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The seeds of an authoritarian state will still be there unless the United States reckons with its own fascist past and how that relates to Stephen Miller’s vision for the future.

by Whitney Curry Wimbish May 28, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

Despite what Republicans and some mainstream Democrats would have us believe, half of Americans agree that ICE should no longer exist. Progressive candidates across the country have taken note and are using “Abolish ICE” as a rallying cry to organize their communities and win elections.

Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ) is one such progressive. She campaigned on abolishing ICE against ten other candidates, some of whom had raised much more money, and won her primary and then the special election. The day after she was sworn in, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced Mejía’s appointment to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the body that oversees ICE and the Trump regime’s immigration terror campaign, joining others on the committee who have called for ICE’s abolishment and redirecting funding to community-based organizations.

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Shortly after her appointment, Mejía participated in a hearing of the Homeland Security Committee, asking witnesses whom immigration agents had shot and assaulted what “meaningful actions” lawmakers could take to bring them justice. Most said they wanted accountability for the agents who hurt them. But the Rev. David Black, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, whom federal immigration agents shot multiple times in the head, face, and body with pepper balls and shoved to the ground when he protested outside an ICE prison in Broadview, Illinois, last year, had a different answer.

“With respect to the members who believe in reform, I believe that this department and administration really need an exorcist. That’s my opinion as a pastor,” he said. “I would like people to understand in this Congress and in the United States, that what we are facing, the evil we are facing from this administration, goes beyond political solutions and goes beyond reform. It requires spiritual solutions.”

Some Democrats have been more circumspect in the face of ICE’s terror or have retreated to weasel words that fall short of wholesale reform. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), for example, wants to “abolish ICE as we know it.” Political leaders like this have failed to fully internalize the political project of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and his intellectual allies in the Trump administration. They mean to have the federal government fund, arm, equip, and train a paramilitary force to roam the country as it pleases, with few or no checks on its power. They mean to institutionalize an entity that is incompatible with democracy.

Stephen Miller and his allies in the Trump administration mean to institutionalize an entity that is incompatible with democracy.

The clearest indication of Miller’s desire was when he went on state media—Fox News—last fall and gave these men with guns a directive. “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” Miller said. “No one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Miller made these comments three months before agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; the Department of Homeland Security shared Miller’s clip on X after the Good murder, as if to confirm ICE sat beyond the reach of the law. It was a matter of time until Miller’s concept would result in death.

Scholars who study authoritarian and fascist regimes may not be calling for an exorcism or spiritual renewal. But they do say that simply erasing institutions that embody such ideologies is not enough to escape them. Inevitably, authoritarianism will more easily return if the structures that enable it remain in place, just as Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Good, was reassigned to another part of the bureaucracy.

They also say that while it is tempting for Americans to look to places like Argentina, Germany, or Italy for guidance, those are poor comparisons for what’s going on in America today. Instead, they suggest revisiting America’s own history, when enough people decided to take the nation away from its genocidal, slave-owning genesis, fought a war that left 620,000 dead—more than any other war in U.S. history—and then spent a century struggling to end Jim Crow laws that oppressed Black people.

“Abolishing ICE is probably not that hard,” said Yanilda María González, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, who studies authoritarianism. “Agencies get abolished all the time.”

ICE IS A MODERN INVENTION. Its creation abolished a different immigration agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, when lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the 2002 Homeland Security Act following 9/11. That law was ostensibly meant to stop future attacks from terrorists, and all but ten senators voted for it. (Frank Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, did not cast a vote.) Enacted through democratic processes, the new law handed racist authoritarians a tool with which to terrorize immigrants, drive them underground, strip them of basic human rights, and facilitate an easily abused workforce.

The evolution of the Homeland Security Act from a response to 9/11 to one facing inward came within a matter of years. The law held that ICE would answer to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and be responsible for enforcing immigration law, investigating the illegal movement of people and goods, and preventing terrorism. The agency it replaced had answered to the Department of Justice.

ICE had an initial budget of $3.3 billion. Funding for the new agency crept upward for years and under President Barack Obama was slightly less than $6 billion in 2015. During that fiscal year, the federal government reported that ICE had removed or deported 235,413 people.

Ten years later, the base budget is now roughly $10 billion, but it has been supplemented with a surge of $75 billion in extra funding from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, the number of deportations in FY2025 hit 443,000, according to Reuters, up from 271,000 the year before. The Trump administration has stopped issuing detailed statistics on immigration, just as it has stopped issuing timely notices each time someone dies in its immigrant concentration camps. The Prospect’s nonscientific tally listed the names of 55 people who have died in ICE custody as of April 24. Immigration agents have injured dozens of people since the beginning of 2025 and killed at least 28. These are minimum numbers.

Democrats tried to at least hold up the base funding for the 2026 fiscal year, conditioning it on a series of relatively modest reforms. But at the end of April, Republican lawmakers introduced a measure using the party-line budget reconciliation process that would send yet more money to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP): a $70 billion baseline that would fund the agencies through at least the end of President Trump’s term. Because both the surge funding and this baseline funding do not go through the normal appropriations process, this avoids certain guardrails and accountability measures, like time limits on spending and directives about where the money goes. The money becomes a slush fund for abduction, warehousing, deportation, and mass death and injury.

