Police State Bounty Hunters: The Rise of ICE’s Unconstitutional War on America

“Brother, I am American. You are twisting my arm.”
Man shouts “I am American” while ICE agents detain him

Masked gunmen. Tasers. Tear gas. Pepper spray. Unmarked vehicles. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Racial profiling. Children traumatized. Families terrorized. Journalists targeted. Citizens detained. Disabled individuals, minors, the elderly, pregnant women, military veterans—snatched off the streets. Private property destroyed.

This is not a war zone. This is America.

This is what now passes for law-and-order policing by ICE agents in Trump’s America—and it is not making America safer or greater.

What began as an agency tasked with enforcing immigration law has metastasized into a domestic terror force.

From coast to coast, ICE goon squads—incognito, thuggish, fueled by profit-driven incentives and outlandish quotas, and empowered by the Trump administration to act as if they are untouchable—are prowling neighborhoods, churches, courthouses, hospitals, bus stops, and worksites, anywhere “suspected” migrants might be present, snatching people first and asking questions later.

Sometimes “later” comes hours, days or even weeks afterwards.

No one is off limits—not even American citizens.

Make no mistake: this is not how a constitutional republic operates. It is how a dictatorship behaves when it decides the rule of law—in this case, the Bill of Rights—is optional.

Journalists are being shoved to the pavement, forced into chokeholds, teargassed, and brutalized—in violation of the First Amendment. U.S. citizens, including toddlers, are being snatched up and carted off—in violation of the Fourth Amendment. People with no criminal records who have lived, worked and paid taxes in this country for decades are being made to disappear—in violation of habeas corpus.

This is not public safety. It is domestic terrorism, carried out by masked, militarized, lawless bounty hunters.

In California, ICE agents stopped a U.S. citizen and military veteran on his way to work. According to George Retes, agents fired tear gas, broke his car window, and applied physical force, including kneeling on him. Retes spent three days in federal custody with no charges, no call to his family, no access to a judge or an attorney, no shower, and no explanation for ICE’s actions before being released.

In Portland, a U.S. citizen outside his workplace was detained by masked, plainclothes agents who refused to identify themselves, threatened him with a dog, handcuffed him, hauled away in an unmarked vehicle, and held for hours without justification.

In Chicago, a local TV journalist was violently knocked to the ground by masked agents, handcuffed, arrested, and hauled to a detention center—then released without charges.

In Los Angeles, ICE agents handcuffed and detained a 23-year-old, heavily pregnant woman for over eight hours with a chain around her belly, accusing the native-born American of being from Mexico. Bruised and in labor, she went straight to the hospital upon release.

Two sisters were stopped outside a school, surrounded by at least ten ICE agents, who broke into their locked vehicle, dragged them out, and pinned them to the ground. Both women were later released without explanation.

Each of these incidents is presented as routine immigration enforcement. Yet collectively they reveal a government agency that has abandoned the principles of restraint, accountability, and due process in favor of brute force.

Justifying extreme measures—martial law, mass surveillance, suspension of constitutional safeguards— as necessary for “national security” has always been the refuge of tyrants, and this American police state is no different.

Under Trump, however, things are so much worse.

The rationalizations have become bolder, the violence more normalized, and the lies more transparent.

The biggest lie of all is the Department of Homeland Security’s claim that its costly, ego-driven, and unnecessary military invasion of Chicago—Operation Midway Blitz—rounded up “the worst of the worst pedophiles, child abusers, kidnappers, gang members, and armed robbers.” In fact, DHS’ own data shows that out of more than 1,000 people rounded up, only 10 had criminal records.

As one Chicago resident remarked, “When Donald Trump campaigned, he said he was going after criminals, rapists and drug dealers. Now, they’re assaulting women, deporting children, mothers and fathers—not criminals. And if they’re criminals, he needs to prove it. We haven’t seen that evidence yet.”

Indeed, even the courts are finding the Trump administration’s so-called “evidence” of crime to be scant and/or unreliable.

Nationally, more than 70% of individuals rounded up by ICE nationally have no criminal convictions. Many have lived in the U.S. for decades, raised families, paid taxes, contributed to the economy, and worked the jobs most Americans refuse to do.

The blatantly false claim that immigrants are inherently violent criminals has also been repeatedly refuted by studies showing that immigrants—including undocumented ones—are less likely to commit crimes than Americans born in the U.S.

Even Trump’s insistence that certain states or cities are overrun with crime, thus necessitating his military invasions, collapses under scrutiny: crime remains at record lows nationwide.

The data simply does not support the rhetoric.

Violence rises and falls with social conditions, not partisan control. Yet, conveniently, only those states that have challenged the Trump administration’s abuses have been singled out for invasion by ICE and the National Guard.

