My conversation with Chowdhury took place during what the Department of Homeland Security touted as its “largest … operation ever.” As in Operation Midway Blitz, which began in Chicago last September, masked men in tactical gear, equipped with military-grade firearms, recklessly deployed chemical weapons as they prowled local neighborhoods populated predominantly by immigrants. Some of their detainees included a worker at a Spanish immersion daycare center and the husband of a woman who was pregnant with their fourth child. (The mother has since given birth, but her husband is still nowhere to be found—perhaps lost in the ever-growing labyrinth of the ICE detention system.) A couple of days before Good’s killing, an additional 2,000 armed agents had been deployed to the Minneapolis metro area.
To many in the United States and around the world, the sight of militarized, federal police forces operating with immunity on U.S. streets seemed inconceivable. Of course, heavily armed, virtually unaccountable forces are not new to American policy; they’re only new to American soil.
The anti-immigration sweeps by ICE should be viewed as an extension of a broader U.S. paramilitary tradition that began decades ago. At the beginning of the Cold War, the United States was trapped by the contradictions at the heart of its two major obligations: on one hand, maintaining an international liberal order premised on the relatively novel concept of universal human rights; on the other, eradicating the rise of nascent communist movements and governments across the world, at any cost.
It wasn’t limited to the Third World, either. After the Allies carved up Europe, the United States created a postwar network of clandestine “stay-behind” cells in Western Europe, should a hypothetical Soviet invasion occur. This CIA-backed network, known as Operation Gladio, was staffed with reactionary ideologues, and weapons caches were planted in countries like Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Greece. When a Russian incursion failed to materialize, Gladio operatives, particularly in Italy, began carrying out terrorist attacks—such as the bombing of a bank in Piazza Fontana that left 17 dead—in an effort to intimidate and pacify left-wing parties that might be sympathetic to communism. The goal was a “strategy of tension” that would drive citizens into the arms of right-wing governance, and the police initially blamed the massacre on an extraneous collection of anarchists. “There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers, and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism,” a former Greek general said of Gladio.
Such state-endorsed ruthlessness was often effective, and it would prove to have bipartisan support in Washington. Fearing a growing Red Menace, the Kennedy administration “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” wrote the president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa. Paramilitaries were particularly active in Latin America, a region of special concern to U.S. policymakers, thanks both to its proximity and to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted this nation’s right to behave with impunity in its “sphere of influence” in the Americas. As a result, in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Colombia, the paramilitary threat reigned supreme. Trade unionists, social workers—anyone, really, who was deemed a potential communist sympathizer—were exterminated by secret police, militias, and death squads, many of whom were trained by U.S. intelligence officers at the notorious School of the Americas—an academy created by the Defense Department on the border between Georgia and Alabama.
Unfortunately, such policies were not left in the twentieth century. During the almost two decades when U.S. troops occupied Afghanistan, local extremist groups were heavily utilized to defeat the Taliban and maintain order. Their conduct was overwhelmingly more likely to result in civilian casualties and human rights abuses, and many groups with ties to the country’s U.S.-installed leader, Hamid Karzai, engaged in narcotics trafficking.
In theory, paramilitary violence works by terrorizing a civilian population into submission. These lawless units make their own rules and answer to nobody. The only way to survive is to follow those rules.
The Trump team has experimented with different iterations of the paramilitary style, including the use of military contractors as immigrant bounty hunters and a failed attempt to create a “quick reaction force” out of National Guardsmen and “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds.” The goal from the very beginning has been to create a force that could fulfill the president’s will without interference from the “deep state.”
Instead, ICE and Customs and Border Protection, both governmental agencies, have been transformed into the personal armed force of the president and granted unprecedented financial resources in an era of otherwise draconian funding cuts: The ICE budget now rivals the defense budgets of entire nations. Those tasked with deporting one million migrants a year have been granted federal immunity from prosecution, the ability to bypass Fourth Amendment guardrails against unreasonable searches and seizures, and can ignore civil rights law. Agents have been employing illegal choke holds, borrowing surveillance methods from the Israeli Defense Force, and executing “high-risk military tactics” with almost no legal consequences.
“A lot of the groups that we monitor, whether those characterize themselves as white nationalists, whether that’s something like active clubs—neo-Nazi fight clubs that have been popping up around the country for the past couple of years—they have been a little bit less active, actually, during the start of the second Trump administration … not because they’re done, but because the federal government is advancing, essentially, their policy priorities,” said Kate Bitz, a senior organizer with Western States Strategies, which specializes in helping local governments reckon with the white nationalist movement.
Yet administration officials have preposterously claimed that both were “domestic terrorists” whose killing was justified. In framing their deaths in this manner and blocking investigations into them, the administration is extending the threat of paramilitary violence to all of its enemies.
Now, the government is depicting its own people as the enemy. For the Trump administration, winning the war against immigration, multiculturalism, and liberalism demands spectacular violence, undertaken with total impunity. It demands terrorizing communities, rounding up their residents, and even assassinating dissidents. The paramilitary ethos has long been one of America’s most unsavory exports. Now, it’s come home.
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