American Carnage
Trump Has Brought American Paramilitary Violence Home
The United States has a long history of paramilitary violence abroad. Now, ICE and CBP agents are using the same tactics against American citizens.
Illustration by Klawe Rzeczy
Caleb Brennan/
Hours after Renee Good was gunned down on a Minneapolis street by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent inside her Honda Pilot, Aurin Chowdhury, the council member for Minneapolis’s Twelfth Ward, told me the city was under siege. “We’re already in a mass, mass militarized occupation,” Chowdhury said, referring to the thousands of armed federal agents who had invaded the Twin Cities a month earlier as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge.”
My conversation with Chowdhury took place during what the Department of Homeland Security touted as its “largest … operation ever.” As in Operation Midway Blitz, which began in Chicago last September, masked men in tactical gear, equipped with military-grade firearms, recklessly deployed chemical weapons as they prowled local neighborhoods populated predominantly by immigrants. Some of their detainees included a worker at a Spanish immersion daycare center and the husband of a woman who was pregnant with their fourth child. (The mother has since given birth, but her husband is still nowhere to be found—perhaps lost in the ever-growing labyrinth of the ICE detention system.) A couple of days before Good’s killing, an additional 2,000 armed agents had been deployed to the Minneapolis metro area.
Chowdhury had reached out to city leaders in Chicago not long after the start of Operation Metro Surge so she could get a handle on what was to come—and to prepare for the worst-case scenarios. Her foresight proved tragically accurate. As she was relaying to me how dire the situation was, a convoy of agents led by Greg Bovino, then the commander at large of the Border Patrol, was arriving at Roosevelt High School to detain a special-education paraprofessional. The arrest couldn’t have been more poorly timed: School was being dismissed, and in the chaos, rounds of tear gas were fired into a crowd of students. “We have to go,” I heard a muffled voice mutter in the background. “All right, well, there’s ICE agents at the high school in my ward, so I gotta run,” Chowdhry said before hanging up.
To many in the United States and around the world, the sight of militarized, federal police forces operating with immunity on U.S. streets seemed inconceivable. Of course, heavily armed, virtually unaccountable forces are not new to American policy; they’re only new to American soil.
Lost in the rush to metabolize the Trump administration’s unprecedented domestic conduct was any real reckoning with what we were witnessing. Since the end of World War II, paramilitary violence—the use of armed, military-style operations conducted by forces who operate outside the formal armed services and are therefore unaccountable to them—has been a crucial component of U.S. foreign policy. But such operations have also been obscured by both definition and distance, with U.S.-backed militias, intelligence units, special operations proxies, and death squads typically operating thousands of miles from America’s borders. No more. Now, the Trump administration has brought the paramilitary violence home.
The anti-immigration sweeps by ICE should be viewed as an extension of a broader U.S. paramilitary tradition that began decades ago. At the beginning of the Cold War, the United States was trapped by the contradictions at the heart of its two major obligations: on one hand, maintaining an international liberal order premised on the relatively novel concept of universal human rights; on the other, eradicating the rise of nascent communist movements and governments across the world, at any cost.
U.S. paramilitary politics was born out of these contradictions. Efforts to “excise” left-wing revolutionaries required targeting the vulnerable populations where leftist insurgents operated, such as those in rural hamlets or impoverished urban centers. Conscious of its own anti-colonialist history and wary of public disapproval, successive U.S. governments sought to covertly outsource the bloodiest aspects of anti-communism to puppet governments in Latin America and the Middle East. With a few notable exceptions like Vietnam and Korea, the United States relied less on traditional boots on the ground and more on the subtlety of proxies who operated with impunity.
It wasn’t limited to the Third World, either. After the Allies carved up Europe, the United States created a postwar network of clandestine “stay-behind” cells in Western Europe, should a hypothetical Soviet invasion occur. This CIA-backed network, known as Operation Gladio, was staffed with reactionary ideologues, and weapons caches were planted in countries like Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Greece. When a Russian incursion failed to materialize, Gladio operatives, particularly in Italy, began carrying out terrorist attacks—such as the bombing of a bank in Piazza Fontana that left 17 dead—in an effort to intimidate and pacify left-wing parties that might be sympathetic to communism. The goal was a “strategy of tension” that would drive citizens into the arms of right-wing governance, and the police initially blamed the massacre on an extraneous collection of anarchists. “There were ex-military men, specially trained soldiers, and also civilians. What held them together was one ideological common denominator: extreme rightism,” a former Greek general said of Gladio.
Unrestrained, unaccountable political violence became a recurring theme of U.S.-backed paramilitary operations. “We see way higher rates of human rights violations in conflicts [involving paramilitary units], and in particular, we have higher rates of violations that are what we call ‘agent-centric violations,’” Erica De Bruin, associate professor of government at Hamilton College, who researches the history and impact of civil-military relations, told me. “And what that means is the individual militia member or paramilitary member has discretion during an encounter to use force or not use force, and so that tends to be extrajudicial killings. Torture increases, and other violations of civil liberties increase.”
