ICE Report

June 28, 2025

A Meme Is Worth A Thousand Tanks

I want to begin tonight with a case that captures just how thin the line has become between farce and state-sanctioned intimidation. Mads Mikkelsen, a 21-year-old tourist from Norway, was detained for five hours at Newark Airport after US Customs and Border Protection agents found a meme on his phone. The image was of Vice President JD Vance photoshopped with a bald, egg-shaped head. It was labeled by agents as "dangerous extremist propaganda." When Mikkelsen explained it was satire, he was met not with understanding but with visible hostility. The agent reportedly fixated on the meme, demanding to know why it was saved, and framed it as a legitimate ideological threat.

That classification of “dangerous extremist propaganda” isn't a simple one-off reaction. It signals something much deeper. It tells me that a mindset is already baked into agency protocols and reinforced through training and internal culture. If border agents are primed to treat satire as a red flag, then the infrastructure is already in place to escalate the same treatment toward U.S. citizens holding similar views. The only difference is jurisdiction. Tourists can be barred outright. Citizens can't, yet. But the groundwork is being laid, and the rhetorical reclassification of humor as extremism is a canary in that coal mine.

Agents threatened him with a $5,000 fine unless he unlocked his phone. Once inside, they combed through his photos, interrogated him about terrorism, drug use, and employment intentions, and subjected him to invasive searches: a strip-search, fingerprinting, blood sampling. He admitted to having legally used cannabis in jurisdictions where it’s permitted (Germany and New Mexico) but this, according to CBP, became grounds for denial of entry. Meanwhile, the official paperwork cited an entirely different pretext: a suspicion that he may be trying to work in the US without authorization. Nothing quite adds up.

Mikkelsen’s experience is outrageous, but it’s far from isolated. Just days earlier, federal agents staged a high-intensity raid on a home in Huntington Park, California. Jenny Ramirez, a US citizen, lived there with her boyfriend and two small children. Agents detonated an explosive charge at the front door, shattered windows, and sent a drone into the house before storming in with rifles and full tactical gear. The alleged justification? Her boyfriend had been involved in a minor car accident with a CBP vehicle.

There was no prior contact or warrant served. And obviously no attempt to de-escalate. What could have been resolved with a mailed court summons or a local officer knocking on the door was handled with overpowered military-style force. The optics alone included drones, flash-bangs, and rifles. This sends a very specific message. That being, procedural restraint is no longer the default.

In both cases, the level of force vastly outweighed the alleged offenses. A meme and a traffic incident. One involving a foreign visitor, the other a family of citizens. Yet both were treated as if they posed immediate threats to national security. And the tools used such as device searches under duress, invasive bodily procedures, drones deployed inside homes, and unannounced explosives point to a rapidly expanding power dynamic. It is a dynamic that no longer distinguishes between harmless, legal behavior and genuine danger.

What ties these stories together is the underlying assumption that any deviation from a rigid, opaque standard warrants maximum enforcement. It means that anyone, even a tourist with a joke image or a citizen in their home can be turned into a subject of federal force based on nothing more than suspicion, misinterpretation, or bureaucratic convenience.

The emerging framework is one of extreme military measures for minor or imaginary offenses, applied indiscriminately. The targets are no longer confined to undocumented migrants or hardened criminals. The perimeter is growing quickly and beginning to sweep up tourists, legal residents, and citizens alike.

This shift isn’t being codified through laws; it’s taking hold through normalization. Protocols once reserved for worst-case scenarios are now routine responses to everyday events. And as each incident fades into the next, the absurd becomes standard. The invasive becomes expected. The outrageous becomes policy.

It’s no longer “how far will they go?” It’s now “Who will be next?”

The Disappearance Machine

According to recent reporting in The New Yorker, ICE’s internal systems are beginning to collapse under the weight of their own aggression. The problem is both moral operational. As Stephen Miller’s deportation quotas intensify, the very tracking infrastructure meant to log detainees is falling apart. People are arrested and simply vanish. Their names don’t appear in the ICE detainee locator. Paperwork goes missing. Even DOJ attorneys are reportedly unable to locate their clients.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, called it out plainly: Miller’s policies have "broken" the system. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights reports receiving nearly 4,000 calls about missing persons since June 6th. Some are deported before anyone can intervene. Others simply disappear for days at a time before surfacing in remote facilities or not at all.

Take the case of Francisco Urizar, a tortilla delivery driver with decades of residence in the United States. He was arrested by heavily armed, masked agents in a Los Angeles grocery store parking lot. The agents were dressed more like combat troops than civil officers. They detained him in broad daylight, in front of customers and coworkers. For hours, no one knew where he had been taken. It was only through bystander video and local advocacy groups that his daughters were able to confirm what happened.

