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The future of any given ICE agent is going to be grim.
All perspectives tend to agree about ICE’s current purpose. Take the two most popular framings: From the viewpoint of those resisting, ICE is there to incite retaliation and create a pretext for deploying the military on US soil to quell social and political opposition to the current regime. To those supporting the actions of the federal government, ICE is there to exercise force that cannot and should not be resisted.
In both cases, ICE is deployed to enact violence. I think the current rank and file is aware of this, and eager to execute its mandate. Unfortunately for them, they are in the beginning of the power grab, and haven’t realized what is ultimately expected of the initial agents of violence in a coup.
Let’s play out three scenarios, ignoring greater geopolitical cataclysms that could make the whole situation moot.
Failure
Republican infighting and plummeting popularity splinter MAGA and the political power base, while atrocities galvanize the opposition into coherence.
This is a current reality being leveraged by those resisting ICE, and it is not without precedent: The deconstruction of the British empire owed a debt to the descriptions of its colonial atrocities filtering back into the general population. Today’s digital connectivity accelerates this process, in turn accelerating the need for the regime to become more blatant in its public embrace of extrajudicial murder and dehumanization of its opponents. This is less of an active counterbalance in the US, since dehumanization and celebrations of violence have been included in our national mythology since the systematic extermination of Native Americans.
This alone will not suffice for failure: Project 2025 is smart. It targeted unsexy administrative levers under the auspice of presidential power or those the president could appoint. The effectively instantaneous destruction of the social safety net and every government body tasked with its maintenance is the most powerful way to create and maintain a desperate and impoverished—not to mention thoroughly culled—population. It furthermore pushes the population toward corporate solutions and corporate dependence, funneling resources into corporate interests, who are beholden to the regime lest they be absorbed (socialized) or destroyed by it.
Resistance to this process is also smart, if hamstrung, and, at least in the Democratic party, famously slow to realize the kind of game they’re playing. Assume various forms of resistance succeed: the military prevents an unsuitably hot war; ICE is softly prevented from both executing its deportation mandate and inciting more dramatic violence; the remaining administrative apparatus prevents the complete elimination of services; elections continue to happen and are sufficiently protected to remove the executive and fire everyone he hired.
This is the best case scenario for ICE agents. ICE will be dismantled or at least greatly scaled back, and the majority of its members will face tribunals, criminal charges, and civil actions for decades. This doesn’t sound great now, but as the other two scenarios play out, remember the above consequences will hypothetically occur in the context of stable judicial process, with things like habeas corpus and appeals.
Civil War
If it becomes pure armed struggle, I will not tread on the territory of military theorists; I will only offer the layman’s perspective that if the entire armed forces comes down on the side of the regime, the US military has not had a spotless track record against guerrilla resistance over the last sixty years.
Militarized police forces are everywhere in the US, with varying personal and professional allegiances. The majority of armed militias tend toward isolationism and might ostensibly support regime action, but that will erode as large-scale violence turns attitudes away from national abstraction, and toward local trauma. Social atomization over the years has hollowed out most municipal loyalties, so war theaters of unpredictable size can occur anywhere along fractal ideological divides.
More frightening is if the military itself fractures. This will at least lean towards organized sides, but requires a vast uptick in necessary use of firepower for those sides to meaningfully contend with one another.
ICE has no place in a civil war no matter how it unfolds. They are not trained or organized for proper military action; those with training and ability will be folded back into the armed forces, the rest will be disarmed or used as cannon fodder. If the organization maintains any kind of identity, its members will be quickly eliminated in open hostilities by more capable and more highly motivated opponents, at best. At worst, they will be awarded graphic, protracted executions. Total social breakdown releases the most sadistic hiding among us: those given license by the local moral construction will target ICE agents along with their friends and family. In the time where ICE is useful for provoking hostility, there is systemic protection from the consequences of their provocation. Once full scale hostilities commence, there is no motivation to provide that protection for untrained pseudo-police.
This outcome should be obvious from the rapid relaxation of requirements to be an ICE agent: fitness, background, and ability are irrelevant, not even checked once, because the agency is uninterested in career agents. It wants thugs. The less capable, the better, because incompetent and insecure people are the best people to arm when the desired outcome is unjustifiable violence sufficient to shock a civilian population into retaliation. In any kind of organized warfare, such people are liabilities, and discarded with prejudice.
Success
Inciting events provoke retaliations, creating enough media and moral confusion for the regime to deploy the army. Political opponents are disappeared; panicking corporations trip over themselves offering actionable information for further suppression. Banking systems withdraw from the country, capitulate to the government, or are socialized. Accounts are frozen en masse; without social systems or money, swaths of the population are simply enslaved in exchange for shelter and food, or turn to crime and eventually enslaved by the prison system. The justice system is allowed to function for a veneer of ethics to satisfy the ruling parties who don’t need them, the legislature is disbanded in favor of executive-appointed czars pretending to run defunct parts of the government. Theological figures are elevated to a kind of enforcer class to resuscitate manifest destiny and peddle the kind of explanatory ethical code unsustainable by a puppet judiciary.
Corporate totalitarianism wins, though shouldn’t celebrate, because the necessity of a theological presence constantly risks its ascent to power, and the ensuing purification stage tends to be thorough. They can avoid this be clearing out the religious figures, which is a time-honored tactic; it’s hard to say how either transition would play out in a fascist US.
This is the worst outcome for anyone currently employed by ICE. Once power is firmly consolidated, ICE bears the infamy of being its harbinger. If it attempts to cling to its power, the regime has them summarily executed, and its agents’ families likely deported to the same facilities ICE is currently sending immigrants.
They can’t go quietly, either. After all the other atrocities, it behooves the now ensconced dictatorship to pin all the blame on its opening pawns. ICE is scapegoated for everything as the regime media relentlessly pushes the exact narratives it currently tries to suppress. “We only wanted peace,” they say, “we regret the actions of those evil men who perverted our intentions.” ICE agents are publicly executed, or dumped in prison courtyards, a peace offering of blood to sate the rage of the defeated.
There’s no good outcome for today’s ICE agents. There’s no future where that $50,000 signing bonus hits their bank accounts, no future where they live well, few where their families are safe. No world where they are celebrated, or loved by any civil society or person. Their legacy will be video game opponents nobody feels bad killing.
The outlook is bleak, and the choices are few.
I suspect most will push (or are pushing) for war, whether or not they understand their inevitable place in such a conflict. It at least offers the best chance to go down swinging.
If they act now, they can quit and hide. Start over somewhere, stay low, change their names, avoid jobs requiring background checks or social security numbers. It’s a form of penance, but preferable to most other outcomes. I would caution against formal resignation, lest coworkers or superiors find this choice inconvenient.
Wait too long, and the only good option is suicide, as it maximizes the chances of the family escaping with life and dignity. It even redeems a token of honor, by some cultural norms. Regrettable, but the situation that we were supposed avoid at all cost has arrived, and winnowed all our paths to tomorrow.