Such state-endorsed ruthlessness was often effective, and it would prove to have bipartisan support in Washington. Fearing a growing Red Menace, the Kennedy administration “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” wrote the president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa. Paramilitaries were particularly active in Latin America, a region of special concern to U.S. policymakers, thanks both to its proximity and to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted this nation’s right to behave with impunity in its “sphere of influence” in the Americas. As a result, in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Colombia, the paramilitary threat reigned supreme. Trade unionists, social workers—anyone, really, who was deemed a potential communist sympathizer—were exterminated by secret police, militias, and death squads, many of whom were trained by U.S. intelligence officers at the notorious School of the Americas—an academy created by the Defense Department on the border between Georgia and Alabama.
Even as the Cold War wound down, U.S. support for paramilitarism remained steadfast. When, in the early 1980s, a coalition of peasants, religious leaders, union organizers, teachers, and journalists attempted to topple the murderous military junta in Guatemala, ad hoc, U.S.-backed hit squads proved critical in suppressing the uprising.
Unfortunately, such policies were not left in the twentieth century. During the almost two decades when U.S. troops occupied Afghanistan, local extremist groups were heavily utilized to defeat the Taliban and maintain order. Their conduct was overwhelmingly more likely to result in civilian casualties and human rights abuses, and many groups with ties to the country’s U.S.-installed leader, Hamid Karzai, engaged in narcotics trafficking.
“The U.S. military did take, in some cases, extraordinary measures to prevent civilian deaths. But then what do you do when you have a military that wants to protect that value, but still wants to take the gloves off?” Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute and a former staff writer at The New Republic, told me just a few months after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. “Well, you outsource it to the paramilitaries.”
In theory, paramilitary violence works by terrorizing a civilian population into submission. These lawless units make their own rules and answer to nobody. The only way to survive is to follow those rules.
In its second go-round, the Trump administration is attempting to weaponize this formula on a massive scale against its own people, helped in large part by social media. Recordings of ICE operations have become fodder for the Homeland Security public affairs team. Videos of brutalized immigrants—who are inevitably identified as dangerous criminals—become “content” used to justify the ultimate goal of removing millions of residents. Heavily armed, typically masked, sometimes even gleeful agents themselves participate in the show: Renee Good’s killer can be seen filming her during the incident, seemingly mining the moments before her death for a social media audience. Recording conflict and violence is good, in this formulation, because they inspire fascination and fear.
The Trump team has experimented with different iterations of the paramilitary style, including the use of military contractors as immigrant bounty hunters and a failed attempt to create a “quick reaction force” out of National Guardsmen and “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds.” The goal from the very beginning has been to create a force that could fulfill the president’s will without interference from the “deep state.”
Instead, ICE and Customs and Border Protection, both governmental agencies, have been transformed into the personal armed force of the president and granted unprecedented financial resources in an era of otherwise draconian funding cuts: The ICE budget now rivals the defense budgets of entire nations. Those tasked with deporting one million migrants a year have been granted federal immunity from prosecution, the ability to bypass Fourth Amendment guardrails against unreasonable searches and seizures, and can ignore civil rights law. Agents have been employing illegal choke holds, borrowing surveillance methods from the Israeli Defense Force, and executing “high-risk military tactics” with almost no legal consequences.
Not coincidentally, the rise of ICE as a paramilitary force has coincided with the decline of grassroots right-wing groups like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and other white identitarian groups, all of which have taken a back seat during Donald Trump’s second term.
“A lot of the groups that we monitor, whether those characterize themselves as white nationalists, whether that’s something like active clubs—neo-Nazi fight clubs that have been popping up around the country for the past couple of years—they have been a little bit less active, actually, during the start of the second Trump administration … not because they’re done, but because the federal government is advancing, essentially, their policy priorities,” said Kate Bitz, a senior organizer with Western States Strategies, which specializes in helping local governments reckon with the white nationalist movement.
Those priorities extend far beyond immigration. Just look at Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by CBP agents in Minneapolis. Neither posed a threat to officers—Good was leaving the scene of an ICE raid as instructed, while Pretti, who was legally carrying a firearm while observing a CBP operation, had already been disarmed. Both were engaging in constitutionally protected protest and were slain as a result.
Yet administration officials have preposterously claimed that both were “domestic terrorists” whose killing was justified. In framing their deaths in this manner and blocking investigations into them, the administration is extending the threat of paramilitary violence to all of its enemies.
It’s a far cry from the days when the government embraced—behind the scenes—extreme violence against “enemies of democracy” on foreign soil, even as they denied doing so, knowing that the public would likely recoil—and often did—when presented with the real cost of American empire.
Now, the government is depicting its own people as the enemy. For the Trump administration, winning the war against immigration, multiculturalism, and liberalism demands spectacular violence, undertaken with total impunity. It demands terrorizing communities, rounding up their residents, and even assassinating dissidents. The paramilitary ethos has long been one of America’s most unsavory exports. Now, it’s come home.
