Would you like ICE with your fascism?

Are there any Federal departments in the US that don’t have their own militia that can be set upon its unwitting population at will? The US Postal Service, NASA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, even Amtrak has its own police force – just four of the 73 separate law enforcement agencies whose members routinely wander down suburban streets looking like they’re under deployment in Fallujah circa 2004.  

The last time the streets of America’s cities became a battle between law enforcement agencies and the populace was at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. Following the murder of George Floyd by an officer President Trump is rumoured to be considering pardoning, Americans took to the streets in support of the proposition that African American lives should matter sufficiently that they can’t be arbitrarily ended by the trigger-happy or bigoted. The trigger-happy and bigoted disagreed and unrest ensued.

President Trump itched to send in the troops to quell the nasty people but the adults in the room persuaded him to be content with civil jackboots on the ground. Those adults are long gone. Among the reality show of Trump 2.0 and the Fox News presenters cosplaying gravitas as they ready for their close-up, there is no-one left to stay Trump’s hand. Against the express wishes of local leaders and the law, Trump has federalized the Californian National Guard and called in the Marines so that, at the time of writing, there are more American troops deployed in Los Angeles than there are in Iraq and Syria combined. Black Hawks squat ominously on LA airport tarmacs and predatory drones fly overhead surveilling protestors as heavily armed officers converge to illegally wreak havoc on the streets of Downtown LA.

The untrammeled violence of this collection of officers as they knock down protestors, fire on them and attendant press, or stomp them with horses may be shocking to the outside eye but it shouldn’t be. It merely allows a wider demographic to experience behaviours routinely dished up to America’s Black and Brown communities and that are positively mild compared to its murderous incursions into the Middle East, Central America and Asia. 

There is, however, something more sinister about the Trump-mandated actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers as they turn up at schools, graduation ceremonies, workplaces and homes with their identities hidden behind masks and ludicrous pseudonyms. Without warning nor warrant, they are seizing all manner of people – family members, loyal workers, students, the undocumented, legal residents, American citizens – and disappearing them, bundling them into unmarked vans and taking them immediately over state borders, rendering them entirely uncontactable and impossible to track down, with the eventual aim of spiriting them out of the US, their destination a gulag in Guantanamo, a concentration camp in El Salvador or unknown.

Stories abound of children being left abandoned at service stations after their father was seized as he paid for gas, of screaming children clinging to their mothers in a desperate tug-of-war played out on front lawns before she’s handcuffed and led away, of children being taken into custody to wait for their parents after their nannies were disappeared from playgrounds. 

People have been swept up outside courthouses as they attend routine immigration check-ins, at their workplaces as they perform the honest toil White America shirks; officers have entered elementary schools by dishonestly telling staff they were there to conduct welfare checks on the children they sought to seize. Countless videos show ICE agents confronting people on the streets seemingly at random as they go about their business, before whisking them away, every disappeared person counting towards the daily quotas imposed by living cadaver Stephen Miller.

Who are these ICE agents, the people tasked with these terrible responsibilities, enacting violent abductions, ignoring due process, isolating and interrogating their victims, denying legal rights? Who are the soldiers now on the streets of LA terrorising their fellow Americans without Constitutional authority? They are ordinary men and women, public servants and soldiers, who have chosen to collaborate with an authoritarian leader and blindly follow orders to act in illegal ways.

We have seen this before.

As the IRS provides ICE with the private data it needs to expedite deportations, law firms refuse to represent those targeted for fear of attracting retribution. Media companies settle baseless lawsuits with the President, gift his spouse millions to develop a hagiographic documentary that will never get made, silence reporters and skew editorials. The cowardly reveal themselves.  

We know where this can end.

As Trump sics some of the US military might on its own people under phantom powers his Defence Secretary cannot name, he requires the rest to parade through the streets of DC to glorify their Dear Leader on his birthday. America needs to be more Gavin Newsom and AOC and less Mike Johnson and Marco Rubio. More Harvard and less Columbia. More Atlantic, less Washington Post. More US Institute of Peace, less IRS. They need to stand up and refuse to don the brownshirts of the MAGA crew. Trump has already said he wants to ship the ‘homegrown criminals’ to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison next. He’s threatened to arrest his political opponents and shut down critical media. A US Senator has already been handcuffed, a judge arrested, a Congresswoman indicted. It is in this moment that silence becomes complicity, not in a hypothetical future that you hope never comes.  

As America teeters on the brink, the rest of the world prepares itself for a post-America world. After hearing Russia’s propaganda mouthed by Trump and Vance, Europe looked inward and drew closer, negotiating together how they’ll manage new responsibilities and burdens – even Britain appears to be leaving some of its Brexit psychosis behind. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a masterclass in navigating the erratic indignities of Trump in his Oval Office meeting, refusing to be cast as a servile extra in Trump’s reality shitshow. A reeling Canada called in our ailing King to name check their sovereign status.

Back in Australia, our leaders pretend nothing has changed. The Member for the Pentagon Richard Marles was thrilled to be in the company of big drinking former Fox News presenter Pete Hesgeth, a man as loose as his skin is tight, grinning enthusiastically by Pete’s side in Singapore as Marles affirmed Australia is totally up for a conversation about increasing defence spending to 3.5% of GDP.

Prime Minister Albanese quickly walked that back but still asserts blithely that all is OK in the US of A, that he shares a respectful relationship with Trump and is looking forward to meeting with him at the G7 conference, as if a meaningful conversation is possible with a man like Trump and that, from one day to the next, one can rely on what was said anyway.  

As the US announces it is ‘reviewing AUKUS’, a panicked Marles pretends the review can only result in an American endorsement of AUKUS, which it might, because it’s such a dud deal for Australia, but probably won’t, because only magical thinking allows anyone to believe there will be spare submarines to send our way.  He insists that a review is ‘a pretty natural step for an incoming government to take’, which rather begs the question why the hell a first term Albanese Government couldn’t have done the same thing and quietly killed the disastrous geopolitical blunder that is Scott Morrison’s AUKUS, an endless albatross around our neck even as it vomits up wealth for the likes of Morrison, Christopher Pyne, Joe Hockey and Arthur Sinodinis? 

Would you rather be dealing with Macron and the French to deliver submarines right now, or Trump and Hesgeth? Would you rather be part of a strategic alliance that looks to our region and Macron, Merz and Carney or one that relies on The Real Housewives of the White House? Let us hope that Paul Keating is right and that, on AUKUS, the Trump administration saves us from ourselves even as it condemns the American people to vulgarity, fear and uncertainty.