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ICE raids: Trump’s power grab is driving America towards conflict and tyranny
- Joe Gill, Middle East Eye
- Jun 16
- 6 min read
The US president is unleashing a campaign of mass detentions against migrant populations as a way to shore up his base, sparking nationwide protests. Where will this end?
The abductions began in the garment sector of Los Angeles outside a Home Depot store. The targets of the raids by US President Donald Trump’s masked immigration agents were the working-class Latino Americans who do the low-paid service and farm jobs in America.
Among those seized were a woman who was nine months pregnant. Churchgoers. Tourists. Parents dropping kids at school. Farmworkers chased through the fields. The only common factor among those seized off the streets by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents is where they work and live: Latinos are being targeted everywhere, regardless of immigration status, gender, age or nationality. This is terror by racial profiling.
The brutal tactics of ICE have shown America what dictatorship looks like: masked figures in black fatigues seizing a mother outside the school gates as she weeps and begs to be reunited with her children.
To pour fuel on the flame, Trump sent 4000 members of the National Guard and 600 Marines to California, against the wishes of the governor and Los Angeles city government. This has not happened since Lyndon Johnson did the same during the civil rights movement, against recalcitrant white segregationists in Alabama. In the intervening decades, US troops have occupied countries from Vietnam, to Panama, to Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, they are occupying America. To quote Malcolm X: “The chickens are coming home to roost.”
Governor Gavin Newsom said Trump was threatening democracy with the troop deployment. Trump confirmed this by saying that Newsom should be arrested.
Yet from Los Angeles to Texas, Tuscon to New York, people are resisting Trump’s mass detentions. The response to the raids was almost immediate, as communities organised to repel ICE agents. Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and water cannons have been unleashed on protesters, wounding at least two reporters covering the unrest.
If the goal of this crackdown was to instil fear among migrant communities, it has worked. The Los Angeles Times reported how whole areas in the city had become “eerily quiet” as people went to ground, fearing that any public gathering could be targeted by ICE. In South Los Angeles, street vendors disappeared and regular children’s music events were cancelled.
On Thursday, the thuggish Trumpian response to opposition reached the halls of power during an extraordinary incident in Los Angeles. California Senator Alex Padilla entered a press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to challenge the administration’s troop deployment, but was forcibly removed by security, pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Afterwards, Padilla warned in a statement: “If that’s what they do to a United States Senator with a question, imagine what they can do to any American that dares to speak up.”
By the weekend, the popular revulsion toward the Trump power grab had snowballed into huge demonstrations in cities across America under the “No Kings” banner. On the day of a limp Trump military parade in Washington, DC, millions took to the streets to reject growing authoritarianism and brutal ICE raids. Not just in the places you would expect, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but also deep red states like Idaho and Florida.
Unifying Trump’s base
For the Trump base, the ICE raids and deployment of troops are what was promised - the forces of the state seizing thousands of undocumented migrants, and confronting the forces of the left, “antifa”, and “woke” pro-Palestine protesters. A CBS/YouGov survey last week found 54 percent of Americans approved of his policy to deport immigrants who are in the US illegally. But that is not proof of mass support for Gestapo-style raids.
For Maga, the anti-ICE protests are organised by nefarious globalist and deep state forces, rather than being an understandable response to outrageous abuses of power. The raids are orchestrated by Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, the sinister architect of Trump’s migrant crackdown.
For Miller, the enemy within is anyone who is not 100 percent American, according to his white nationalist and Zionist worldview. But in an immigrant society like the US, this means going to war with a substantial part of the population. In Los Angeles, where the anti-ICE protests began, the majority identify as racial other or Hispanic.
The challenge for an authoritarian movement like Trump’s - in such a diverse, heavily armed nation, with a revered constitution - is to break the existing political order and impose a new one in its image.
In Trump’s first presidency, street protests following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer sparked the most prolonged period of unrest in modern US history, lasting from late May through September 2020. Millions took to the streets, thousands were arrested, dozens killed.
Alongside the Covid pandemic, this unrest marked the end of Trump’s hopes for a second term in 2021. For the Trump base, this was part of the conspiracy to bring down their leader.
Wave of terror
Trump’s rise is the logical result of the failure of the established neoliberal order to revive social mobility and deal with the immiseration of half the population. (As a recent survey showed, the lower-income 50 percent of the US population has half the monetary assets of China’s equivalent working class.)
Trump does not have a solution to any of America’s deep-seated problems: his 2025 budget plans to slash departments like housing and Medicaid, and to increase spending on defence and homeland security into the stratosphere. And so, he is unleashing a wave of terror against migrant populations as a way to shore up his base, and use the crisis to deploy emergency powers.
Peter Turchin, author of End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (2022) wrote two years before the 2024 election that America was entering its disintegrative phase, based on the vast data sets he and his colleagues used to research patterns of societal collapse over time.
And as it turns out, this prediction is unfolding quicker than could have been anticipated.
Turchin sees Trump and his Maga cohorts as revolutionaries in the mould of Robespierre or the Bolsheviks, tearing down the established order. I would instead argue that Trump is a counter-revolutionary, and his movement wants to reverse the changes toward democratisation in America over the last century, returning it to one in which certain racial groups monopolise power and violence.
As Black Lives Matter revealed, white supremacy had not gone way, even after the Obama presidency’s cosmetic moves to mark a new, kinder America.
But Turchin is correct that the second Trump presidency is of a far more revolutionary bent than the first. It is now commonplace to point to the similarities between what Trump is doing and the rise of Hitler or Mussolini. Yet America, with its federal constitution and separation of powers, cannot easily be turned into a dictatorship, and so chaos is required to bring about conditions for imposing emergency rule.
On the day Trump returned to office, he asked officials to explore invoking the rarely used 1807 Insurrection Act in order to put US troops onto the streets across America.
Trump is managing an uneasy coalition of conservative groups, from the Maga “America First” base led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, to Christian evangelicals, to holdover neoconservatives like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the tech overlords such as Elon Musk. Manufactured crises, like the ICE raids and National Guard deployments, enable him to rally his forces and suppress dissent.
Military welfare state
The recent bust-up with Musk was a clash of giant egos but also about tension between the billionaire class who want a smaller state and the pork barrel politics revealed in Trump’s deficit-exploding budget. The numbers are mind-blowing. Taxes will be cut, military and border security spending hiked to more than a trillion dollars, while Medicaid is to be slashed by $698bn, kicking 12 million working-class Americans out of the healthcare system. Public housing funding is to be almost halved in the midst of a nationwide homelessness crisis.
Musk retreated in the wake of the collapse in his equity value following his X rant against Trump. He wants to stay number one, and that means kowtowing to the leader.
Trump is demolishing what remains of the New Deal social contract, while inflating the military-security welfare state. That expensive hardware is now being deployed to aid Israel’s war on Iran. The president who claimed he would end all the wars has possibly started World War Three.
Dissent within the Maga base over Israel’s genocide in Gaza and now the war on Iran is growing. There is a growing rift between them and the evangelicals and Zionists, led by Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, who have the ear of Trump.
Carlson, probably the most influential figure among conservatives who support Trump, has made his position clear: “The United States should not at any level participate in a war with Iran. No funding, no American weapons, no troops on the ground.” Carlson says this war will end the US empire. And he’s probably right.
But it is the billionaire pro-Israel donors like Miriam Adelson, not Carlson, who own Trump and are pushing him toward a disastrous regime change war on Iran.
(c) 2025, Middle East Eye
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