ICE

The activities of ICE, the changing structure and function of the agency, and most importantly, the individuals that make up the agency itself, are all things to watch. This is where some of the most dangerous people are finding their calling. People that can talk about having increased fun and boosted morale when hunting some of the earth's most vulnerable people are a people to watch.

It is this agency that is most intensely politicized under the new administration, and its size and flexibility to operate in the field is rapidly growing. It is also ICE that is going to be the most hated agency by the greatest number as it expands its reach and power, and it is already experiencing the pressures of increased interagency hostility, as it comes up against other enforcement mechanisms, such as within the sanctuary cities.

This is a hostility that has always existed within the structure of the decentralized US government, but now it is being brought to the surface and further pressurized, especially with the assistance of growing public awareness, an accelerating effect that was made apparent with the increased unrest around police killings.

The agency has been intensely criticized for its duplicitous behavior in the field. Its members actively lie and deceive other agencies, such as in Santa Cruz when they lied about conducting "anti-gang activities" whereas they were merely rounding up defenseless people in the early hours of the morning. And at least in Los Angeles, they have been asked to not call themselves police, for fear of alienating locals to the LAPD. The LAPD! We can sit for a minute and let that one sink in.

This hatred, this fear can have a disturbing and powerful effect on individuals. It is an amplified form of the resentment that is feeding the populist right. Even normal police officers in occupied neighborhoods are forged into powder kegs under these forces, ready to unravel in bizarre circumstances.

It was the vigilante minute men groups and the border patrol agencies that attracted all of the developing neo-fascists in the country, and those capacities provided intense incubation structures for those caught within their nexus. It reinforces and crystallizes the somewhat dormant and nebulous Manichean worldview, the perception of a clearly delineated hero, and an equally developed villain.

And now we have rumors of all manner of checkpoints and covert raids. They're snatching up people at an accelerating pace, a people who don't have the protections of a state, or at least the organized power of sympathetic members of the population. There are plenty of people doing good work, but the immigrants are many, and set to grow as the living debris of global communities that are disintegrating under the pressures of empire.