Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump is not the first president to unleash the terror of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on immigrant communities across the United States. But he’s the most blatant in his use of a federal armed unit as a tool of terror, fulfilling multiple goals at once: to reinforce white supremacy, to undermine his political opponents, to uphold policing as a means of order, and to wield raw, unchecked power.

Before June 2025, analysts were warning against the slide into fascism. Now, full-blown fascism is here. And, it’s not only Trump’s doing, but also a result of our society’s constant reliance on armed agents of state power as a means of control. If we want to end ICE terror and reverse the fascist tide, we need to rethink policing altogether.

Today’s ICE raids aren’t about rounding up violent criminals as Trump and his supporters claim. People caught in the dragnet include a Texas Army sergeant’s Latina wife, who had started the paperwork to acquire citizenship, and several other nonwhite U.S. citizens. As of early June, more than 50,000 people were being held in various detention centers around the U.S. on immigration-related charges. Of those arrested in 2025 alone, at least three-quarters have no known criminal convictions. (And even if it were about crime, Trump is Exhibit A in double standards on criminality.)

ICE raids are clearly targeting areas where low-income communities of color work and reside, such as the racially diverse area of north Pasadena where I live and where people are still reeling from the fallout of the Eaton Fire in January 2025. ICE forces raided a swap meet in LA County’s Santa Fe Springs popular among Latinos, a garment factory in downtown Los Angeles, and

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