This is becoming routine. Raids are conducted at bus stops, food trucks, and grocery stores. Detainees are stripped from their communities before any legal process can catch up. The disappearance isn’t metaphorical, it’s procedural.

When even the Department of Justice can’t find where someone is being held, the machinery is no longer serving law. It’s serving momentum. The system has turned into a black box that consumes people faster than it can record them.

The logic here mirrors the aggression we’ve already seen. Mikkelsen's meme was dangerous. Ramirez’s boyfriend was a threat. And Francisco’s tortillas? Apparently enough to justify a paramilitary abduction.

The line between enforcement and disappearance is gone. What's left is a process that feeds on confusion, cloaked in camouflage and procedural fog, where names vanish, and accountability goes with them.

We were told mass surveillance would mean nobody could hide. Turns out it also means that nobody can be found. The illusion of oversight is maintained by broken dashboards and overloaded hotlines. But the truth is simpler and darker. This isn’t a system that is straining under the weight of enforcement. This is a system that is shedding visibility on purpose.

As these armed kidnappings and black-box detentions become more frequent, the line that once separated immigration enforcement from domestic suppression begins to blur. This isn’t only about the undocumented anymore. These tactics of no warrants, no records, and no accountability are being stress-tested now in plain sight on immigrants. But it’s a framework. And frameworks travel, adapt and scale.

The moment political dissidents, journalists, or ordinary citizens find themselves pulled into unmarked vans under the pretext of a meme, or a tweet, or a wrong-place-wrong-time coincidence, it won’t be a break from precedent. It will be a continuation of it. That’s what these systems are being trained to do. Not control the border. Population Control.

So who do you think is safe from this kind of system?

None of Us Are Safe

The answer is the same as it has been for a while now. None of us are safe. Some of us just don’t realize it yet.

Even during the more "transparent" years of Trump’s first term, when data was still trackable and systems were at least nominally intact, ICE deported at least 70 U.S. citizens. That’s the official number, confirmed by the Government Accountability Office. The real total may be much higher. And that was before the quotas. Before the raids lost all pretense of proportionality. Before the databases collapsed into confusion by design. Before we were normalized into blandly accepting unmarked vans full of anonymous armed thugs snatching people off the streets in broad daylight.

Now, in the chaos of this new wave, we’re seeing it happen again in real time. U.S. citizens who are documented, verified, educated, and employed are being swept up and thrown to the ground by federal agents who aren’t required to wear badges or state who they’re working for.

Andrea Velez, a marketing designer in downtown LA, was grabbed off the street in broad daylight, thrown into an unmarked vehicle, and detained without explanation. Her family, also citizens, watched helplessly from a car. Her only crime? Being brown, in public, during a raid. Luis Hipolito was arrested alongside her. No charges were explained. The LAPD, when they arrived, said they had no idea the federal operation was even happening.

Adrian Martinez, a Walmart employee, tried to speak up when he saw an elderly man being tackled by agents in a parking lot. He ended up in a detention center, battered and bruised, accused of obstructing an investigation. Not assault. Not violence. Just speaking.

We have now been fully warned as to the consequences of even looking like we oppose ICE should we see them in public. For now, this kind of retaliation is concentrated in 'brown' neighborhoods but it will spread, block by block, into 'lighter' and 'lighter' ones. The Supreme Court's latest ruling reinforces this while also stripping away the last procedural guardrails, allowing deportations to third countries without notice, hearing, or recourse.

In a shadow docket decision with no explanation, the Court allowed the Trump administration to begin deporting people to third countries. That’s countries they’ve never been to, where they have no family or legal ties, and where many face credible threats of violence. No notice. No hearing. No process.

The majority didn’t just let it happen, they did so after the administration defied lower court orders, secretly deporting class members in violation of injunctions. Justice Sotomayor called it what it is: a reward for lawlessness. A greenlight for executive impunity.

This is what it means when a government no longer fears the courts. When ICE raids homes for traffic violations. When satire is considered extremist propaganda. When helping a stranger or asking a question is grounds for detention.

We’re not witnessing a crackdown on immigrants. We are watching the scaffolding for total state authority being tested and normalized. Federal agents can now operate without local coordination, without public accountability, and without even the burden of identifying themselves. They can arrest citizens. They can lie about why. And the Supreme Court has signaled that even if you’re deported to a country that might kill you, you have no right to object and no one may even know where you are or why you were taken, or who took you.

We are being conditioned to accept the authority of faceless, badgeless, militarized enforcers. At the same time, we’re being separated from every process meant to track who they take, why, and where they go. And now they can send people anywhere. To any random country without explanation.

The circle of who can be disappeared keeps widening. The speed at which they can do it keeps increasing. The definition of obstruction keeps shrinking. This is what control looks like. It’s not mass trials at first, but through mass silence. It’s paperwork gaps and blackout vans. It’s systems that fail on purpose.

This is the machinery of unaccountable force, no longer restrained by law, reason, or even optics.

“Brownshirts”

Resulting from this chaos is the completely predictable trend of people pretending to be ICE for a litany of nefarious purposes.

In a series of videos from across California, the image of the ICE raid has shifted from hardened professionalism to something far more reckless and dangerous. These are not the polished agents of old. They are nervous men/boys in Amazon vests, gripping pistols like they’re waiting for an excuse. Their shoes are wrong. Their posture is wrong. Their nerves are showing.

One video shows a group of federal agents in tennis shoes and unlabeled cars attempting to enter a Home Depot. They are met with resistance and retreat. One agent is clearly uncomfortable as fumbles repeatedly with his radio, hand drifting again and again to his pistol. More men arrive, some armed with rifles, flanking the crowd. The video cuts before the outcome is clear, but someone may have been taken.

In Los Angeles’ Pico Union district, a video shows plainclothes agents and masked gunmen tackling a young woman off the street. She’s thrown into a car while bystanders scream and throw objects. The car speeds off. Her name, whereabouts, and charges, if any, remain unknown.

A separate confrontation in Bell erupted when masked men in fatigues raided a car wash. Detaining workers, they were swarmed by residents and immigration rights advocates. Tear gas was deployed. Agents drove over sidewalks to escape. The LAPD didn’t even know the raid was happening.

In Pasadena, a man exited an unmarked Dodge Charger, aimed his pistol at civilians, then turned on red-and-blue lights and sped away. Local police confirmed the man bore what appears to be ‘federal ID’ but refused to investigate further.

At Dodger Stadium, agents staged raids in full tactical gear. Mayor Karen Bass demanded answers, saying, “They refuse to give ID. Are they bounty hunters? Vigilantes? If they’re federal officials, why do they not identify themselves?”

And in Torrance, a woman washing her car intervened during a raid. She filmed masked agents attempting to detain workers, shouted legal advice, and disrupted the arrest. One man was saved. Another was taken without warrant, without name, and without a trace.

All of this is by design. These are rehearsals.

The pattern emerging now is one of total uncertainty. Sometimes the agents take someone. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes bystanders are beaten or detained for “interfering.” Other times, they shout the agents down and walk away untouched. That variance and the randomness of it all is the point.

The climate now makes it possible for any sufficiently bored group of assholes to grab assault rifles and some off-the-shelf tactical gear and try their luck. And whether they succeed depends less on legality and more on nerve. Who’s going to stop them?

That’s the trap: either accept every armed, masked, unmarked encounter as legitimate or gamble that it’s fake and risk your life pushing back. There is no way to know. And that uncertainty endangers everyone.

I am confident that this is the dry run for something much bigger.

This Is Their Future, Not Ours

There are 100% people already attempting to take advantage of the current climate and it will only get worse.

In Boyle Heights, students walked out of classrooms and onto the streets, chanting, marching, linking arms with parents and neighbors. From South LA to Van Nuys to Venice, the message echoed: no more raids, no more fear, no more families torn apart.

The school district warned them not to go. Said they couldn’t protect them off campus. Said the streets were dangerous now especially with reports of fake ICE agents.

Three incidents confirmed so far. One impersonator flagged down a school bus and flashed a fake badge. The driver did exactly what they were trained to do. He closed the door and drove away. But that’s not protection. That’s survival.

Superintendent Carvalho admitted what’s really going on: these impersonators are criminals and saboteurs. “Maybe to cause confusion,” he said. “Maybe to cause fear.” He’s right. That’s exactly what it’s for.

Fake ICE, real ICE, violent ICE, silent ICE. It’s the world’s worst Dr. Seuss story. It no longer matters who’s who. The result is the same: fear on the street, silence in the classroom, paranoia in the neighborhood. A climate where protest is punished, resistance is criminalized, and truth is impossible to verify in real time.

But the students still walked out. Not because they felt safe, but because they knew staying quiet was worse.

"Anything can happen," one said, holding a sign with trembling hands. “But I think it’s better if they come out here, because then we could make a change. Stand for something.”

They’re marching to remind the rest of us what courage looks like while there’s still time to learn.

And they’re right. Because this isn’t a crackdown. It’s a warning. And we’re next.

A New Kind of Tent City

There are now 59,000 people in ICE detention. That’s not a typo. That’s a record. A number so high it breaks past precedent, past allocated capacity, and past any pretense that this system is operating within law or reason.

Congress authorized 41,500 beds. ICE filled those, then kept going. Over 140% capacity. And nearly half of those detained have no criminal record at all. Fewer than 30% have any conviction on file. The rest have been scooped from neighborhoods, job sites, grocery stores, traffic stops. Most will never face charges. Many will never face a judge. Some will never be found.

ICE, under direct pressure from Trump and Stephen Miller, has exploded its arrest rate. In June, they’re averaging over 1,200 arrests a day which is nearly double the early numbers of the second term. Some days have cracked 2,000. Over 70% of these detainees were picked up in the U.S. interior. That means from homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods. These aren’t people jumping fences. They’re people going to work. Feeding their kids. Trying to disappear into an ordinary, law abiding American life and they being punished severely for it.

And somehow, ICE is doing all this without having built the facilities. Congress never approved the space. No one knows where all the extra people are being held. Military bases are being converted. Florida has offered to build entire detention compounds, including one in the Everglades already nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz.” FEMA has been enlisted to help coordinate infrastructure. You read that right: FEMA is building detention camps. And the same people who spent decades warning that FEMA camps would be used to imprison patriots and silence dissent are now cheering them into existence. So long as it’s immigrants behind the razor wire.

This was always projection. Every accusation is an admission, remember? The right feared a government that could sweep them up and disappear them into federal holding centers. Now they’ve built exactly that machine. They just gave it a different target.

And it won’t stop at 59,000. Not with a quota still short of Miller’s 3,000-a-day goal. Not with states lining up to host new sites. Not with a president asking for billions more to expand detention to 100,000 beds. That’s what you call scaffolding.

This is mass detention without ceiling or due process. It is not and was never about criminality. It’s not nor was it ever about safety. It’s a headcount, number to hit and a scoreboard to wave on stage.

And now the money’s coming in, the courts have been silenced and the lie is holding.

It’s logistical, military and literal tyranny.

And there’s no room left to pretend it’s anything else.

Stephen Miller’s Dirty Stocks

Stephen Miller is the kind of man who reads about fascism not to avoid it, but to take notes. And now, for the first time in his wretched career, he's found a way to turn those notes into dividends. New financial disclosures confirm he owns up to a quarter million dollars in Palantir stock. That’s the surveillance firm whose software powers ICE’s most invasive, most brutal, most opaque operations.

So that means he isn’t content orchestrating mass detentions. Now we know he is also collecting passive income from them. Stephen Miller is literally invested in the machinery of human misery.

This is what happens when a goblin with a Harvard degree and a persecution complex gets real power. He dreams up ways to make cruelty the point and then he finds a way to turn it into a brokerage account for his toddler.

Because, technically the stock is in his kid’s name. Practically though, it’s Miller’s retirement plan, paid for one abduction at a time. He’s literally profiting from authoritarianism and he's laundering it through a child’s piggy bank.

Every time Palantir’s predictive software identifies a target, every time a name is scraped from a database and shuffled into ICE's logistics, every time a mother is dragged out of a parking lot in front of her kids, Miller gets a little richer. It’s deportation as dividend and disappearance as equity.

You would think a man who looks like Nosferatu’s least charismatic understudy would keep a lower profile. But Miller’s never had shame. He’s the smug necromancer of bureaucracy, waving a federal flowchart like a crucifix at a séance and now he’s got a financial stake in making sure that cross keeps swinging.

Palantir calls its services “mission critical.” ICE depends on it. And Miller, hunched over in whatever bile-colored corner of the West Wing he’s nesting in these days, gets to watch the stock climb while the country sinks.

What Miller has built and what he profits from is a digital meat grinder with a sharpie label on it that says 'Department of Policy'. He broke the system and then sold shares in the wreckage.

Miller has always been fueled by cruelty. The dopamine hits he gets from watching a child cry at the border isn’t a side effect, it’s his lifeblood and nourishment for a withered soul. Now imagine giving that man a profit incentive. That’s what this stock does. It wires his sadism directly to his bottom line.

It creates a feedback loop where the more brutal the policy, the better the payout. The more aggressive the raids, the more he smiles. Not because he’s winning some ideological war, but because his shares are performing. Because the machine he helped design now rewards him for every ruined life. Every sob is a bell ringing on Wall Street.

