Building the American Brownshirts

New funding will make ICE an unaccountable army of Trump loyalists.

A fascist Rorschach test. (Photo: Getty)

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that the House passed is objectionable for many reasons, most obviously because it is the most regressive economic bill of my lifetime, the class war condensed into in legislative form. Its tax policies and spending cuts will erode the well being of Americans slowly for decades to come. Its most immediate destabilizing impact, however—the one that has the potential to push our democracy to the brink—is its vast expansion of the Homeland Security budget, which will be used to build ICE into a huge national army of loyalists under Trump’s control. The money to build America’s brownshirts is in the pipeline. Whereas our military-industrial complex is a threat to the rest of the world, this force will be a direct threat to all of us in the USA. This is the Proud Boys, at national scale, with badges. It is a very dangerous prospect.

Everything I am writing about here has been previously reported in the past few weeks since the House sent the bill to the Senate. But, from my vantage point, the public has not quite grasped just how horrifying a precipice we are on. When you consider the scale of protest already unleashed by the ICE raids in LA; Trump and Stephen Miller’s clear intent to double and triple and quadruple down on the ICE raids and crush the protests with military force; Trump’s unhinged declaration yesterday that “we must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York” to achieve “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History”; and then connect this deep well of poisonous intent with the staggering expansion of ICE’s size and scope that will occur if this bill’s funding comes through, what you will see is the setup for not just a mass deportation program, but a violent national clash between a militarized, government-sanctioned army of Trump loyalists and everyone else.

---

---

How much does ICE stand to grow if this bill’s funding comes through? A lot. The all-in costs of deportation over the next decade could reach a trillion fucking dollars, according to this Cato analysis. That includes the border wall and a huge expansion of prisons for immigrants, to a size nearly on par with the federal prison system.

Let’s focus on the most dangerous funding of all: the direct funding for law enforcement agencies. To level-set you here, understand that right now, before this bill passes, the combined funding of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Secret Service, and all other federal law enforcement is only half the size of the federal funding for immigration and border enforcement. So we are already pouring an inordinate amount of money into stalking immigrants. If the new bill passes, we will add $167 billion to immigration enforcement. Cato helpfully produced this chart to illustrate just how insane this would be:

[A mildly amusing side note here is that Cato—not a liberal organization!— is outraged about this budget expansion, but purely from a fiscal standpoint. They are mad that the bill uses sleight of hand to make its costs look unrealistically low, by assuming that Congress would end all this spending in 2029. They write, “Congress is not going to let the wall collapse, force the firing of hundreds of unionized law enforcement officers, or drastically cut their pay. These outcomes will not happen, even under a President Kamala Harris.” This drives home the fact that “Zero out the ICE budget” should be a plank in the 2028 Democratic platform.]

Part of this funding increase would go to hiring 10,000 new ICE agents, and more than 8,000 new Customs and Border Patrol agents. That would give ICE more agents than the FBI has in the field. It goes without saying that this would be a disaster for not only undocumented immigrants, who would be ruthlessly hunted down like fugitives, but also to any brown-skinned person in America, who can expect to be subjected to harassment by agents sent out to please Stephen Miller’s insatiable desire for public displays of racism at all costs.

It’s even worse than that. Think about this expansion of ICE in the context of the entire arc of Trump’s rise to power. This man falsely claimed to win the 2020 election, tried to have his supporters overthrow the government to keep him in power, came back and won again, and pardoned the people who tried to overthrow the government on his behalf. The main thing he learned from his first term was to surround himself only with fanatical loyalists. The entire top level of the federal government is now staffed with a buffet of lunatics, incompetents, and extremists whose defining characteristic is their loyalty to Trump above the law. This includes the military and the federal law enforcement agencies.

Within the ranks of the military and law enforcement, however, absolute loyalty cannot be achieved so quickly. Even though those constituencies are strongly Republican, there is also some significant level of anger at Trump as well. FBI agents have seen colleagues purged just for working on January 6 cases; Army soldiers were forced to march in Trump’s stupid parade; Marines, many of them from immigrant families, have been outrageously deployed to patrol Los Angeles. These things create dissatisfaction in the ranks that is hard to measure, but real.

---

---

So how can Trump be sure that the absolute loyalty he demands extends all the way down to his foot soldiers? By hiring new ones. Who do you think those ten thousand fresh new ICE agents will be? Well, one thing we can say for sure is that they will be people who are okay with the proposition of taking a job with ICE as it is run under Donald Trump. This is not a job anyone will take by accident. It’s on the news every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are in the streets protesting against it. This creates a self-selecting pool. It will attract only those who are not repulsed by it. Job applicants will consist of those who see pictures of dudes wearing tactical vests and face coverings jumping out of unmarked trucks and grabbing people and think to themselves, “that looks cool.”

The new and expanded version of ICE will not just be immigration enforcers. They will be the most ideologically reliable armed branch of government for Donald Trump. They will be the 2025 parallel of the brownshirts. They will be the most obvious place for the president to turn for dirty work in the streets. Because of this, I guarantee, once they are in place, you will see their sphere of activities expand. Enforcing immigration laws will be defined to include “going after those who try to impede the enforcement of immigration laws”—a group that, according to Trump and Miller, includes protesters, journalists, and Democratic politicians. The increasingly outrageous expansion of ICE activities will certainly be rubber stamped by a Republican Congress which is already busy trying to make it illegal to report the identities of the masked men who have come to arrest your neighbor.

The question to ask yourself about what is coming is not, “Is that legal?” It is, “With Donald Trump and Stephen Miller fully in control of the government, and with no checks on their power within the government’s three branches, what is the next thing they need to achieve their agenda?” What they need is a loyal private army. And that is what they’re building. Be very afraid of this.

---

More

• Related reading: Anti-Immigration Democrats Fuck Off; It’s Interesting How The Past Can Make You Think About the Present; You’re a Bunch of Cowards!

• Last week I spoke to Academic Freedom on the Line about labor organizing in higher ed—if you’re interested, you can read that conversation here. Also, let me shout out a cool new project called The Approach, a free quarterly community paper that is being put together by a very talented group of writers and artists. You can read more about and offer your support right here.

• Right now you are reading How Things Work, and I thank you for that. This publication is proof that independent socialist media can survive in 2025. We are totally, completely, 100% funded by readers like you who choose to become paid subscribers. It’s six bucks a month or $60 for the full year, which is a pretty affordable price. All of you paid subscribers enable me to do this work, and to keep this site free and open so that anyone can read it, even if they can’t afford to pay. You make this place possible, and I appreciate you. If you like reading How Things Work and want to help us thrive, you can become a paid subscriber in a few seconds, by clicking the button below. Peace.