Italy’s foreign minister defends ICE attendance at Winter Olympics after outrage: ‘It’s not like the SS are coming’

Italy's foreign minister has launched an extraordinary defence of his government's decision to allow ICE agents into the country for the Winter Olympics, saying: “It’s not like the SS are coming.”

Foreign minister Antonio Tajani said on Tuesday that the agents attending the Games would not be “those that are on the street in Minneapolis”, as the US reels from the fatal shooting of two people by ICE in the city this month.

Thousands of Italians have signed petitions to demand that ICE be barred from entry since it was first reported that they would be travelling with the US delegation. On Tuesday, ICE confirmed it would send a branch with the diplomatic security service to protect top officials.

“I have been harder than anyone else in Italy on [the ICE] raids,” said Mr Taijani, addressing the backlash. “But it’s not like the SS are coming.”

“The problem isn’t that those with machine guns and their faces covered are coming. They’re officials from a specific unit. They’re coming because it’s the unit responsible for counter-terrorism,” he told L'Espresso.

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The Schutzstaffel (SS) was a paramilitary organisation in Nazi Germany that was used as an instrument of terror. They carried out the Holocaust and also played a role in security and intelligence collection.

ICE said that its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) branch would be present “to vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organisations”.

Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant homeland security secretary, insisted that “obviously, ICE does not conduct immigration enforcement operations in foreign countries”.

But Italian officials have raised concerns over the potential safety risk of ICE agents being used after the death of intensive care nurse Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot in Minneapolis on 24 January. It came just weeks after ICE agents shot and killed writer Renee Good.

In both incidents, officials claimed agents were acting in self-defence. Those accounts have been disputed and the deaths have caused public outcry.

Angelo Bonelli, a spokesperson for the Greens and Left Alliance, said: “The Gestapo conducted raids with their faces uncovered, while ICE conducts them with their faces covered. Unfortunately, this is the only real difference.”

Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, which is hosting several events, said that ICE agents are “not welcome” at the Games, which will run from 6 February until 15 March.

“This is a militia that kills,” he told Italian radio station RTL 102.5. “It is clear that they are not welcome in Milan. There’s no doubt about it. Can’t we just say no to Trump for once?”

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Giuseppe Conte, president of the populist Five Star Movement, said: “After street violence and killings in the USA, we now learn from their spokesperson that ICE agents will come to Italy … We cannot allow this.”

Marco Furfaro, a Democratic Party MP, told La Repubblica: “ICE is not welcome in Italy in any form. The government should have said only this: our country is strongly opposed to the presence, even minimal or symbolic, of a militia so incompatible with our constitution and our values ​​at the Olympic Games.”

Attilio Fontana, the governor of Lombardy region, previously said that ICE would only be in Italy as “bodyguards” for vice president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio, when asked whether he was concerned about violent clashes involving the agency in the US.

Mr Fontana subsequently backtracked, saying he did not know anything about the matter and did not mean to confirm their presence.

The HSI branch investigates global threats into, out of, and through the US, according to the ICE website.

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The Trump administration has also faced mounting backlash after two reporters with Italian television broadcaster RAI were threatened by ICE agents in Minneapolis.

The journalists were accompanying a volunteer monitoring operations in the city when men, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, approached their car and demanded they roll the windows down.

Video of the incident showed the reporters identify themselves in English several times before they were warned: “If you keep following us from this point on … we will break your window and we will pull you out of the vehicle.”

Peppe Provenzano, with the centre-left Democratic party, said that the reporters had been “threatened by Trump’s political police”.

“We ask the Meloni government, if it has any national pride, to formally protest and distance itself once and for all,” he said, as reported by the Ansa news agency.

Mr Trump sacked Gregory Bovino, the border patrol chief leading immigration raids across the country, following the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, The Atlantic reported.