Trump’s ICE crackdown is on pause… but not for long

After the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE – as with the earlier killing of Renee Good – the White House reached instinctively for a smear, branding the victim a domestic terrorist to justify lethal force.

But once facts made this claim untenable, Donald Trump retreated, then pivoted to say that Pretti should not have been armed at all, a line so thin that even the National Rifle Association recoiled, exposing fractures inside his pro-gun base.

As pressure builds over the excesses in immigration enforcement, Washington is starting to edge backwards. Officers involved in the killing have been placed on leave, and Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino was pulled out. Even Trump’s border tsar has gone dovish, promising “by the book” reforms.

This climbdown has even tempted some Democrats to hope that a reckoning with ICE may be within reach. That optimism is misplaced.

If America’s “war on terror” taught us anything, it is how stubbornly policies endure once they are organised around emergency authority. At its height, revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and the sweeping reach of the Patriot Act ignited a public backlash. Critically, the Bush administration didn’t retreat fully. Instead, it consolidated.

The “war on terror” survived by acknowledging dissent at the margins, even as extraordinary powers became routine and emergency authority slipped quietly into everyday government.

The focus has changed – but the pattern remains. Just as some egregious figures inside ICE are being reshuffled, raids are only ramping up in cities such as Phoenix, with Philadelphia bracing for what comes next.

Even now, the agency is willing to push authority beyond its remit. In Minneapolis, an agent attempted to enter the Ecuadorian consulate without a warrant, testing the boundaries of diplomatic immunity. And with plans to deploy ICE to the Winter Olympics in Italy, we are witnessing an agency eager to stretch its reach outwards.

From the point of view of local government, the danger is obvious. As federal power grows less inclined to explain itself, cities are left to absorb the fallout. And once fear becomes the organising logic of immigration control, the restraint imposed by public consent falls through.

That logic explains the timing. With midterms approaching, enforcement can be eased now and reintensified later, depending on what the polls demand. More crackdowns may look volatile right now, but hardline immigration enforcement proved the winning ticket in 2020.

Besides, the public backlash may not last. Just as the killing of Pretti swung the political pendulum against ICE, another flashpoint could just as easily restore it. That is why opposition alone is not enough. Democrats who want to defeat Trump in November must show immigration can be governed without this theatre of fear.

Democrats have often faltered on convincing voters on immigration, but calling for a system without routine violence is not naive. Others have faced comparable pressures and changed course. Europe did so after the 2015 surge, when more than a million people arrived via porous borders. The adjustment was imperfect, but it worked, with irregular crossings now reaching historic lows.

Crucially, Europe’s shift worked not with ICE-style brutality, but through sustained cooperation between governments and civil society. Control was paired with integration, and pressure was shared.

The support from the Muslim World League is illustrative. At the height of Europe’s migration crisis, the league became a significant partner in refugee support across the Mediterranean, working through the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and UN agencies. Its funding helped sustain central Mediterranean operations that assisted thousands, alongside medical care, food provision and guidance through asylum procedures.

Just as important, the league directed efforts to places where migration pressures begin. Under its secretary-general, Dr Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, humanitarian aid, healthcare and food security programmes were expanded across north Africa, the Sahel and parts of the Middle East most closely linked to Mediterranean routes. The aim was to ease the pressures that drive crossings in the first place, an approach that coincided with a significant fall in deaths and disappearances at sea from their mid-2010s peak.

This contrast is uncomfortable for America, where migration policy often begins only at enforcement, making violent outcomes such as those in Minnesota more likely.

The irony, of course, is that the actors best placed to ease migration pressures are now treated as enemies. Trump brands NGOs as threats to the “national interest” while stripping more than 1.5 million people of temporary legal status. The result is predictable: more illegality, more disorder, and an ICE apparatus geared towards keeping fear electorally useful.

All of that is more reasons why Democrats cannot rest during this pause. They must show voters that ICE’s militarisation will end, and that immigration control does not require fear to function.