions asked.

And here’s a hint of where it’s going: not translators, not legal aid, not family reunification. Not anything that could remotely be called humane. They appear to be buying Guided missile warheads. Military‑grade armored trucks. AI facial recognition systems. Surveillance drones. Ammunition stockpiles large enough to invade a country. Enough gear to erase any memory that this was ever supposed to be about paperwork and improving our immigration system. Because it isn’t. It never really was. This isn’t law enforcement. This has nothing to do with immigration. This is a prelude. This is preparation. This is what every authoritarian regime in history has built before the real crackdown begins. And we are letting them build it, with our money, in our name, on our streets. And on our watch. “Never again” has already begun.

And while the arsenal grows, the ranks are shifting. Because ICE has a recruitment problem. Qualified agents are quitting. Veterans are walking out. Morale is in the gutter. So the standards dropped. You don’t need a law enforcement background to join ICE anymore. You don’t need a college degree. You don’t need experience. You just need loyalty. Just obedience. Just a willingness to carry out whatever mission is handed to you.

And some of us have noticed something else. The Proud Boys appear to be gone. The January 6 foot soldiers, too. But maybe they haven’t vanished. Maybe they’ve been handed badges. Could ICE be quietly recruiting from the same ideological pipeline that brought us the insurrection? And instead of disqualifying these men, could Trump be empowering them? They tried to overthrow the country once before, and now it seems they might be getting paid to do it again.

And it’s important to note that ICE doesn’t operate under the laws you might think they do. They’re not part of the military, so the Posse Comitatus Act, the law that prevents U.S. soldiers from acting as domestic police, doesn’t apply.

That law was written to protect us from our own government turning its military against us. It’s the legal firewall between our neighborhood and a military occupation. But ICE isn’t the military. So they don’t have to follow that rule. And they’re not our local police force either, so our mayor doesn’t have control over what they do. They live in the loophole. They can detain without charges. Raid without notice. Operate without transparency. They have surveillance tech that rivals what we use in war zones, and they’re using it here, on us. On our streets. On our neighbors. On families just trying to make it home from school.

They call it national security. I call it domestic militarization.

And we’ve seen this before. Every dictator has a force like this. Hitler had the Brownshirts, then the Gestapo. Mussolini had the Blackshirts. Stalin had the NKVD. Franco had the Guardia Civil. Pinochet had DINA. Putin has the Rosgvardiya. They all start the same way: create fear, build a force, and unleash it on your own people. Trump isn’t inventing anything. He’s just copying the worst of what worked.

But here’s the part ICE, Trump, and his enablers can never fully erase or get away from: the truth of what people do when they’ve had enough.

In New York, when ICE agents took over Canal Street, the community didn’t run. They stood their ground. They recorded what was happening. They got in the way. People circled around the vendors. Neighbors stood side by side. The raid didn’t go quietly. Because sometimes, even when it feels like nothing we do matters, people remember how to hold the line. They remember how to say: not here, not today.

In Argentina, it was the mothers. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Their children had been disappeared by a brutal regime. So the mothers showed up. Wearing white scarves made out of cloth diapers embroidered with the names of their missing children, mostly young adults. They walked and marched, week after week, year after year, demanding answers. The government mocked them. The police threatened them and some of them were also “disappeared”. But they didn’t stop. And eventually the world took notice. Their defiance sparked a movement. It helped force change and the trials that followed.

And in the former Czechoslovakia, it was the singers and the students and the workers, people who had lived their whole lives under a communist regime, that told them resistance was useless. In November 1989, they gathered in the streets holding candles and linking arms. Just the quiet, unstoppable power of people who refused to stay afraid. The government collapsed within days. Not a single shot was fired. They called it the Velvet Revolution, not because it was soft, but because it chose peace over vengeance. And still won.

Even when this moment feels too big to face, I still believe in us. I believe in the people who keep showing up, who are marching, documenting, resisting. I believe in the ones who stood on Canal Street and said “not in my city.” I believe in the ones who surround ICE vans with their bodies when others are too afraid. The ones who are tired but still refuse to stop. The ones who hold the line, even when the line is cracked, even when the ground is shifting, even when it feels like we’re alone. Because we are not going to let this country fall to a man who builds secret armies and calls it patriotism.We are the answer to history’s question: What did you do when it started happening again?