America Confronts a New 'Ice Age'

California National Guardsmen stand off against protestors at the federal building in Downtown Los Angeles on June 9, 2025. FLICKR: WALTER HAMMERWOLD

There is little cause for celebration, however, because there is no relief from the cadres of heavily armed and masked ICE agents, who refuse to identify themselves even as they grab L.A. residents off the streets and force them into unmarked vehicles. With these fierce, seemingly random sweeps, the Department of Homeland Security shock troops are spreading fear and despair across the Southland.

Los Angeles is serving as the test case for a nexis of potentially calamitous national policies. Yet, far too many people are no longer paying attention. The public — and the news media — are now riveted by the newest bright shiny object, the Jeffery Epstein file. The L.A. story has fallen not just “below the fold” on the front page — to use now-archaic journalism terms — it has been relegated to the back pages.

I know what it’s like to walk out of your office and see Army tanks sitting across the street. I ran the Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” during the 1992 civil uprising after the Rodney King decision. California’s elected officials had asked for troops that time. As a journalist, I could ignore the citywide curfew. So it was after dark when I walked out of the landmark Los Angeles Times building, positioned catty-cornered to City Hall, and, looking across the street, saw what looked like a baby sitting atop a tank. As I got closer, I could see it was a somewhat nervous, very young man, decidedly dwarfed by the dimensions of his hulking tank.

Right now, if ICE can take down and handcuff Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) while ignoring his attempts to identify himself, arrest a Midwestern judge in her own courtroom and imprison high-ranking civic officials, what chance does a hardworking Encino gardener or long-serving Hollywood Hills housekeeper have?

Linda Greenhouse, the smart, former New York Times reporter, who won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court, now has a home in Los Angeles and wrote a powerful NY Times Opinion piece, “We Will Regret Not Standing Up to This Venomous Cruelty.” She deftly captures the current surreality of life in Los Angeles:

I was taking an early morning walk in my neighborhood when a black S.U.V. with tinted windows slowed to a stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone, should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage on a summer morning on an American city street.

Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are the Other — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but also stand outside the web of connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the got aways,” the ones we didn’t catch.

Back when I ran The L.A. Times “Opinion” section, Mike Davis, one of the most incisive of social critics and civic observers when it comes to Los Angeles, wrote a brilliant piece, “Why L.A. Is a Synonym for Disaster,” for me, explaining how “immigrants” morphed into fearsome “aliens.” There’s a reason he deserved the MacArthur “genius” award:

… the abiding hysteria of Los Angeles disaster fiction, and perhaps of all disaster fiction -- the urge to wipe out an entire city and its inhabitants -- is rooted in racial anxiety. In the United States, more than in Europe, the disaster novel remained fixated on the specter of subversive immigrants and nonwhites. From the earliest 19th-century examples of the literary destruction of New York, to the latest survivalist fantasies about Los Angeles, white fear of the dark races lies at the heart of such visions. It is this obsession, far more than anxieties about earthquakes or nuclear weapons, that leads us back to the real Los Angeles as well as to the deepest fears of our culture.

If race ultimately unlocks the secret meaning of Los Angeles disaster fiction, its apparitions have changed over time. In novels written before 1970, when Los Angeles was still the most WASPish of large U.S. cities, racial hysteria was typically expressed as fear of invading “hordes” — variously yellow, brown, black, red or their extraterrestrial metonyms. After 1970, with the rise of a non-Anglo majority in Los Angeles County, the city turns from an endangered home into the Alien itself; and its destruction affords an illicit pleasure not always visible in previous annihilations.

…In the shadowlands of white anxiety, the distinction between the images of space alien and illegal alien was subjected to repeated elision. Immigration and invasion, in a paranoid register, become synonyms.

This view of immigrants as the Other, as “aliens,” as less than human, helps grant ICE broad license for its actions.

Now, thanks to the megabill that President Donal Trump orchestrated — which GOP majorities in Congress passed and he then signed on July 4 — the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is about to increase exponentially. For the bill pumps more than $170 billion into the agency.

The New Republic’s Felipe De La Hoz provides details in his astute column, “The Worst Part of Trump’s Big Bill Is Getting Almost No Attention:

The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration’s ramp-up of enforcement, detention and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on. It would take everything we’ve seen so far — the targeting of activists for their speech … ramping up detentions — and crank it to 11.

Yet, we heard far too little from Democrats about this ominous component of the bill during the run-up to passage. They most often cited an estimated 11.8 million Americans who could lose health insurance, for, as De La Hoz speculates:

… Democrats are used to their Republican counterparts (and some within their own ranks) pushing for increased “border security” and immigration enforcement funding during budget negotiations and think the public will view it as old hat.

Democrats know polls regularly showed that much of the public supported Trump’s talk about deporting undocumented immigrants. It’s one policy he actually campaigned on — and seems most intent on delivering to his base. As the nation watches ICE in action, however, this support has declined. One June Gallop Poll shows Trump’s support for “handling the immigration issue” now stands at 35 percent. (Though that number incorporates the 85 percent of Republicans who still back him on this.)

