For Trump, A Dream Come True, His Very Own Private Army
Trump is getting his fondest wish, his own private army with more than 30,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, more than the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security combined and larger than the miliary budgets of most countries.
The plan pays for more than 10,000 new ICE agents is funded under trump’s new budget, perversely titled, “The Big, Beautiful Bill.” The expanded ICE numbers will drastically boost trump’s immoral and likely illegal plans to deport millions of undocumented as well as documented immigrants, many who have lived and raised families in the U.S. for decades.
The bill allocates ICE with more funding than any federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history and more than the total federal prison system. The expanded ICE program will further trump’s dreams of mass detentions and deportations, restricted access to asylum and will undoubtedly lead to dire economic and humanitarian consequences.
The bill, which sailed through Congress with barely a GOP whimper, invests $178 billion in additional immigration enforcement over the next decade, primarily through new funding to ICE. It will pay to build more detention centers and to deploy more Marines throughout the nation to help round up such dangerous migrants as gardeners, home health aides, grad students, nannies and construction workers.
The bill costs an annual average of $37.5 billion, more than the defense budgets of Israel ($30 billion), the Netherlands ($27 billion) and Brazil ($26.1 billion).
Shocking Force
The expanded force will play a decisive role in fulfilling trump’s vision of controlling the nation through the military and police. Businesses, stores, parks, schools and religious places have been terrorized by the nightmarish scene of unidentified ICE agents in dark masks and balaclavas who sweep mothers, fathers and children away to an undisclosed location. The most recent omen of the terrifying mutation came three days after Independence Day in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, Calif.
Children who were playing at a park summer camp were rudely interrupted by the arrival of dozens of armed federal agents who began marching over soccer fields and grass berms while military-style vehicles blocked the street and a federal helicopter flew overhead. The agents, some on horseback, wore fatigues, masks and helmets and marched in lines in search of their prey, undocumented migrants.
Mayor Karen Bass said the scene “looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation. It’s the way a city looks before a coup.”
The show of force came a month after trump called up National Guard troops to quell limited protests at federal buildings and at immigration raids. A total of about 4,000 Guard members and 700 Marines were deployed but were not again obvious until the latest incursion.
Gregory Bovino, a Customs and Border Protection chief in Southern California, said the trump administration would plan more actions across the city.
“Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon,” Bovino told a Fox News reporter. “We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
Ongoing Deportations
The U.S. has been deporting migrants to gulags in various foreign nations including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, Mexico, Panama, Rwanda and now South Sudan, two countries that have long been considered dangerous and racked with violence and revolution.
Around 137 Venezuelans were captured and flown to the notorious maximus security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The trump administration paid El Salvador $6 million to detain 300 migrants.
Venezuelan nationals deported from the U.S. are expected to be forced to return to their homeland where a brutal socialist dictator has caused widespread hunger and other humanitarian crises
The Salvadoran jail is known for serious human rights violations and the U.S. deportees are held without due process, with no orders or sentencing. Many have no criminal records or convictions in either country.
One of the deportees was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old native of El Salvador living in Beltsville, Md., who was mistakenly deported and taken to CECOT in March. The Trump administration has admitted that Garcia’s deportation was a mistake, caused by an “administrative error.”
Abrego Garcia claimed in court papers that he experienced “severe beatings” and “psychological torture” in CECOT after he was deported by the trump administration.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem famously visited the prison in March and posed for news photos in front of scores of prisoners who were packed into sweltering cells and never allowed out of the prison.
Setting a new and lower standard, the U.S. has developed a concentration camp for detained immigrants on a 39-acres site in the Everglades of Florida. Officially known in Florida as “Alligator Alcatraz,” after the infamous California prison. The camp will house around 5,000 prisoners on land surrounded by alligators and pythons. Trump has made the ghoulish reference to anyone attempting to escape from Alligator Alcatraz may turn out as food scraps for the alligators.
Already, Florida’s GOP has started selling Alligator Alcatraz merch as a way of fundraising for the center. The merch includes T-shirts, hats and drink coolers.
It goes against historical facts to expect that new concentration camps would be a place for fair and humane treatment. As an example, a report by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General revealed that 1,224 sexual abuse complaints while in immigration custody were filed between January 2010 and June 2017. Contrary to ICE’s claims, only 2 percent of these complaints were investigated.
The sadistic architect of the trump deportation policies is the nihilistic Stephen Miller, who glowed while describing the “Big Beautiful Bill (BBB).”
“The BBB will increase by orders of magnitude the scope, scale and speed of removing illegal and criminal aliens,” Miller posted on X in June, calling the bill “the most essential piece of legislation… in the entire Western World, in generations.”
