The Plan For Defeating ICE

Understanding what Trump’s secret paramilitary force is and what it’s trying to achieve defines a clear path to victory for the American people

The President of the United States of America has declared war on the American people. The problem with that statement is that its reality is even more absurd than its premise. As brutality intersects stupidity, as five-year olds in bunny hats are rounded up, and as victims of the government’s murderous violence are slandered for their humanity, it can be hard to identify a clear path forwards. That’s both a feature and a bug, because the White House’s plan requires our participation.

This plan is drawn from the interview I did with Robert Young Pelton last week. Pelton is the world’s foremost expert on the intersection of insurgency and media, which is particularly relevant here because what we’re seeing is an attempt by the administration to create an insurgency using media. Let’s start there.

What Is The Purpose Of ICE?

Why entrap a bunch of losers in debt, then set them loose on the American people all dressed up like they’re about to storm Caracas? Because you can’t give a war without someone to fight.

Pelton explains that the administration is following a well worn template for creating a violent insurgency. Just, in the past, those have been made more from negligence than malice.

Think of Iraq, post-2003 invasion. The first thing we did was fire 400,000 professional soldiers, who suddenly found themselves without an ability to feed their families, but still in possession of their weapons. Desperation combined with oppression, and all of a sudden shares in Lockheed Martin began to skyrocket in value as American teenagers bled to death on the streets of Fallujah.

The parallels with today are legion. Beginning on January 20, last year, the rug was pulled out from under our “envy of the world” economy, and hundreds of thousands of Americans suddenly lost previously stable careers. This is America, so the guns are a given. All we need is a spark of oppression to ignite the tinderbox of dissatisfaction. Enter ICE.

It’s important to note here that ICE hasn’t always been a debt-entrapped goon squad sent to terrorize the American people. But the fact that its deportation numbers were higher during the Obama and Biden presidencies proves the point: The purpose of this new version of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, newly flush with 170 billion taxpayer dollars, isn’t to round up brown people.

Creating the goon squad from the ruins of a once-legitimate federal agency creates the potential for the Trump regime to sow disinformation about its purpose. As talk of ICE surging into more communities spreads, I find myself having more and more discussions along the lines of, “Well, ICE has always been here.” But not this ICE.

The fact that the regime needed to create its goon squad using the ruins of a once-legitimate federal agency also begins to point us towards a remedy.

Why Trump Needs An Insurgency

Pelton and I aren’t the only ones using that word.

Writing in the New York Post, a far-right propaganda tabloid, far-right propagandist James A. Gagliano claims, “…the anti-ICE movement looks less like a populist, grassroots uprising of outraged soccer moms—and more like a criminal insurgency.”

Gagliano then goes on to warn that this insurgency could lead to, “…the fall of Rome.”

Along with that, consider the administration’s attempts to paint suburban moms and nurses at the Veteran’s Administration as “domestic terrorists.”

This also isn’t the first time team Trump has tried to manufacture an insurgency in order to overthrow American democracy. Employing the same playbook is what caused the January 6th coup attempt to fail in 2021.

While much of the collective memory about that day focusses on the violent mob of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and beat police officers with American flagpoles, that was actually the moment the coup failed. As Jack Smith testified last month, Trump gathered that violent, armed mob instead to engage “Antifa” in street warfare, at which point the plan was to use the Insurrection Act to declare martial law, and delay the certification of electors in Congress, thereby calling the results of the 2020 election into question and preventing Joe Biden from being sworn into office.

The only problem was that “Antifa” doesn’t exist outside the imaginations of MAGA, so Trump’s mob had no one to fight, and instead turned to beating up the very cops who were there to protect them.

As all of that indicates, the Trump regime is still, to some degree, forced to act within the bounds of the law. Even with Supreme Court justices flying pro-insurrection flags in an apparent sign of coordination with the plan, even with coordination in the planning from members of Congress, and even with logistical support from prominent far-right hatemongers like Charlie Kirk, the sitting President was still forced to devise a plan that relied on some sort of foundation in law, even if it involved highly questionable interpretations of such.

