A fascistic symptom of a darkening world
Some words are used to hide, others to reveal. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” belongs to the first category: an administrative, almost neutral name designed to anesthetize reality. But reality is anything but neutral.
ICE is not simply an agency “in charge of borders.” It is a shadow police force, a raiding force, a deportation machine—repressive mechanisms that have been at work for a long time, under administrations of different political colors, but which Trumpism has brutally politicized and made spectacular. It thus constitutes a mechanism of targeted terror, directed at exiles, the precarious, and racialized people—and, more profoundly, at anything that exceeds the established order. American libertarian analyses are unambiguous: ICE is not an unfortunate aberration, but a coherent organ of a system that has become structurally violent (CrimethInc.).
If the Social Ecology and Communalism Workshop is interested in this, it is not because of a taste for hot news: it is because ICE reveals, almost naked, what capitalist and state societies produce when they enter a twilight phase—not as an automatic end, but as a moment when contradictions become ungovernable except through violence.
The border descends into the streets
In a healthy world, the border would be an abstract word, a line on a map—better yet, it would no longer exist. In the real world, it becomes an operation: a police gesture, an administrative punch, logistical violence. ICE embodies this transformation. The border is no longer just at the edge of the territory; it spreads throughout the territory, descends into the streets, infiltrates neighborhoods and workplaces, appears in the early morning, and even tends to spread beyond the national territory, at the whim of transnational security measures.
We must call things by their name: ICE functions as a political police force, specializing in hunting down a population made “illegal” by decree—an illegality that has long existed but is now activated as a central instrument of government—and then subjected to arbitrary repression. Nothing is more revealing than this institutional production of “illegality”: the state creates crime, then punishes those it has itself manufactured as guilty.
The “deportation machine”: a state industry
ICE is not an isolated body. It is a chain. Contemporary deportation is not only brutal: it is industrial. It mobilizes files, biometrics, surveillance, local police, courts, detention centers, private subcontractors, transportation, and transfers—all the way to the final expulsion.
What we have here is a bureaucratic-police complex capable of transforming human lives into flows to be managed, and suffering into procedure. This is why libertarian analyses insist on the infrastructural dimension: to fight ICE, we must understand where it is anchored—buildings, nodes, flows, centers, logistical corridors (CrimethInc.).
The communalist reading then imposes itself: domination is material and systemic; liberation must be too.
Late capitalism: governing through fear, sorting through violence and death
Why now? Because capitalism is entering a phase where it can no longer present itself as a promise. It can no longer sell itself as progress, nor even hide behind the illusion of shared prosperity. Its crisis is no longer an episode: it is becoming permanent — and above all, twofold.
Internal, social, and economic crisis: the contradiction between endless accumulation and destroyed societies, between predation and the reproduction of life. An external, geobiophysical crisis: exceeding the Earth’s limits, the collapse of biodiversity, climate change, tensions over water, energy, soil—everything that makes a society livable.
When a system has exceeded its limits, it does not reform: it stiffens. It no longer organizes adherence, but submission. It no longer governs, it monitors. It no longer pacifies, it hunts down. ICE is a major symptom of this shift: in late capitalism, political management becomes security-oriented, then carceral, then militarized. The “crisis” becomes a pretext for everything — and violence, a supposed realism.
Fascistization: from democratic simulacrum to assumed state violence
The term is disturbing, and that is precisely why it must be used with rigor. What we are seeing emerge is indeed a fascist-like—or fascistic—dynamic: not a copy of the 1930s, but the reactivation of the same mechanism—creating enemies, legitimizing the exception, militarizing order, sorting lives. The proclaimed “democracy” reveals itself to be a useful simulacrum, a backdrop that makes authoritarianism presentable and brutality acceptable.
This slope always begins with the capture of language. Orwell described it with chilling precision: when power reverses words, crime becomes procedure, violence becomes necessity, domination becomes virtue—and war can even be presented as peace. This reversal is not rhetorical: it constitutes the moral infrastructure of the worst. When Trump can call an assembly of fanatical warmongers, racists, and colonialists a “peace council,” a threshold has been crossed: language no longer describes reality, it serves to make it tolerable.
