by zahlman | 2026-01-16 18:29:33+00:00
The claim that ICE exists and is highly funded is not in dispute. ICE has existed since 2002 and the current funding was provided in the Big Beautiful Bill and was never in question.

"Paramilitary" is a subjective assessment.

Anyone being "held accountable" for anything, ever, in the legal system, takes years. Trump has not even been in office (this time around) for a year yet.

The actions you describe as "clearly violating rights" simply do not do any such thing. The rights of American citizens don't work the way that protesters have been implying.

ICE agents are federal law enforcement officers. They are explicitly empowered in the relevant law (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357 , section (a)(5)) to make arrests without a warrant of any person (including citizens) for any federal crime that they actively see happening, and any federal felony on reasonable suspicion.

Which makes perfect sense, because those are things that any other federal law enforcement officer would be able to do, without a warrant, in the same situation.

The Tenth Amendment does not bar federal officers from prosecuting federal crime and does not bar them from being in your state in the first place. It also doesn't give your local law enforcement the right to interfere with them. It only relieves them of the burden of helping to enforce federal law.

Even a Mother Jones article admits it's "not illegal" generally for the ICE agents to wear masks (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/06/ice-immigration...). (Aside from any question of anonymity, in the Good case, the face coverings on agents appear to be fabric appropriate to the near-freezing weather.) Attempts to pass state laws to prohibit the masks are being challenged (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-14/federal-...); I'm not convinced they would matter anyway given the Supremacy Clause.

When protesters are resisting arrest, physical force is sometimes required to enact that arrest. (And it's strange to make this argument about "safety" when many protesters are attempting to endanger the officers as well as counter-protesters and critics.) All the same things would be playing out if you had the same actions taken against state LEO that were trying to enforce state law.

I have thus far seen video footage of the ICE protesters:

* vandalizing unattended federal vehicles and stealing a firearm from one of them

* throwing dangerous objects at officers

* intentionally ramming cars

* boxing in officers on the street

* attempting to booby-trap the area around ICE facilities presumably in the hope of injuring the agents

* repeatedly refusing to leave when officers tell them to leave and there is clearly nothing preventing them from leaving, then resisting arrest when that refusal leads to an arrest

* effectively enacting their own "Kavanaugh stops" (without any legal authority) on other random citizens that they wrongly suspected of being plainclothes ICE agents because they happened to own the wrong model of SUV

* vandalizing the vehicle of counter-protesters while they were stopped at a traffic light, physically climbing onto the vehicle, making threats, and soaping up the front window to obscure visibility (a clear safety threat to everyone)

* running in front of a parked ICE SUV and pretending (very obviously) to get hit by it

* using a loudspeaker at close range next to a counter-protester, in a manner that would clearly cause or threaten hearing damage

And a lot of this directly leads to the situations that they subsequently propagandize.

Freedom of speech is not freedom to interfere physically with law enforcement.