ICE at the airport is just the beginning

In almost every movie about life under a dictatorship, there is a scene where the security services order someone to “show me your papers.” The United States under Donald Trump has not fully arrived at that place. But it is closer than most Americans want to admit.

On Monday the president ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to assist the Transportation Security Administration at the country’s airports. Due to the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, which began Feb. 14 after the GOP failed to accede to Democrats’ demands to reform ICE, TSA employees have been working without pay for weeks. Some have called in sick. Others have quit. The result: long lines and mounting delays at major airports across the country.

ICE officers are wearing bulletproof vests and carrying weapons at more than a dozen airports around the country. In an interview with CNN, border czar Tom Homan said that agents would not be screening passengers or handling baggage. Instead, they are focused on security and crowd control.

Much of the mainstream media and political class are treating the ICE deployment as normal politics, just another mess caused by Trump and MAGA Republicans, or by Democrats who have refused to fund DHS — a symptom of extreme polarization and dysfunctional government, or as a data point in the upcoming midterms and the polls. After more than 10 years of experience with Trump, many of these political observers still refuse to become literate in the basic logic of the authoritarian’s playbook. They are hyper-focused on speculating about Trump’s motives and whether he is playing three-dimensional political chess, instead of framing the move as a function of his authoritarian personality and an example of how he is damaging American democracy and society.

Authoritarian regimes attempt to control freedom of movement, association and privacy; this is one of the most direct ways that such leaders exercise power. People internalize the restrictions and conform. Those who refuse to do so are punished. The Trump administration is now using America’s airports as a space for authoritarian training and conditioning.

A 2024 report by Freedom House, an organization founded in 1941 to support and defend democracy, puts it plainly: “[G]overnments around the world use mobility controls — revoking citizenship, passport restrictions, travel bans — to coerce and punish dissidents, activists, journalists, and ordinary people. At least 55 governments employ one or more of these methods. For people targeted in this way, mobility controls produce a sense of powerlessness.”

This was seen on Monday when the Chicago Tribune spoke to a traveler at O’Hare International Airport about ICE. “They don’t belong here,” he said. “They don’t belong stalking people coming off of planes, going into the airports. There’s no reason for any American to feel threatened traveling throughout the United States. And that’s what they did. It’s just a piece of intimidation. It’s pointless. It’s just to cause fear and threat to people.”

ICE is not a neutral enforcer of the law. With an annual budget of $8.5 billion — more than the United States Marines and many countries’ militaries — the agency has become Trump’s de facto enforcer and the vanguard of his MAGA movement. The president has publicly acknowledged ICE’s real mission at the country’s airports: to keep out those he views as racial undesirables, and to serve as a bludgeon against Democrats to force them to fund DHS without reforming ICE and capitulate on the SAVE Act, his voter nullification bill.

Trump’s series of social media posts in which he threatened to deploy ICE at airports were steeped in white racist panic. A primary focus, he said, would be “the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country, with heavy emphasis on those from Somalia.”

Former Trump White House senior adviser and MAGA thought-leader Steve Bannon was even more explicit. The strategy, he said, should be used as a “test run to perfect ICE’s involvement” in November’s midterms — an authoritarian escalation that could result in voter suppression, nullification and arrests at the polls for alleged fraud and being “illegal aliens.” 

When militarized guardians of the border and the larger national security state are turned inward against a country’s own citizens, it is known as the boomerang effect. This is a defining feature of democracies collapsing into authoritarianism.

According to Paul Gowder, professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, airports are liminal spaces for immigrants where constitutional protections thin out. “This leads to the imperial boomerang,” he told me. “The federal government has created agencies and personnel trained and socialized in operating in these liminal spaces. Most infamous is the Border Patrol, which has a long record of brutality — predictable, because they are trained to deal with people with lesser rights, in spaces where monitoring of their conduct is thin or nonexistent.”

Civil and human rights abuses at airports are a feature of this system, not a bug — and a measure of how far Trump is pushing its boundaries to advance his authoritarian project.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

“ICE isn’t yet as bad as the Border Patrol, but it’s still markedly worse than ordinary law enforcement — and for the same reasons,” he said. “The training they receive doubtless includes being told that the people they deal with don’t have ordinary constitutional rights. And they’re being inserted in [airports] where Fourth Amendment rights have already been diluted in the name of security.” 

That notion of safety under the Trump administration began with relatively benign-sounding rhetoric about crime, law-and-order and immigration enforcement, and it has escalated, with the occupation of Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, to naked thuggery. In reality, the vast majority of people who have been caught in the Trump administration’s mass deportation dragnet have not committed any violent or other serious crimes. They are hard-working, law-abiding members of their communities, and many are U.S. citizens.

The next step in the spiral of authoritarian escalation is the use of ICE and other federal law enforcement to assist local police with routine tasks. This is already happening in Washington, where the Home Rule Act of 1973, which gave the city limited self-government, allows Congress oversight. In August, despite crime rates being at an historic 30-year low, the president declared a state of emergency and deployed the National Guard and ICE to essentially militarize the city in what D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser described as an “authoritarian push.” On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to extend the crackdown until 2029.

Once a precedent is set, deploying ICE could become the default solution to any policy challenge, such as the wildly exaggerated claims of government fraud by Somalis in Minneapolis.

“Show me your papers” laws and ICE’s deployment in airports and cities are gears in a much larger fascist machine designed to push targeted individuals and groups outside society, making them anti-citizens and non-persons.

In Kansas, the GOP majority in the state legislature recently overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto to pass a law revoking the driver’s licenses of 1,700 transgender residents and invalidating birth certificates that had been updated to reflect a person’s gender identity after transitioning. The state was the first in the nation to pass legislation allowing such retroactive cancellations.

The Trump administration and Republican-controlled states are also enforcing — and proposing — laws to strip commercial driver’s licenses from undocumented people, asylum seekers, refugees and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and to revoke their non-commercial licenses as well. There are also moves to take away resources — such as Social Security numbers and banking — that undocumented people need to maintain a basic standard of living and to provide for their families.

Gowder warned that Trump’s use of ICE at airports is designed to generate an “expanding scope of lawlessness” to intimidate people who do not support him.

“Trump knows that the rest of us are (rightly) afraid of ICE and its criminal behavior,” he said, “and so he sees putting them in more places as a threat to harm more people, further up in the socioeconomic scale. This will put pressure on constituencies that support the Democratic Party. That’s the only explanation for why this might seem like a good negotiating ploy for Trump.”

Authoritarian leaders transform a society through both big changes and incremental ones, like stationing ICE agents at airports. Eventually, people wake up one day and their country is no longer recognizable. Trump and his MAGA movement are not slowing down. As the midterms approach, they will only accelerate as their poll numbers continue to collapse and they become more desperate to retain power. 

The average American is learning that airports — and every other space of daily life — have never been apolitical. In the Age of Trump, that lesson is no longer optional.