3 September 2025

Donald Trump is creating a personal paramilitary force

Ice, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has become a form of armed police.

There is often no single, obvious point when a country tips over from democracy to autocracy. In the popular imagination, an autocrat seizes power and forces a cowed public to submit to his will. In reality, autocrats are often democratically elected by people who support the kinds of crushing policies the autocrat promises. Sometimes they then create crises in order to justify leveraging the full force of the state to solve them. By the time the democratic red lines are crossed – rights stripped away, sham elections, no elections at all – democracy is already dead.

Donald Trump may fantasise about cancelling elections, and he may have already fomented an attempted coup by denying the results of a free and fair transfer of power, but a wannabe dictator is not yet a dictator. Yet he’s concerningly close as he strips funding from the media outlets that cover him honestly and guts institutions that might hold him to account. And across America, masked men are snatching people off the street, stuffing them into vans and detaining or deporting them without due process of law – all at the direction of the president.

These men are officers from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice), which Trump seems to be readying as his own personal paramilitary. They wear masks, they say, to prevent being doxxed – identified by a public upset about what they’re doing. It’s true, the public doesn’t tend to like it when armed police snatch people from work, from their homes, from the immigration court they showed up at because they were following the rules. And there are good reasons why, in functional democracies, agents of the state are generally expected to act transparently. If there is no shame in what Ice is doing, then its agents shouldn’t need to hide. But of course, the president wants Ice agents to act with impunity. He also wants their loyalty to be to him, rather than to the American people.

Ice currently gets more money than all other US federal law enforcement combined. According to reporting in the Atlantic, it has more funding than the military of any country in the world other than the US and China. But it is still not as powerful as Trump wants it to be: Ice is now on a hiring spree, offering $50,000 bonuses for new recruits and lowering its requirements so that more people might meet them. Trump is currently asking Department of Defence employees to leave their roles to help Ice with its deportation efforts. He’s hoping to deport one million people in his second term.

Trump has also called in the National Guard, a branch of the US military, to police liberal cities. They first arrived in Los Angeles to quash protests over deportations, and more recently in Washington, DC, where Trump claims a “crime emergency” forced him to send in troops. Crime in Washington, as in many US cities, is indeed high, much higher than in America’s economic peer nations. But that’s not due to lack of law enforcement; it’s largely thanks to the country’s nearly non-existent gun laws, which fuel astronomical homicide rates as well as ratchet up the stakes of less-serious crimes such as robberies. A real tough-on-crime approach would get tough on guns.

The National Guard is made up of civilian soldiers, people who generally have regular jobs but are prepared to be called upon when needed – usually if US forces abroad need extra support or if there’s a natural disaster. Deploying the National Guard against American citizens is rare. The 1992 riots in LA, which killed more than 50 people and resulted in more than $1bn in property damage, was the last time the Guard was called in to quell civilian unrest – and they were deployed at the request of California’s governor and the mayor of LA. The last time the Guard was deployed without local consent was in 1965, during the civil rights movement, in order to stop a violent crackdown by local law enforcement on peaceful protesters. In both of those circumstances, the National Guard was deployed under the Insurrection Act. Now Trump is using a different law, one that relies on the pretext of an invasion or where “the president is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.

Crime in DC and the latest protests in LA don’t even come close to meeting historical standards for deploying the National Guard. Mayors of both cities opposed the deployment. And because National Guardsmen and women are not generally full-time military, deploying them comes at significant personal cost – time away from work, family and their normal lives. Calling up members of the National Guard to duty is no small ask, and presidents have taken seriously the burdens placed on those who serve. Members of the Guard are standing around DC in military fatigues, doing things like picking up trash and guarding toilets. But tackling crime isn’t the point. Demonstrating Trump’s dominance is.

Piece by piece, autocrats dismantle institutions and break assumed-to-be-ironclad rules. Much of Trump’s destruction this term has been appalling. But little so far compares to his use of a military force to settle political grudges and the building of a personal paramilitary of men who hide behind masks so that they can aggressively satisfy his appetite for cruelty and power – an appetite that only seems to grow more voracious.

[See more: Taiwan on the edge]