Applying that same framework is the key to understanding what’s going on today. The President isn’t simply able to declare war on the American people. If he did, he could not expect crucial players like the courts, or the military, or politicians to be able to go along with it. For that support he must first concoct the justification people who have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution need to violate it, the justification the legal system needs to work under wartime powers, and the justification elected officials need to convince their voters that they are fighting a legitimate enemy that exists in reality.

That justification is the existence of a violent, coordinated, anti-government insurgency. Go back to that New York Post article and you can see an example of propaganda beginning to make the argument such a thing exists.

This is the exact same plan the Trump team tried to employ on January 6th, but they’ve learned from their mistake of relying on an imagined enemy, and have instead embarked on an effort to create that enemy.

That effort is also trying to achieve the exact same goal as the January 6th coup attempt: denying the American people the ability to choose their own leaders in free and fair elections.

Wait, This Isn’t Nearly Stupid Enough

Pelton cautions that we should consider this through the lens of Trump’s career, prior to the golden escalator ride—that of an actor who played a successful businessman on reality television.

Doing that, we arrive at an understanding that the eight people who have been murdered by ICE so far in 2026, and the 32 people who were killed in ICE custody last year, and all the people getting shipped off to domestic concentration camps and foreign gulags, and the separated families, and the chaos in Minneapolis, are all merely collateral damage to the main event: a video shoot intended to capture social media clips the regime can use to convince people of the existence of a violent, coordinated insurgency. Yes, that is as cruel as it sounds.

That framework also helps us understand why the administration has entrapped a bunch of dopes in debt, dressed them up in military-esque costumes, then set them loose in American neighborhoods so they can play Army with “absolute immunity,” and specific instructions to violate our Constitutional rights: they’re actors paid to play the “good guys” in Trump’s reality show.

This is again nothing new. Trump tried to do exactly this in 2020, by highlighting and promoting the rare instances of violence that resulted from that summer’s social justice protests in an attempt to justify declaring martial law. That effort was ultimately prevented by institutional protections—Mark Milley, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—has written that he resisted multiple attempts by Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Now, that position is held by Dan Cain, a Trump loyalist who plays a reasonably convincing tough guy on television.

And we can consider much of the rest of Trump’s domestic policy over the last year through this same lens. One of the early stated goals of DOGE was to clear out institutional knowledge and established leadership at the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump appointed an alcoholic talk show host to run the Department of Defense not for any sort of leadership qualification, but rather an enthusiasm to replace qualified military leaders with stooges willing to go along with Trump’s plan. The same is true at DOJ, FBI, DHS, and any other department or agency that might be important in the administration’s primary goal: to declare war on the American people.

The Key To Revolution Lies In Ratings

Trump wins if his reality show is able to serve as justification for a declaration of martial law. So how do we, the American people, prevent that from happening? By creating counter programming, and working to make sure it accrues more viewers. We’re in an old school, network television-era ratings war with our President. We need to create our own “Survivor” to outmatch the President’s “Apprentice.”

That’s why Trump is losing the battle of Minneapolis. There, regular people are risking their lives to record every atrocity ICE is committing. And those videos are proving more popular than the administration’s attempts to lie about them.

But our challenge doesn’t stop there. Where ICE has been given a $170 billion production budget and has the entire Executive Branch running PR interference for their abuses we, the American people, are left responsible for the safety of our communities.

And in Minneapolis we can again find a model for that success. The community is rallying around those targeted by ICE, supporting families with food deliveries, financial assistance, and legal aid, all drawn from their own pockets. As that battle winds down and others begin, telling stories about those struggles and successes, as well as the methods and protocols developed is going to help us frame our own narrative of opposition in compelling ways, even while equipping other communities with a developing set of tactics we can employ when ICE comes for the rest of us.

The President and his stooges are right in that this moment calls for for a coordinated insurgency. But, by keeping that non-violent, the American people can subvert the administration’s own programming, and turn its budgets and cruelty against it. We can and will win this war so long as we continue to be better at content creation than a 79-year old man.

Top photo: The Museum of American History

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.

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