I have a few words to say about the discourse regarding whether ICE is more like the Nazi secret police, or rather more like the slave catchers in the antebellum USA and Confederacy.
The argument to compare it slave catchers is that this is not foreign.
But here's the hard part: neither are Nazis.
Jan 25, 2026 05:12America is about as German as it is English, with some 45M claiming German ancestry. Many people in the US prior to WW2 were only a generation after German immigration, if that. It was a second civil war.
The global north has been oppressing its people and the rest of the world for centuries.
What makes the *most* sense is to contextualize ICE as part of a tradition of totalitarian fascist regimes, from medieval feudalism, to the advent of nation states, to the era of modern information-based control via hypervisible stochastic terror and algorithmic gaslighting.
So, really, none of this is new per se, but neither is it distinctly "American". It's the violent thrashing of an empire that senses the inherent threat of accountability for its actions, and the ensuing loss of hegemonic control.
This also means that we can look to the resistance history of the United States, the West, and the Global North, to see examples of what has worked and what hasn't, in the face of *all* oppressive regimes.