Clearly, this is not about crime, safety, or jobs.

So what is really driving this campaign of terror?

What we are witnessing is the weaponization of fear.

A government that profits from panic and rewards blind obedience has turned immigration enforcement into a spectacle of domination—part deterrent, part distraction, and all political theater.

The timing is no coincidence.

The Trump administration has just announced its fifth military strike on a Venezuelan vessel it claims—without evidence—was engaged in illegal activity. The propaganda might scream about “foreign threats,” but these spectacles serve a different purpose: to divert public outrage away from falling poll numbers, a faltering economy, and growing unrest over the regime’s corruption and incompetence.

At home, ICE raids perform the same function as those boat strikes abroad—they keep the public frightened and the cameras fixed on the wrong enemy. Meanwhile, the scandals that should command national attention—the Epstein files implicating powerful allies, the graft, the insider enrichment—sink beneath the noise.

Each new show of force, each televised arrest or explosion, is meant to remind the populace who holds the power and how easily it can be turned inward.

This is not about border control or law enforcement. It is about control, period.

When a political regime begins to equate its own survival with the nation’s survival, every citizen becomes a potential suspect and every act of dissent a potential crime.

Against such a backdrop, ICE’s strategy is predatory and deliberate.

Lower court rulings have affirmed that ICE, DHS and the Trump Administration are willfully trampling the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

When ICE agents hunt people the way one might hunt animals in the wild, they cease to be officers of the law and become roving packs of lawless predators.

Lawless, paid predators, that is.

Thanks to the vast sums of taxpayer money funneled into ICE under Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” financial incentives are turning ICE agents into bounty hunters.

In addition to recruiting ICE agents with $50,000 signing bonuses and $60,000 in student loan forgiveness, DHS is also promising to lavishly reward police agencies that allow their officers to operate as extensions of ICE with salary reimbursements, overtime pay and monthly bonuses.

Then there is the Trump administration’s directive to ICE to carry out a minimum of 3,000 arrests a day.

No wonder citizens, lawful residents and immigrants with no criminal history are getting swept up. There simply aren’t enough violent criminals to fill these quotas.

While some lower courts have attempted to rein in ICE’s abuses, the U.S. Supreme Court has largely empowered them.

In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, a 6–3 Supreme Court order paused a district court injunction that would have barred ICE from stopping people based on perceived race, accent, or workplace location—in effect greenlighting racial profiling and roving patrols.

The court ruled that ICE’s criteria for targeting individuals—judging people by race, language, or job—does not rise to the constitutional level of reasonable suspicion.

But for an administration that mistakes might for right, the law is whatever justifies the hunt. “Everything we’re doing is very lawful,” Trump declared. “What they’re doing is not lawful.”

Martin Luther King Jr. offered the clearest rebuttal to that logic more than sixty years ago.

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written while jailed for participating in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation, King reminded the world “that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’”

King then went on to explain how to distinguish between just and unjust laws:

“I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’ Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

King’s message was not about politics but about principle. His words remind us that legality and morality are not always the same — and that a nation that abandons moral law will soon find itself without any law at all.

A government that chains pregnant women, assaults journalists, and detains citizens without cause has lost its moral authority to govern.

King warned that the gravest threat to justice is not the clamor of bad people but the appalling silence of good ones. The same holds true today: silence in the face of government brutality is itself a form of consent.

Even in the face of the Trump administration’s heavy-handed repression, citizens have stepped up to meet military intimidation with moral conscience.

In Portland and other cities, protesters have embraced creative, nonviolent acts of symbolic resistance—appearing unclothed to expose the government’s hypocrisy, donning costumes to mock its fear, and standing silently before armed agents as living reminders of what it means to resist tyranny without becoming it.

These creative gestures recall the kind of moral witness King described: the courage to confront injustice with peace and strip it of its disguise.

The bottom line, as always, rests with “we the people.”

ICE does not protect America—it terrorizes America. And until it is reined in, dismantled, or reformed to operate wholly within constitutional boundaries, it will remain a standing army on domestic soil: unaccountable, unconstitutional, and un-American.

Tyranny always cloaks itself in the language of welfare and safety. And constitutional abuse transcends party lines.

Every regime that seeks to entrench its power begins by promising to protect the people from chaos, crime, or foreign enemies—then proceeds to manufacture both.

The raids, the strikes, the distractions are all part of the same design: to condition obedience, erase accountability, and cement totalitarian rule under the pretense of “law and order.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.

The Constitution is not a suggestion; it is the rule of law.

If ICE—and by extension, the DHS and the entire Trump regime—cannot operate within those limits, if it must hide behind masks and military might to exercise its power, then it has ceased to be lawful.

It has become exactly what the Framers of the Constitution feared: a government that wages war on its own people.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected]. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN

If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.

For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.