By Aswad Walker
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) $100 million, year-long “wartime recruitment” media campaign to hire thousands of new agents for mass deportations is making national news.
Many are calling the effort inherently “un-American” because it pours vast resources into an enterprise that tramples moral decency, mocks the nation’s self-image as a “nation of immigrants,” and routinely violates basic constitutional rights—detaining, beating, killing, and deporting people with no due process or crimes committed.
But from the vantage point of many Blackfolk and others, ICE is openly, unapologetically, and quintessentially American. And the reflexive comparison to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo only obscures that harder truth.
$100 Million Recruitment Campaign
Start with the facts. ICE’s recruitment drive—part of a $170 billion border and interior enforcement allocation—spent $100 million over a single year to hire roughly 14,000 new personnel. The campaign was explicitly framed as “wartime,” saturated with patriotic imagery, militarized language, and a sense of existential threat.
But this was not generic recruitment. It was precision targeting. ICE used geofencing technology to push ads to phones near military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses, gun shows, and trade expos. Millions were paid to influencers—“former agents, veterans, and pro-ICE creators”—to spread recruitment content across Facebook, Instagram, X, and conservative platforms like Rumble.
The message was blunt and racialized: “America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.” Generous incentives followed—salaries nearing $90,000, $50,000 signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness, and retirement benefits.
This was data-driven recruitment aimed squarely at communities steeped in militarism, gun culture, and reactionary politics—spaces where anti-Blackness and anti-Brownness are not bugs, but features.
‘Wartime’ Wonder
The results were staggering: over 220,000 applications and 12,000 hires in just four months. Former ICE Director Sarah Saldaña warned that the “wartime” framing risked attracting applicants seeking combat rather than civil enforcement. Her concern was prophetic.
Reports quickly followed of shortened training, poor vetting, badge violations, and misconduct.
The killing of Renee Nicole Macklin Good—shot by an ICE agent during a vehicle encounter—became a flashpoint. Despite video evidence raising serious questions, Homeland Security officials defended the shooting as “following training.”
Even more on-brand, Keith Porter Jr, a 43-year-old father of two, was fatally shot by an off-duty ICE officer on New Year’s Eve for participating in the most American of traditions–shooting his gun in the air outside his apartment. Reportedly, the ICE agent, a neighbor of Porter’s, went inside his own apartment, came out in his tactical gear, and fatally shot Porter. That death was all but ignored.
The defense of Good’s killing, and the ignoring of Porter’s, only deepened the alarm: What kind of country defends this madness?
Modern-Day Gestapo?
When people witness this level of state terror, they often reach for the Gestapo analogy. As Ashley B. (@ashleytheebarroness) notes, “Raids in the middle of the night, neighbors disappearing, families gone before breakfast—that’s the kind of terror people were taught to recognize.”
And that comparison makes emotional sense. It captures fear. It signals evil. But it also lets Americans keep terror at arm’s length—something foreign, something imported, something that could never be us.
Less Gestapo, More Slave Patrol
“Structurally, historically, ICE does not move like the Gestapo,” Ashley B. explains. “They move like slave patrols. And the reason nobody wants to say that out loud is because slave patrols aren’t foreign. They’re American; homegrown.”
Slave patrols were legal, state-funded, and community-supported. Their job was not to investigate crimes, but to enforce status. Stop people. Demand proof. Decide on the spot who belonged.
“No crime required. No trial. No explanation. Just papers, accent, skin, and presence.”
That is the blueprint ICE follows today, and Ashley B. explains: administrative power masquerading as law, paperwork elevated to morality, families treated like inventory.
The Convenient Untruth
The Gestapo comparison allows Americans to condemn terror without looking at themselves in the mirror. Slave patrols force a deeper reckoning. They require admitting that American terror is homegrown, with not Hitler necessary, only bureaucrats “doing their jobs,” and neighbors’ silence serving as tacit permission and sheepish acceptance of injustice as the status quo.
Legal scholar and commentator Lurie Daniel Favors has long argued that America is not “going rogue.” The current hyper-anti-Black and anti-immigrant moment is not a betrayal of America’s core—it is its expression. Reconstruction and the Integration Era were brief deviations. The other 400-plus years tell the real story.
Using Red, Black, and Green-Colored Glasses
By that measure, ICE is more “American” than “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” This recognition is not despair, though. Rather, it’s an awakening to effective strategy. Favors argues that only by rejecting America’s self-flattering mythology can those committed to democracy and human decency organize effectively.
You cannot dismantle what you misdiagnose. You cannot defeat lineage by pretending it is an anomaly.
Only by seeing ICE honestly can we see America honestly. And only then can we decide—clear-eyed—whether we are going to fight to remake this country, or finally accept that for many, survival may mean getting the hell outta dodge.