Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Since its last two murders in mid-July, ICE, mothballed for a mere 24-hours, has dropped out of the news. Its stop and shoot habit, one can only assume, is approved by the man who nixed the Department of Homeland Security’s pause of it, namely Donald “Deporter-In-Chief” Trump. On July 13, an ICE agent shot and killed Johan Guerrero, who was not the operation’s intended target. In other words, ICE would have you believe he was collateral damage in some Marvel-Comics war on immigrant criminals. But ICE’s war is on immigrants per se (as everybody knows), whether or not they are criminals, because ICE would have you believe the nonsense that immigrant equals criminal.
The previous ICE murder, of Lorenzo Araujo July 7, was just as horrifically random and casual. The ICE gestapo fatally shot him during a traffic stop, because ICE claimed, he tried to use his car as a weapon. With Guerrero, ICE claimed its officer shot him for attempting to flee, thus creating safety issues. In both cases ICE murdered innocent men gratuitously, presumably because for ICE brown skin means criminal.
So in mid-July, it was Minneapolis déjà vu all over again: it became transparent that all ICE could do was murder innocent people and clearly such a homicidal agglomeration should not exist; in fact, its continued existence proves that what emanates from the white house is a death cult, as does the fact, which cannot be repeated enough, that within hours of those two murders, Trump overturned the DHS order to halt these deadly traffic stops. If Trump wants to soften his place in history as a psychopathic killer, he will do something about ICE’s policy of stopping random drivers to inspect their papers and then murder them, a bad look, though Trump does not yet appear to understand that. Or does he? There has been only one reported ICE murder, similar to a stop-and-shoot, since mid-July, though there have been deaths in ICE custody. Make of that what you will.
But being out of the news doesn’t mean out of business, which is also called for. According to Katya Schwenk, writing in the Lever July 31, ICE’s “massive spending spree on real estate for ‘mega’ detention centers” has led it into relationships with – surprise! – shady characters, specifically one James Grossman, a real estate entrepreneur working with Homeland Security to buy two prisons. DHS paid $1.5 billion for them, which, even for that org, is a gigantic sum. Who is Grossman? A Boston construction company bigwig, whose collapsing business led a bank to sue him for failure to repay a $25 million loan, “just one of a mounting number of lawsuits he and his firm were facing from frustrated creditors.”
During this time, staring at over a dozen lawsuits, Grossman got noticed in an ICE “spending spree on real estate” for the aforementioned huge detention centers. Per the Lever, DHS’ “strategy to buy up detention infrastructure could help it evade state and local oversight.” But the Lever sagaciously wonders if “ICE’s warehouse deals – which have cost another $1 billion-plus in taxpayer funds – were designed to shore up a struggling commercial real estate industry.” After all, demand for warehouses was down, but DHS paid double-digit premiums for them. “Politically connected real estate brokers, meanwhile, got their own cut of the deals.” Considering a politically connected real estate tycoon sits in the oval office, this is not surprising.
While currently restrained, presumably by bad press, from stopping and shooting people, ICE has boosted its arrets in airports and expanded urban crackdowns. Its data-sharing with TSA enables ICE to detain travelers and ship them far, far away, while in June ICE newly detained a record 43,000 people, notably in cities like New York, where amny’s Dean Moses reported August 2 that ICE detention had been noted at New York’s Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital – in the ER! Of all outrages, hauling the sick and injured out of emergency hospital care! “The witness, who asked not to be identified, said that when she attempted to speak with the man and take photographs, ICE agents intervened and demanded that she delete her images.”
Also, to make matters worse for Syrian and Haitian immigrants, they have now lost their Temporary Protected Status. Meanwhile, NBC reported July 29 that ICE was “Working to open four new detention facilities with space for 5,500 detainees.” These lock-ups would be in Seattle, Philadelphia, Miami and Denver. If this sounds like an agency on a war footing to you, you may be onto something. Cleansing the U.S. of as many migrants as possible is one of Trump’s most fervent promises to his base, and for this ICE is his grotesquely violent henchman.
On July 31, KCRA 3 Sacramento reported that arrests in at least 15 airports zeroed in on people with expired visas. More broadly, from “January 20, 2025 to March 10, 2026, there were 568 arrests made by ICE…at or near an airport. That’s more than five times the 108 arrests linked to airports in the same time frame leading up to Trump’s second administration.” The worst airports now? Chicago’s O’Hare. The worst for those 108 previous arrests? Puerto Rico’s Luis Munoz Marin International. So there’s been a shift from a territory to the so-called homeland. Meanwhile, per Reuters earlier in 2026, “More than 800 people had been arrested by ICE following tips from TSA, which shared its data on over 31,000 people traveling.” I can only say that these stats do little to enhance the allure of air travel.
“The average daily number of ICE arrests has more than tripled since Trump took office in January 2025, compared to the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency,” reports KCRA 3. But at least since ICE murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis that number has dropped.
Another place where ICE arrests have spiked is Philadelphia International Airport, according to WHYY August 1. Fortunately, on July 7, six city council bills took effect limiting enforcement in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the Trump regime sues the city over a seventh bill prohibiting ICE agents from using masks or covering their faces, a measure which also requires ICE agents to display badges. The other bills “codify the city’s…not participating in collaboration agreements with ICE…prohibit city agencies, including police from collaborating with ICE.” They also restrict city agencies from “collecting information on people’s citizenship or immigration status…prohibit discrimination based on citizenship or immigration status…bar ICE from conducting raids on city-owned properties…ban ICE access…to city owned spaces, including libraries, health centers, shelters and rec centers.” In short, ICE is not welcome in Philly, which is undoubtedly why my city has been singled out for more ICE jails.
It is not an open question whether a system that deploys a gendarmerie behaving in this manner is a free democracy. It is not. The closest analogues though with far higher body counts, are Latin American anti-communist paramilitaries and the World War II German gestapo, both of which blighted their nations so, that only an imbecile could call them free. Over the past years, various administration thugs have even floated the idea of harsh treatment for ICE’s critics, which only makes the brutal denouement of Nazi-persecuted author Hans Fallada’s masterpiece “Every Man Dies Alone” more likely. (In that novel, a stubborn father, angry about his son’s death on the Eastern Front, scrawls anti-Nazi graffiti throughout Berlin, with predictable results.)
God protect any Hispanic American or migrant caught spray-painting anti-ICE graffiti. He would be looking at the inside of El Salvador’s hideous mega-prison, CECOT, pronto. Just because the number of fatalities is not high doesn’t mean we don’t have an unaccountable death squad in our midst, supported by the white house. It is the shame of the loyal Dem opposition that when in power just two years ago, they did nothing, zilch to crush it.
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