But this violence does not rely solely on ideologues. It also relies on what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil: ordinary, procedural violence, fragmented by the administration. ICE operates in this way. Everyone “does their job,” applies the rule, fills out a form, escorts a body—without ever thinking of themselves as responsible for the whole. Deportation becomes a task, roundups a mission, suffering a side effect. Evil does not always shout: it classifies, stamps, and obeys.
When the state declares that a group of people is “superfluous,” it is not making a mistake: it is producing a sacrificial category. The border is always the laboratory; it serves to test the worst.
Gaza: the abyss made manageable
The world has seen Gaza—and today sees Sudan, Iran, Rojava—but Gaza is not an isolated case. It condenses, with extreme intensity, a regime of domination and violence that has been at work for decades throughout the Palestinian territory, under the guise of security, under the control and attacks of an Israeli army that still dares to present itself as “the most moral army in the world,” a description complacently repeated by much of the Western media, without the accumulation of crimes ever seeming to be enough to disqualify it.
What is most striking is the way in which this has been made acceptable: in the name of law, security, and order. When support becomes unconditional, when genocide becomes manageable, how can we believe that our societies are immune?
Gaza is a warning. It demonstrates that an entire population can be treated as superfluous, disposable, erasable. And this logic contaminates everything: once a life becomes “superfluous,” all that remains is to discuss the details. ICE is part of the same world—a world where we learn to no longer recognize others as our equals.
The almost universal tolerance of these practices, including on the part of Arab regimes that are directly affected, says something even more disturbing: what is accepted there paves the way for what will become acceptable elsewhere.
Social ecology: a structural reading
Social ecology refuses to reduce these horrors to mere “excesses.”
It reminds us of an obvious fact: domination breeds domination and separation, and the state is the institutional form par excellence of this. Capitalism, for its part, follows its logic of “grow or die,” whatever the cost to humanity and life itself. The combination of state and capital produces the administration of misery, armed hierarchy, fear as a mode of government, and the sorting of lives.
ICE is a specialized organ of this logic: that of a social order which, incapable of ensuring a dignified life, is content to ensure order. And when order takes precedence over humanity, anything becomes possible.
Facing the hunt: the commune
Communalist thinking is not limited to denunciation; it opens up a concrete perspective. A libertarian formula sums it up aptly: to stop ICE now, action is needed; to prevent it from returning, organization is needed (Libcom). To this, we add a decisive requirement: the institution of forms of power from below, which alone are capable of breaking with the state order in a lasting way and rendering structural violence inoperative.
Action means immediate solidarity: anti-raid alerts, collective protection, blockades, refusal to cooperate—everything that makes the hunt more costly, more visible, less “normal.” Organization is what transforms these gestures into lasting force: local assemblies, mutual aid, commons, grassroots coordination. ICE is not just a political problem: it is a problem of civilization, of a world that no longer knows how to produce the common good and produces nothing but control. Frontex is its European mirror image: same logic, same deaths, same war waged against the undesirables—with vocabulary and procedures adapted to the European setting.
Faced with this logic, it is not a question of humanizing the state or managing violence, but of deploying real counter-powers capable of removing territories, lives, and relationships from permanent internal war.
Conclusion: the night is systemic
ICE is not a marginal monstrosity. ICE is a truth: that of systems which, having exceeded all limits, can no longer manage permanent crisis except through violence and war. The more unliveable the world becomes, the more order hardens, the more brutality becomes a norm of government.
This is not actualism. It is a historical diagnosis: a system that destroys the conditions of life always ends up declaring war on the living. ICE is one of the clearest faces of this—because it makes visible what the dominant order strives to conceal elsewhere.
In the face of the shadow police, there is only one adequate response: a society capable of defending itself, not through delegation, but through collective organization.
A united, ungovernable population—because it governs itself.
Sources (selection)
CrimethInc.; It’s Going Down; Libcom; Desinformémonos—analyses on ICE, borders, deportation, fascism, and resistance.