In a podcast interview last year, Miller gleefully explained what to expect if trump was re-elected.
“You will wake up every morning so excited to get out of bed to see what’s happening on the border, to see what’s happening with immigration enforcement, you’ll set your alarm clock two hours earlier every morning just to get two more hours of daylight to watch the deportation flights happen,” Miller said. “That’s how excited you’ll be. That’s how wonderful this will be.”
Tom Homan, trump’s so-called “Border Czar,” crafted the first trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy. As of April 2024, about 1,400 children were still not confirmed to have been reunited with their families.
At a July 2024 National Conservatism Conference meeting, Homan said if “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
The thousands of new ICE agents will have a massive job as they will be expected to capture and deport hundreds of thousands if not millions of immigrants. Their experience and requirements do not instill confidence that immigrants will be treated fairly and humanely.
Minimal requirements for new ICE agents include a college degree in criminal justice, homeland security, or a related field or work experience in law enforcement, military service, or another field related to ICE’s mission. They also must complete 14 weeks of ICE training and pass a medical exam and drug test.
Concentration Camps
Concentration camps around the world have been historically places of severe cruelty, dehumanization and death. The nature of trump’s immigration plans and expansion of ICE to concentration camps are suggestive of another dictator’s plans of ridding his country of those considered undesirable.
The trump propaganda machine homogenizes any concerns over paramilitary forces or concentration camps. Adolf Hitler also relied heavily on paramilitary rule cloaked in nationalism.
In 1925, 300 personal bodyguards were hired as part of a new paramilitary organization to protect Hitler, the future fuhrer. During the Nazi period, the organization, the feared Schutzstaffel (SS), swelled to more than 250,000 members who were responsible for enforcing Nazi racial policies, prosecuting opponents and orchestrating the Holocaust.
The SS worked hand in glove with another paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung or SA, known as Storm Troopers or Brownshirts. The SA played a significant role in Hitler’s rise to power by providing protection at Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties and intimidating Romani, trade unionists, and especially Jews.
The trump administration has refused to divulge where many of the deportees have been sent and under what conditions they are being held. The nature of concentration camps have always been secretive and publicly minimized. A window into the Nazi propaganda machine came on April 22, 1933, when the N.Y. Times ran a story about the first correspondent to visit the huge Nazi internment camp at Dachau, where 5,000 “political prisoners” would eventually be detained. The visit was on Hitler’s birthday, which included special parades and “privileges for the prisoners.”
The story left no hint of the violence that prisoners suffered. The prison commandant was described as “a quiet-mannered, blond, blue-eyed young former officer named (Hilmar) Wäckerle.” The prisoners’ heads were shaved and they wore dungarees over their civilian clothes.
“They had a parade with music and addresses from Nazi leaders this morning in honor of Chancellor Hitler’s birthday,” said Wäckerle. “They have been excused from all but essential work for the day and they are getting additional rations and also ten cigarettes apiece.”
“The prisoners’ workday begins with reveille at 6 a.m. and ends at 5:30 with intervals of half an hour for breakfast and two hours for dinner. Then supper and lights out at 9:15,” the Times reported.
The story noted the prisoners lived in huts “which are clean and sanitary…The prisoners are free together to read censored newspaper and selected books and receive certain foodstuffs from their relatives but they cannot see their wives, children and friends except in cases of extreme urgency such as dangerous illness or financial crisis.”
“Some, the commandant assured the writer in front of the silent prisoners themselves, are grateful for regular work and food after years of unemployment, Herr Wäckerle declaring that ‘they miss only their Bavarian beer.’”
“In one hut a Jewish doctor who is a prisoner was conducting the fortnightly medical examination of the inmates. In another, a prisoner began playing a mandolin, curiously enough just as we entered.”
The reality was far different.
Wäckerle was a commander in the Waffen-SS of Nazi Germany during World War II. In 1933, Wäckerle was picked by his former classmate and friend, Heinrich Himmler, to be commandant of the newly established Dachau concentration camp. Under orders from Himmler, one of the most powerful people in the Nazi Party, Wäckerle established rules for dealing with prisoners that instituted terror as a way of life at the camp. Wäckerle’s initiatives included execution of four prisoners for “violent insubordination” and “incitement to disobedience.”
Dachau, one of the first Nazi concentration camps, was initially intended to intern Hitler’s political opponents, including communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. After its opening, it was expanded to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, Germans, and Austrians that the Nazi Party regarded as criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded.
Prisoners lived in constant fear of brutal treatment and terror detention including standing cells, floggings, the so-called tree or pole hanging, and standing at attention for extremely long periods. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands that are undocumented.