The vast amount of taxpayer wealth handed to immigration enforcement has spread and nurtured violence, beyond abusing immigrants and those trying to protect them. It’s also spawned a massive surveillance network that can spy on anyone, regardless of their immigration status, and acted as a jobs program for violent far-right bigots, whom it recruits with Nazi imagery at gun shows, “Ultimate Fight Club venues, rodeos, martial arts centers, and other haunts for men who tend to have a far right political vision,” as Truthout reported. Homeland Security officials are hiring at such a fast rate that they’re unable to fully vet their new recruits, an AP investigation found, filling the ranks with bankrupt people who are easy to extort and people who have previously been accused of misconduct. The rot that this represents goes beyond the existence of a single governmental agency.

THE IMPLICIT GOAL OF ICE is to eliminate illegal immigration entirely. But immigrants are always going to come into the United States, as North Carolina Justice Center senior attorney Carol Brooke explained. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the economic situation in other countries is such that people will come regardless of how difficult we make it for them while they’re here.”

At some level, Miller and his allies know this. The presence of the paramilitary force is not solely to enforce immigration laws or improve job availability for native-born citizens. It’s to project authoritarian power. And that’s made easier by the fact that such power projection is already all around us.

The brutality of rounding up and kicking out hundreds of thousands of people and imprisoning at least 60,311 (as of April 4) in immigration detention camps has infuriated people across the U.S., who have put themselves physically and financially in danger to protect themselves and their neighbors. Many have wondered how widespread violence conducted by masked agents could happen in the land of the free.

But the surrealism of such a tyrannical force existing within a democratic nation is not as odd as it sounds, González said. Authoritarian enclaves routinely exist within democratic nations, using authoritarian practices, formal rules, and informal norms, including arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings. And while the U.S. is accustomed to denouncing these practices in State Department human rights reports, they persist in the United States just as they do in countries that have undergone celebrated transitions to democracy, including Brazil and Argentina.

“Even in the U.S there are all these different ways where the local police departments have operated in authoritarian enclaves,” she said. The emergence of ICE as an institution is just one example, she and other scholars said. Other modern examples include prison and even American workplaces, where employees’ ability to access modern medicine, buy groceries, and pay rent comes to an end if a boss decides to hand out pink slips.

“These authoritarian policies are the outcomes of ordinary democratic policies,” González said. One reason she gave will make average Democratic voters uncomfortable: Some Americans want them. Consider the Trump rallies across the country, at which white supporters held up signs that said “Mass Deportation Now!”

“We have bottom-up societal demand for this violence, for extralegal force,” González said. In Brazil, for example, surveys throughout the years show that the popular phrase “bandido bom é bandido morto,” or “a good criminal is a dead criminal,” routinely draws between 36 and 60 percent agreement. Her own survey found that 40 percent of participants agreed with the phrase. Some tolerate the violence, and some outright support it.

Infrastructure like ICE fulfills this latent desire. “These are demands that end up getting channeled through democratic institutions,” she said. “I’ve sat in committee meetings where citizens applaud when someone says a police officer killed someone. They applaud like, ‘Thank God.’”

That outlook comes from frustrations with crime, feeling unsafe and unprotected, and anger that the government has responded inadequately. Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former president of Brazil who is now serving a 27-year term for an attempted coup, campaigned on that violence, saying “a police officer who does not kill is not a police officer,” and that cops should get medals for killing. Donald Trump has voiced similar sentiments, suggesting that the government grant police officers “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” in the style of The Purge, because that would “immediately” end crime. These are appealing statements to people who are afraid and angry about crime, and in the U.S., for people who do not know that overall crime and property offenses across the country have been falling for years.

“People’s frustration with rising crime or a sense of disorder, candidates using this type of really pro-violence rhetoric is not a minus, it’s a plus, it’s not a bug it’s a feature, it’s something that makes people vote for them as opposed to something that would repel voters,” said González. “There are incentives for politicians to make these types of demands.”

Those incentives get a boost from a highly concentrated media apparatus that works in service of regime officials yet brands itself as news, scholars said. Fox News is the standard-bearer of state media, but the propagandistic nature of the news industry is everywhere, laundering the talking points of the political party in power, accepting corporate economic theories as fact, and taking the side of the State Department.

Many have wondered how widespread violence conducted by masked agents could happen in the land of the free.

As civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis points out in his book Copaganda, consuming content from mainstream media outlets that routinely take the side of police skews perceptions (including in subtle ways like using the passive voice to shield cops), makes people feel less safe, and increases their fear of marginalized groups. And as Jeremy Busby writes from a Texas prison, where he is incarcerated, “propaganda can turn people into individuals they would have once despised,” including leading incarcerated people to believe they no longer deserve soap and toilet paper, “and get angry at anyone who did,” after watching enough “law and order” commentary on Fox. He warned that the same is true for anyone: Watch enough anti-democratic propaganda, and “people on the outside may stop believing they deserve democracy.”

