Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

From Gaza City in occupied Palestine to the Marble Hill neighborhood in New York, a disturbing parallel has become visible between the daily militarized violence inflicted on Palestinians and the lethal enforcement tactics deployed by federal immigration authorities on residential streets in America.

There is a credible argument to be made that the systemic violence within domestic agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is fundamentally linked to U.S policies that have enabled Israeli brutality in Palestine for decades.

When state power abandons its constraints, the geographical distance separating a distant war zone and a local neighborhood effectively dissolves, leaving vulnerable defenseless populations exposed to unchecked aggression.

The shooting in Manhattan’s Marble Hill neighborhood is the most recent example of unbridled state-sanctioned violence.  On a busy street filled with families, a masked plain-clothes ICE agent fired live rounds into a vehicle, striking a father, while his five-year-old son sat terrified in the backseat.

Brazen aggression, assumed impunity and human rights violations by ICE have turned American communities into what look like military-occupied zones.

There have been 32 separate immigration agent-involved shooting incidents since the Trump administration expanded its operations in January 2025, targeting sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and New York. Nine people were killed in........

© CounterPunch