We Cannot Police Our Way Out of Fascism

May 13, 2025

From ICE

The past week has presented an upsetting montage of what happens when an authoritarian executive, motivated by naked racism and nativism, activates a highly militarized “unitary executive police force” across the country to storm into apartments and restaurants, throw kids onto the ground, and whisk people away with their kids still in the car.

Via 805UndocuFund (https://www.805undocufund.org/our-story.html)

Why would local police support ICE operations that appear violent and unjustified?

ICE and the immigrant criminalization system, to a large extent, do not operate the way most local criminal legal systems do. Warrants don’t require the same scrutiny to be actionable. The burden of proof is different. There is no real “statute of limitations” – you can be deported for something that happened decades ago or deported before you are convicted. People facing deportation and detention are not guaranteed defense attorneys. And, as we now have seen so clearly, ICE is not required to say who they have detained or why (although they are supposed to post who is being held in ICE detention). Thus, we have an immigrant criminalization system that is perfectly designed to disappear people in a horrific way, that leaves loved ones in confusion and dismay, that criminalizes people for movement.

I want to be fair and say that, first of all, the current administration and state-level legislation have made it difficult for many local law enforcement leaders to resist compliance, to some degree, with ICE. States have passed laws requiring in many cases some degree of compliance with ICE and making open dissent from political leaders difficult, if not illegal. The feds have even made it plain that they are willing to arrest local elected leaders and judges, who should be, if anything, permitted (if not required) to dissent and speak their mind as part of any healthy federalist system of government. Remember “local control” and “federalism” back when?

As one law enforcement official in Florida put it, “A lot of the conversations you will see in the fine print is, it's a policy, it's custom, it's a norm, it's a way during regular order and ordinary times that you do things,” adding that deportations are a “national priority.” The intent of the current administration and the right-wing movements that support it is to bend norms and rules as much as possible, to the point of courting lawsuits. They do not care.

During the first Trump administration, we did see local law enforcement declaring that they would not work with ICE. Yet now those voices are more subdued. We hear that law enforcement will “comply with the law.” Democrats are also more moderate in their tone. While many find these interior arrests painful to witness, they are unwilling to present a full-throated defense of immigrants as people, as parts of every community, as an important and necessary part of living in a world where there are some people who have a great deal and other people who have very little. Here in the United States, we live off of the livelihood of people in other countries. Political pundits want to divide international policies from domestic “bread-and-butter” policies, but that is just ridiculous. Global warming, economic insecurity, and human rights know no bounds.

After 2020, Democrats decided to defend the rights of the police to murder, maim, assault, and steal, with very few boundaries. They “punched left,” as it were, and spent political capital defaming and delegitimizing abolitionist activists. They did the same with pro-immigrant advocacy, decided that it was more important to portray the Democratic party as “pro-cop,” even running a cop for president, rather than actually taking calls to “defund the police” seriously. Major media and advocacy organizations have turned away from supporting “police reform” to fear-mongering about crime – not, of course, the crimes of the Trump administration or his allies, but “disorder,” the moments when intense economic and political inequality raise their heads high enough for everyone to see.

As for the right-wing, they seized the opportunity to spread their influence. Groups like the Claremont Institute realized they could indoctrinate sheriffs. Law enforcement organizations politicked for more political power; they organized for Trump knowing that he was going to give them a lot more than “one real rough nasty…violent day.” He has given them a blank check. It was, unfortunately, all too easy because no one resisted.

ICE, as many people point out, is limited in its resources. But the criminal legal and punishment system is, unfortunately, not really. There are around 18,000 different law enforcement agencies in this country. Prisons and jails that were closed, but never destroyed, are now being reopened. Local law enforcement agencies, even ones that are not officially deputized to be immigration agents, are acting as bodyguards for deportation creators. The Department of Justice, oft-hailed for enforcing civil rights, is now a political arm of the far-right. (It’s worth remembering, of course, that some of those now standing up for the “rule of law” as prosecutors were the same ones who sent young Muslim youth to prison for decades for providing “material support” to ISIS in the form of their own bodies that never even got there.)

We have seen this before. But it is terrible to witness. And it is perhaps all the more awful to see because there is no real way to prosecute out of this. The U.S.A. tried to prosecute January 6; they created martyrs. They tried to prosecute Donald Trump (not very hard); they got a would-be king. We tried to reform the police; it backfired. This is not a new lesson—we have known for eons that killing people to teach people that killing people is wrong does not work, that waging war to install peaceful democracy is a fool’s errand. But my sincere hope now is that all kinds of people will see how oppressive the policing and jailing system really is, how it will eat us all.

I want to be clear that I think people should tell their local law enforcement that collaborating with a nativist authoritarian will not end well. Their deeds will not be forgotten. But we also have to build power outside of policing and prisons. The idea that police can ever create “public safety” is barely crawling; it can no longer walk. Let’s lift it back up and, as we seek to rebuild institutions, make them better.