Designate ICE As A Terrorist Organisation
When an armed group go door-to-door looking for people that look foreign and kidnap, assault, injure, and murder people in cold blood in the streets, all while hiding their faces behind masks, and doing so specifically to intimidate a population for political reasons, we would normally consider them to be terrorists.
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, in performing each of these acts, should therefore be added to the Government of Canada’s Listed Terrorist Entities.
As state terrorists, ICE are acting an awful lot like the Schutzstaffel, better known to history as the SS. The Gestapo, to whom ICE are most often compared, were the Nazi’s secret police, but the SS was the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party and therefore acted as Adolf Hitler’s personal army. They were responsible for protecting him, enforcing Nazi doctrine, instigating violence such as Kristellnacht, rounding up ‘undesirables,’ building and operating their concentration and death camps, directly murdering some 10 million people in the Holocaust, as well as operating as wartime combat units.
ICE, as it stands today, operates as the paramilitary wing of the MAGA movement and as Donald Trump’s personal army, free from identification or accountability. It is responsible for the policing of MAGA doctrine, instigating violence as we are seeing in Minneapolis, rounding up ‘undesirables,’ and building and operating concentration camps throughout the United States, as well as being directly responsible for at least 32 deaths in 2025, with more already accumulating this year. Their activities meet the FBI’s own definition of terrorism.
When an ICE agent acting on behalf of the United States murdered a woman in cold blood in Minnesota on camera, rather than holding the agent accountable or using the opportunity to demonstrate that the agency is one that can follow the law, the response was to circle the wagons and justify the murder by attacking the victim.
When Donald Trump pardoned over 1,500 people involved in his coup attempt on January 6th, 2021, he did not forgive those people for what they had done. Rather, he gave them cover for what he still needed them to do. His government’s protection of Renee Good’s murderer suggests that this cover has no limits.
Over the days following her murder, ICE went door to door in the same city, which they have no legal authority to do without specific judicial warrants for each door, hunting non-white people to detain and deport as they try to meet the million deportations per year quota that the Trump administration has imposed.
Of even greater concern, though, was ICE boss Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s podium at her next event, bearing the slogan “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.” The message is clear that any form of resistance against ICE’s atrocities will be met with unrestrained vengeance rather than justice. We have seen this example before, in the Lidice massacre where the SS took revenge for the murder of Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich by slaughtering most of the town and imprisoning the few survivors in concentration camps. This is what ‘one of ours, all of yours’ means. It is, here, a direct threat of intimidation through fear of harm or death against civilians; state terrorism.
ICE are ruthlessly attacking foreign nationals while attempting to provoke citizens. They are focusing their energy on states that did not vote for Donald Trump, trying to trigger violent counterattack so they may justify the use of the emergency powers in the Insurrection Act to bring in the military and completely end the last dim lights of electoral democracy ahead of this year’s American midterms. They want to ensure opponents are afraid to speak up, afraid for their well-being, afraid for their lives.
Canada would be, in American terms, a blue state. Overwhelmingly opposed to Trump, actively embarrassing that orange popsicle on the world stage, and directly and repeatedly threatened with annexation, Canada and Canadians are going to be increasingly at risk of being targeted. With Trump and his terrorist personal army having free rein in the United States, it is no longer truly safe for Canadians to cross the border.
Canada has a moral responsibility to protect and warn our people when they travel. This week, we updated our travel advice to Cuba to a yellow “exercise a high degree of caution” over “shortages of basic necessities including food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel, which can also affect resorts.” Yet the government has still not updated our official travel advisories from the green status of “take normal precautions” for visiting the United States. It is high time we elevate this to include direct, explicit, factual language, something along the lines of:
“Exercise extreme caution. The United States government is, through federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, violently targeting any person present on American soil suspected of not holding American citizenship primarily on the basis of the colour of their skin, and intimidating, attacking, and killing persons, regardless of citizenship, who bears physical witness to these actions. Travel to the United States by Canadians is strongly discouraged at this time.”
This would be an unmistakable message to Canadians, Americans, and the world in general that we learned the lessons of the Second World War, of the meaning and effect of a fascist dictatorship, and are taking the protection of our people seriously.
If we designate ICE specifically as a terrorist organisation, joining Proud Boys and other American white supremacist groups already listed, it would have the additional effect of banning any employee, member, or supporter of ICE from entering Canada, and would allow anyone in Canada supporting ICE to be charged domestically as a terrorist. It would also allow terrorist activity committed by ICE members in the United States to be prosecuted in Canada.
It seems clear that the MAGA leadership of the United States and their Schutzstaffel-inspired ICE have also learned lessons from the Second World War — and assume that, without the United States as an adversary, they will succeed in their white supremacist murderous terrorism where the Nazis were ultimately defeated.
In dealing with this threat, we cannot worry about offending the oppressive and unpredictable American government. The American people are craving some type of reaction, coherent opposition, concrete pushback. Their own opposition leaders are by-and-large not effectively resisting, holding onto the false hope of ending the nightmare through mid-term elections that Trump just said should not even happen, for which ICE is attacking blue states to fulfil that prophecy.
We must have the courage to call it what it is: ICE aren’t cops, they’re state terrorists.
