Trump has turned ICE into a war machine that terrorizes American families

Shock-and-awe operations deployed in the country’s major cities

The scenes unfolding today on American streets defy imagination. In Los Angeles, more than 4,000 National Guard troops were deployed against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom, in what many perceived as a test aimed at establishing federal control over cities led by Democrats. In Chicago, ICE agents and border patrol officers arrived in force alongside Texas National Guard troops, using tear gas and rubber bullets; in one particularly dramatic instance, agents even rappelled from a helicopter onto the roof of an apartment building to make arrests. These military-style methods, reminiscent of special forces operations in war zones, have shocked international public opinion and sparked waves of protests across the country.

The impact on local communities has been immediate and devastating. In the Charlotte area, more than 30,000 students stayed home from school after the Border Patrol arrived in November 2025. In Minneapolis, public schools canceled classes for two days and offered remote learning for an entire month following ICE operations that culminated in the death of an American citizen, Renée Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in January 2026. Local economies also suffered, with businesses and restaurants in immigrant neighborhoods such as Chicago’s Little Village closing their doors while customers stayed home for fear of being arrested. This deliberately induced economic and social paralysis is part of a broader strategy aimed at making life unbearable for undocumented immigrants to push them toward self-deportation.

When I see the images of these police raids—helicopters flying over residential neighborhoods, terrified children who don’t understand why armed men are pointing guns at their parents—I wonder how we got to this point. This is America, not a war zone. These are families seeking a better life, not combat enemies. The brutality of these operations, the blatant indifference to collateral damage inflicted on innocent people—including U.S. citizens—is an insult to everything this country claims to stand for. And the scariest part is that it continues, day after day, with no one seeming able to stop it. Images of masked, unidentified agents arresting people on the street are something one would expect to see in a dystopian science-fiction film about the rise of a totalitarian regime, not in the daily news of a modern democracy.

The Use of Military Force in Immigration Operations

The Trump administration crossed a constitutional red line by deploying the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement operations, a practice prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act since 1878. By circumventing this prohibition through the declaration of a national emergency and the creation of national defense zones along the Mexican border, the administration has militarized vast portions of U.S. territory. Approximately 7,000 soldiers have been deployed to the southwestern border as part of a mission that has cost about $1.3 billion, while thousands more have been sent to U.S. cities to assist ICE operations. This unprecedented militarization of immigration represents a radical transformation of the traditional role of the U.S. armed forces.

National Defense Zones, first established in New Mexico and later expanded to Texas, Arizona, and California, grant the military extraordinary powers over civilian areas. Anyone, including U.S. citizens, who enters these zones can be charged with criminal trespass on military property. As of June 2025, more than 1,400 migrants had been charged with trespassing, although many federal judges have since dismissed these charges. This expansion of military powers on U.S. soil has alarmed civil liberties advocates, who see it as a dangerous precedent for the separation between the military and civilian law enforcement—a pillar of American democracy for generations.

This militarization of immigration is a historic and frightening turning point. The U.S. military is trained to fight foreign enemies, not to hunt down families in the suburbs of Chicago or Los Angeles. When we see armed soldiers patrolling American streets, we cannot help but think of other dark moments in history when the military was used to oppress civilian populations. This is an insidious but real shift toward a militarized state where the armed forces become a tool of domestic social control. And once that Rubicon is crossed—once the military is routinely used for domestic policing operations—it becomes very difficult to turn back. It opens the door to a future I don’t even want to imagine.