Many political commentators openly worry that Los Angeles is now serving as a template for similar federal actions in other major metropolitan areas -- particularly in Blue states. Josh Marshall, founder and grand poohbah of Talking Points Memo, lays it out in his savvy essay, “ICE’s Penumbra of Abuse”:

The LA example looks to be a prototypical case. ICE orders a wildly militarized and aggressive series of raids. That triggers fairly spontaneous and overwhelmingly peaceful protests. In response, the president orders in the federalized state National Guard and then the Marines. In every case, we can see a ratcheting process in which ICE’s actions create a climate of protest or disorder or simply disagreement which prompts newly aggressive actions or assertions of power.

The additional factor is the open-ended and general nature of immigration enforcement. ICE’s brief isn’t for discrete crimes or really any crimes at all. It’s for people without permission to be in the United States or anyone who complicates or gets in the way of how it defines its mission. ICE has a broad latitude to question people about their immigration status, especially within 100 miles of an international border, a limit which includes the areas where a surprisingly large percentage of Americans live. It’s an expansive brief which creates a penumbra of chaos and tension which ICE can then (and already has) used as the pretext for more assertions of power. The federal government is thus allowed to determine what constitutes civil order and choose to impose it wherever it decides it doesn’t exist.

ICE indeed seems like an ideal instrument for Trump, allowing him to bend norms and turn the “unprecedented” tactics of street sweeps and masked federal agents into standard operating procedure. Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, explained why this could be possible in his terrific essay, “The American Police State Is Here,”

… I suspect that in a year we will consider this legislation to be the moment that Trump created his own internal security apparatus: His goal is to have ICE supplant the FBI in national law enforcement.

This is a big deal. Because the FBI is a professionalized organization with strict standards and a well-defined mission while ICE is more or less a national brute squad.

The Trump administration realized that corrupting the FBI would be a tall order. So while they’re certainly trying to do that, they put most of their chips on a different number: Reinventing ICE as the primary instrument of internal state power.

Garrett Graff, former editor of Politico Magazine who now writes the substack Doomsday Scenario, spent many years reporting out the starkly different standards and training of the FBI and immigration enforcement. He details them in his recent post, Four Fears About ICE: Trump's New Masked Monster, demonstrating why ICE agents could prove easily malleable in serving Trump’s purposes:

FBI special agent requirements include a bachelor’s degree and two years of professional experience (or an advanced degree, often a J.D. or accounting degree for the bureau), be at least 23 years old, pass a Top Secret security clearance background check and then special agent candidates undergo 20 weeks—five months—of training at the academy at Quantico.[Basic training in the Army is only 10 weeks.] ICE officers do not have a basic educational requirement (they can use three years of work experience instead), pass only a Secret level security clearance background check, and go through just 13 weeks of training (plus a five-week Spanish course).

Graff emphasizes that, though the megabill’s stunning funding infusion propels a powerful buildup in enforcement, there is scant comparable increase in the immigration system’s judicial infrastructure:

We know that this giant increase in detention facilities and officers isn’t meant to actually work with the existing immigration system because compared to the rest of the bill, there’s only the most modest of modest increases to the number of immigration judges in the country — a rise from 700 to 800, an increase so out-of-scale to the problem that we could have used those extra 100 to work through the existing backlog from the Biden years. If the Trump administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges. The fact that it's not makes clear that the Trump administration, DHS, and DOJ have no intention of normal due process.

Another serious problem, Graff reveals, could be that this sort of warp-speed build-up often distorts and distends a U.S. policing agency. After 9/11, for example, the Bush administration sought to quickly ramp up the Border Patrol by flooding it with funding. Graff spent more than five years investigating the resulting chaos and corruption that riddled the agency:

What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. …

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of Customs and Border Patrol officers and agents — ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012 — meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours.

Graff’s adroit arguments show that problems created by pouring money into ICE would not be a case of “unintended consequences.” Rather, these terrible consequences would likely be very much intended.

Mike Davis, again, provides vital perspective. With his usual prescience, he wrote that Los Angeles’s woes might not even trouble the rest of the nation:

The City of Angeles is unique not simply in the frequency of its fictional destruction, but the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences.

No other city seems to excite such dark rapture. … The destruction of London — the metropolis most persecuted in fiction between 1885 and 1940 — was imagined as horrifying, equivalent to the death of Western civilization. The obliteration of Los Angeles, by contrast, is often depicted as a victory for civilization.

Thus, in “Independence Day,” … devastation wreaked by aliens is represented first as tragedy (New York) and then as farce (Los Angeles).

A true farce, however, would not feel so heart-rending.

L.A.’s iconic Capitol Records Tower is destroyed by a tornado in The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Photo: 20TH CENTURY FOX