These are some of the factors that lead members of a democracy to support authoritarianism, scholars said. Simply replacing ICE, or even the entire DHS, won’t touch the real problem, nor do nations that have rejected full-blown fascist dictatorships hold the answers.

A BETTER SOURCE FOR GUIDANCE, said Alberto Toscano, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication, is to look at the fascism America has already confronted and to the radical Black thinkers who have been doing that since the nation’s founding. He outlined this position in a 2020 column, pointing out that radical Black thinkers have struggled to get white Americans to face the fascism inherent to colonialism and racial slavery for more than a hundred years—“long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy.”

The American tendency to look for answers abroad ignores that America has already contended with fascists in the form of racist slavers who bought and sold Black people on an industrial scale. It’s one thing to take inspiration from international anti-fascist fights. But imagining oneself as analogous to a member of the French resistance, he said, is “silly.” It’s also a tendency driven by American exceptionalism and emotional fragility, allowing Americans to think of fascism “as a kind of aberration or exception,” Toscano said. “It allows you to think there is something fundamentally positive in the U.S. order.”

That is why, he said, it’s better to study Black radical activists and authors in the U.S., including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Angela Davis, and ask, “What are the homegrown forms of racialized fascism and authoritarianism that are baked into U.S. institutions?” It’s not that nothing can be learned from other countries, but thinking about what Europeans did after fascism has limited virtue if you’re not thinking about how the U.S. failed to ever truly transition into a multiracial democracy. Why are white people still trying to disenfranchise Black voters in 2026? Is the U.S. Constitution fundamentally corrupted by existing with slavery for 80 years? The experiences of other countries cannot answer.

“In all those cases you’re talking about the passage from one political order or form of government to another,” said Toscano. “That’s not really the case with the U.S. All of the institutions are in some sense the same. [Trump and Miller have] grown ICE, but Tom Homan was hired and given a medal by Barack Obama … The political and institutional architecture of the U.S. has not been radically transferred, but abused or perverted.”

Toscano added that instead of learning what Americans can learn from Europe after World War II, a better question is what can be learned about the fact that much of the right wing is unhappy about the results of the Civil War. To truly change the future of the United States, he said, the electorate would need to engage in a version of what Rev. Black suggested with his “spiritual solutions.”

“Whatever comes after Trump, if there were a political movement and a shift in government such that the idea would be to really revoke many of the effects of Trumpism in the United States, this would actually involve not returning to the previous status quo but engaging in some serious radical reforms,” Toscano said, such as changing the nature of the Supreme Court or radically rethinking U.S. residency rules, which “have always been authoritarian in its potentiality.”

But, he said, a real discussion of a Third Reconstruction can’t happen if people think the order is good, just taken over by bad people. “That’s the fundamental flaw in the ideology of the mainstream Democratic Party,” Toscano said.

FOR MEJÍA, THE ANSWER LIES in organizing. Speaking with the Prospect after the DHS hearing, she agreed that simply getting rid of one agency is not enough, and like Toscano she is drawing inspiration from American civil rights fighters, who used legal challenges, direct actions, boycotts, and protests, while holding their ground against vicious racists who attacked them and their children physically and assassinated their leaders. They also organized, which was one of the messages from Rev. Black’s testimony she said resonated with her.

As an organizer, Mejía said she heard a call for community-building, connecting with neighbors, and getting more people to take an active role in participating in governance. She cited research by Erica Chenoweth, dean and Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, who theorizes that governments typically fail to withstand challenges from 3.5 percent of the population. To her, that means doing exactly what she did to get elected: meeting with constituents, offering training and education sessions, and listening to their needs, fears, and hopes, and encouraging them to do the same.

“In many ways we’re going to have to return to old-school organizing,” she said. “3.5 percent deeply engaged doesn’t just mean people reading the news but rather … 3.5 percent of the population has to be actively engaging with their neighbors, activating them.”

That is what will roll back ICE and the rising fascism it embodies. After all, she said, the United States has already endured a fascist regime. “We’ve experienced that in the U.S,” she said. “It just wasn’t evenly distributed.”

For Toscano, it also requires imagining a new future, as Du Bois wrote about in the 1930s. Toscano says it is striking that the best that many Democratic leaders can do is think about removing recent institutions, not radically overhauling any of the American systems that have made ICE and the Trump/Miller immigration terror campaign possible. It’s not as if the South just gave Black people better representation out of kindness, he said. The Union Army occupied Southern states and forced them to.

“There’s almost no willingness to recognize that the reason things have come to this really grim point is because the U.S. laws and the U.S. state make all of this possible,” Toscano said. “What I don’t see happening, even among the further left edges of the Democratic Party, is a political analysis that would really say that a very drastic reform of the U.S. constitutional order would be necessary for this not to happen again.”

Without that, he said, rhetoric about the rule of law, the Constitution, the checks and balances is completely hollow. That unwillingness, the inability to really question the institutional and legal order of the United States, is what has made ICE possible.

“So, what would a reform or transformation or abolition of this kind of precedent look like?” he asked. “And who’s willing to take it on?”

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This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.

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Whitney Curry Wimbish

writers@prospect.org

Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish