USA: ICE-Watch Teams

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 30 Jun 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

A nationwide movement of neighborhood programs defending people and democracy.

There are multiple videos appearing online of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-ICE agents claiming drivers have “swerved” toward them or have been “following” them and therefore interfering with their policing operations. They have sometimes called the local police and insisted on an arrest or citation being given. It is important to record and document all such interactions because ICE is the vanguard of the emerging fascism in the US.

Timothy Synder’s small book On Tyranny outlines 20 “lessons” about how tyranny has arisen in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and how citizens must act to stop it. The first lesson is “Do not obey in advance.”  Tyrants rise to absolute power because most people acquiesce without being forced to do so.  Columbia University capitulated to Trump’s attacks.  Major law firms made humiliating deals with Trump without calling the bluff of his threats; major media organizations such as Paramount CBS and ABC News capitulated with the same cowardice. Corporations abandoned their DEI programs without question. We must not grovel in these ways before the plague of ICE.

ICE directly represents the fast-rising fascist onslaught on the USA.  The rise to power of every dictator requires an emergency, an emergency that is then extended into a permanent state of emergency in which the rule of law is swallowed up by the rule of arbitrary force—spearheaded by the police and military.  In Trump’s rhetoric, the US is under an “invasion of rapists, murderers, and criminals who have been invited into our country by the Democrats”—an invasion that must be stopped by drastic and radical ICE-police action.

In response to this fabricated emergency, an army of ICE agents is attacking the cities and states of our nation, creating social chaos and misery everywhere they appear.  They are arresting or detaining people indiscriminately, including all those deemed to stand in the way of this onslaught, whether it is ordinary citizens who angrily honk at them from cars, or high officials such as California Senator Alex Padilla or New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

Their mission is to normalize a police state of emergency (through the false-flag of an immigration emergency) that legitimates extreme measures and unregulated police action. How they are recruited, oriented, or “trained” remains a top secret of the federal government.  Kristi Noem and other top officials refuse to affirm or deny whether violent criminal gangs such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers (pardoned for January 6 violent crimes by Trump) have been recruited for this paramilitary onslaught.

In response to Brad Lander’s arrest, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a declaration claiming he was arrested for “assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer” (although videos of the event clearly show otherwise). The DHS statement concluded that: “No one is above the law, and if you lay a hand on a law enforcement officer, you will face consequences”. These “federal officers” that have flooded the cities and streets of the US are sometimes heavily armed and wearing combat clothing. They wear uniforms with no individual identifying marks. At other times, they wear civilian clothing with no way to distinguish them from ordinary hoodlums. They almost always wear masks to hide their identities.

Concerned citizens are faced with a dilemma—the dilemma of all civilized people when confronted by the rise of fascism and totalitarianism.  These “federal police officers” even when wearing a uniform, usually have no identifying marks on their clothing and are masked. Hence, they are “secret police,” bullies who claim authority to act without public accountability. Not only do they refuse to identify themselves, they normally refuse to show a warrant to justify their supposedly official actions. They have zero accountability to the communities where they are sowing chaos. These “secret police” arrest legal immigrants as well as US citizens through dragnet sweeps of places where they might find immigrants, while using racial profiling to target people. They are violating the ultimate law of the land, the Constitution, as well as state and local laws, all of which require due process and personal accountability to be followed in all police conduct.

As Brad Lander told the press after his being manhandled and arrested by masked ICE agents, “We are not going to allow Donald Trump to wreck the rule of law, to deny people due process and to turn our country into something that doesn’t meet its obligations under international law…. We are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy, and we’re not going to stand by and let it happen.”  This underlines our dilemma: for ICE agents are “wrecking the rule of law” and “normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy” through the pretense that they are legitimate police who are enforcing the rule of law, as the DHS statement makes clear.  However, they are not legitimate federal police or any other kind of police.  They are criminals, thugs, and violators of the rule of law and need to be stopped. But how?

Timothy Synder’s sixth lesson on his book On Tyranny, is “beware of paramilitaries.” It is widely known that Donald Trump used the National Guard and the US Military as a false-flag to create a crisis in Los Angeles around the invasion of that city by an army of ICE-agents masked, lawless, and freely violating the laws and norms of Los Angeles and the State of California.  Paramilitary forces not only show up in the form of armed civilian groups who then begin working with the police of some country to destroy democracy: in our case they have been created by the Trump administration in the form of the ICE-thugs to circumvent and subvert the official police in their lawless assault on the North American people under the cover of an immigration crisis.

Citizens who want to restore our failing democracy must act immediately, forcefully, and non-violently.  Synder’s lesson 13 demands that we “Practice Corporal Politics.” He continues: “Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.”  “No-Kings Day” and its follow-up public actions are indeed essential. But we need so much more than this if the ICE vanguard of the fascist takeover is to be defeated.  We need nation-wide neighborhood ICE-Watch Teams that will slow down, publicly expose, and defuse the effectiveness of the lawless, paramilitary ICE-driven onslaught against the Constitution and the rule of democratic law.

People are using the digital media to create interactive groups dedicated to protecting a certain defined neighborhood in their cities and communities.  On a rotating basis 24/7, there are teams of at least two people with a car ready to respond to a notice from someone in the group that ICE has entered the area.  The car (with cameras and recorders rolling) follows the ICE thugs at a safe distance so as not to be seen as “interfering with the operations of the federal police.”  The neighborhood-watch team traces ICE movements and alerts people in these neighborhoods or other locations where ICE is headed. They simultaneously alert the (responsible) media and the real (local) police about what is happening. They also, of course, are coming out in public protest wherever ICE rears its ugly head—making noise, making things public, raising nonviolent hell for these fake, Keystone Cops and thugs.

In recent congressional hearings three democratic governors were asked if they would allow their state and city police forces to work with ICE.  Their answers, while not particularly forceful or inspiring, stated that official police take an oath to follow the Constitution, the law, and due process of law.  If there are so-called “federal police” who are violating the Constitution and the law, then local law enforcement is not required to cooperate with them.

Neighborhood ICE-Watch Teams (IWTs), networking and operating nationwide, will constitute a formidable social pressure on local police to become more aware of the lawless ICE paramilitary police flooding our communities and our nation. The IWTs will help give the legitimate official police the courage to do the right thing, not only by refusing to cooperate with the ICE thugs but by helping protect the nonviolent community-ICE-Watch Teams from harassment by ICE.

In this way North Americans can “take to the streets” nationwide in an organized, peaceful, and nonviolent form—creating networks of community solidarity while working with the real police (who respect due-process of law). By taking collective democratic actions, we are establishing a real social force that defuses the lie of an “emergency immigrant invasion” and the corresponding lie that we need a flood of lawless ICE thugs to invade our cities and communities to save us from this non-existent crisis.

We must not forget that the real purpose of the ICE onslaught is not to deport illegal “rapists, murderers, and criminals” (of which there is little or no evidence), but to destroy the authority of the US Constitution, the legitimate rule of law, and the absolutely essential principle of “due process of law.” The vanguard of all fascist dictatorships is the creation of a false state of emergency that requires a pervasive, lawless secret police—the establishment of a massive police presence that no longer needs to obey the rule of law because they are supposedly dealing with some emergency. The most effective way to stop the ICE onslaught against our democracy is a nationwide network of ICE-Watch Teams, getting the word out—and getting the job done—of “taking to the streets” in and organized and effective direct-action movement.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Jun 2025.

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