His ethics disclosures are a joke. His recusal promises are fiction. And his presence in the White House is a national humiliation of generational scope.

This isn’t border policy. It’s asset management for sociopaths. And Miller is running the fund.

There is no conflict of interest. There is just interest. And it's not national.

It’s personal, it’s petty, and It’s profitable.

It's Stephen Miller’s favorite kind of project. One that only gets uglier the more it succeeds.

Joe Rogan Agrees with Me

I'm not going to say that I agree with Joe Rogan, but he does agree with me. The protein-powdered fence-sitter in a leather apron chasing Spotify checks has now said what the rest of us have been shouting for months: “These ICE raids are fuckin’ nuts… if Trump had said we’re gonna go to Home Depot and arrest everyone, tackle people at construction sites, I don’t think anyone would’ve signed up for that… It’s crazy.”

But you see Joe, it’s always been performative. The story they told, you know the one about hardened criminals, drug lords, MS-13 hit squads, was never true. It was a sales pitch. An ugly little narrative designed to pre-justify a sweeping dragnet against anyone who looked out of place. And now that the numbers are out and now that we know half of ICE detainees have no criminal record and the vast majority were pulled from quiet lives with no violence, warrants, or legal justification at all the ruse is laid bare.

And what’s their response? To double down. Not to correct course, apologize or even rebrand. They just decided to declare open season on sanctuary cities and lean harder into chaos.

It’s cynacily strategic. When they no longer have the narrative, the only thing left is noise. Create enough noise, enough confusion, enough overlapping headlines and blurry videos and unconfirmed raids, and they break the ability of anyone to form a coherent response.

California is the prototype. It’s the beta test for how to run a federal terror campaign without public oversight. LA County alone is too chaotic to monitor. Add in San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, New York, each with its own tempo, its own panic, and its own resistance and suddenly you don’t have a crackdown. You have a smokescreen.

And that’s the point. Because ICE doesn’t have the numbers. They don’t have the trained personnel. The real agents are already stretched thin, cycling through burnout and lawsuit after lawsuit. So where will the extra boots come from?

Look at the edges. 287(g) agreements deputizing local law enforcement. Bounty hunters working under vague memoranda of understanding. Right-wing civilians with AR-15s and a YouTube following, suddenly acting like they have jurisdiction. That’s not theoretical, it’s already happening. And when it scales, it won’t look like collapse. it will play as policy.

Once you blur the badge and you allow anyone with a vest and a printer to raid homes and detain neighbors, the law becomes irrelevant. The narrative dissolves. The damage is done.

There’s simply no way to track it all. There will be no way to fact-check every claim and no way to verify what’s real once the country is running on viral footage and secondhand panic. I also predict plenty of fake footage, misattributed footage an AI footage to start being put into the stream by the right as a way to further muddy the waters.

Listen, this isn’t about ICE anymore. They are preparing the country for a type of enforcement that doesn’t need laws, just momentum and it’s gaining speed.

If Rogan sees it, and he does, then it’s not on the fringe. It’s already here. And it’s going to get very messy, very fast.

Final Thoughts

They are letting us know where the line is. ICE harassment of U.S. citizens, increasingly violent raids for thinner and thinner pretexts, and now the JD Vance meme. That’s the threshold they’re marking. And I’m calling it now: in two to four weeks, we’re going to see pundits on TV and radio start echoing the same scripted outrage about how these kinds of memes and jokes are “dangerous,” “irresponsible,” maybe even “radicalizing.” That slope isn’t slippery. It’s greased.

We’re already being conditioned. We’re going to be told that humor is violence, criticism is threat, and dissent is extremism. The talking points are in the chamber. What will count as “dangerous extremist propaganda” six weeks from now? I don’t know. But I’m betting it’s going to surprise all of us. And it will come preloaded with bipartisan approval.

And meanwhile, the right is still cheering. Cheering as the numbers in detention swell. Cheering as the facilities overflow. Cheering as the state builds the exact infrastructure they used to foam at the mouth about on AM radio. These are literal FEMA camps, mass roundups, and military raids on U.S. soil!

They cheer for their own downfall. They cheer for the torture and mistreatment of other human beings. They cheer as the boot inches closer to their own throats.

But cruelty isn’t the point, it’s simply the mechanism. Control is the point. Immigrants are just the most useful, most convenient way to get the tip of the spear in. Once it lands, it doesn’t stop. And the crowds still cheer, because they think they’re watching a wall go up. But what’s really being built is a cage that anyone can be thrown into. Including them.