The New Police State
What color shirts will they wear with their masks?
by Sue Yarvin
The German intellectual Max Weber defined a state as an organization that “successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.” Historians of fascism note that both the German and Italian fascist parties gained power in part because they had violent paramilitary organizations supporting them against their rivals and the established government.
Some observers of the United States are worried that we face increased political violence and growing willingness among the public to accept the use of force for political ends. This could end tragically in another civil war.
But what if the violence comes from the government against its citizens? What if, in order to counter possible violence from below, the government creates a strong police state on top? That’s what happened after communists seized power in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe and after Mussolini and Hitler came to power. It sure looks like that in El Salvador today.
Donald Trump since boyhood has fantasized about the military. Three of his pictures in his book Art of the Deal show him in uniform at the New York Military Academy. He told biographer Michael D’Antonio,
“I always thought I was in the military.” He said that in prep school he received more military training than most actual soldiers did, and he had been required to live under the command of men…who had been real officers and soldiers. “I felt like I was in the military in a true sense.”
Journalist Fintan O’Toole sees Trump’s goal as using the U.S. military for his political ends.
Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.
He wanted to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. He urged his supporters to “fight like hell” on January 6, 2021. He has now deployed active duty Marines to Los Angeles and called up National Guard units to help in massive deportations. And he was willing to spend $45 million for a big parade and events on his birthday.
That isn’t all. His “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed on July 4, gives added billions of dollars to expand the police state. There’s $170 billion for immigration enforcement to be spent within five years. Here’s what it will buy:
$46.5 billion to extend the border wall and add security gear.
$45 billion to build and operate detention centers. (That could bring total immigration-related detention beds to 112,000, according to a July 1 report by the American Immigration Council.)
$29.9 billion for ICE personnel, vehicles, IT, and other equipment.
$5 billion to build and improve Customs and Border Protection checkpoints.
$4.1 billion to hire CBP and other personnel.
$3.3 billion to hire immigration judges and otherwise increase the capacity of the immigration system.
Since ICE had a budget of only $8 billion in 2024, how can it be expected to spend these extra billions effectively? Historian Garrett Graff doubts that they can.
What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well.
I spent nearly five years reporting heavily on the decade-long epidemic of corruption that paralyzed the Border Patrol after its ill-conceived Bush-era post-9/11 hiring surge— including interviewing every single person who had served as commissioner of CBP, visiting detention facilities, and even doing ride-alongs on the southern border by truck, boat, and helicopter. The Border Patrol’s hiring surge doubled the size of the force in just a few years, from about 9,200 to 18,000, a move roughly equivalent to (but still less than!) what we’re about to see happen with ICE.
As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of CBP officers and agents—ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012—meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours. “The Border Patrol was never big on the huge hiring,” one former training officer told me. “We weren’t prepared. That’s never worked out for anyone.”
Now we’re about to repeat all of those mistakes with ICE — and with CBP all over again.
Graff also notes that the kind of people who might be attracted to join ICE are not the kind we would want.
Whole swaths of “normal” ICE applicants, the types of standard former local or state law enforcement officers who have made up the applicant pool, will surely think twice before applying to an agency that makes the NYPD or the Ferguson PD look like “Officer Friendly.” Instead, the types of people who will be attracted to a job in the wake of Kristi Noem’s special-forces cosplay, the eye-popping photo ops at El Salvador’s CECOT torture gulag and the Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp are exactly the people who we shouldn’t imbue with federal law enforcement powers — you’re going to tell a tidal wave of applicants who are specifically attracted by the rough-em-up, masked secret police tactics, no-holds-barred lawlessness that ICE has pursued since January.
Instead of the carefully recruited and well-trained FBI, America will have a newly empowered, aggressive enforcement arm in DHS.
According to the latest figures, DHS already has more federal law enforcement officers and agents than the Department of Justice. CBP was already the largest federal law enforcement agency. As of 2020, DHS had about 66,000 officers and agents — almost entirely ICE and CBP, with about 5,000 Secret Service agents and another 1,000 building guards and TSA investigators — while DOJ had about 40,000 officers, including the FBI, DEA, Marshals, ATF, and the Bureau of Prisons. Now, we’re going to funding ICE and CBP at a level where they will dwarf the Justice Department’s resources, tipping the balance in the government even more so from DOJ to DHS.
“With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and I think the smartest immigration watcher on social media.
Jonathan V. Last foresees a new police state:
While most people spent the budget fight fixated on health care policy, I suspect that in a year we will consider this legislation to be the moment that Trump created his own internal security apparatus: His goal is to have ICE supplant the FBI in national law enforcement.
This is a big deal. Because the FBI is a professionalized organization with strict standards and a well-defined mission while ICE is more or less a national brute squad.
The Trump administration realized that corrupting the FBI would be a tall order. So while they’re certainly trying to do that, they put most of their chips on a different number: Reinventing ICE as the primary instrument of internal state power.
The BBB represents a step change: The operational budget for ICE is projected to go to $11.29 billion in 2026 with an additional $29.85 billion layered on top of that spread out over the next few years for personnel expansion and then another $45 billion for ICE to spend on detention facilities. To put that in perspective, ICE’s annualized budget won’t just be bigger than the FBI’s. It will be bigger than the budget of the Israeli military.
I share Graff’s concerns:
But as someone who has covered federal law enforcement for the last two decades and has spent recent years writing both about the state of democracy today and authoring history books about the fall of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, it’s hard not to look at the new legislation and fear, most of all, how we’re turbo-charging an increasingly lawless regime of immigration enforcement and adding superpowers to America’s newly masked secret police.