Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“This is starting to look disturbingly like Germany in the 1930s.”
Just hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed an unarmed US citizen in Minneapolis on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance said the agency would soon be going “door to door” across the country to escalate the Trump administration’s mass deportation crusade in the coming year.
In an interview on Fox News with host Jesse Watters, Vance boasted that during Trump’s first year back in power, the administration had gotten “2.5 million illegal aliens out” of the country, “without any of the really big marquee things that we’ve been working on.”
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Notably, only about 600,000 of these have been through formal deportations, while the rest have been through what the White House claims are “self-deportations.” Despite claims to the contrary, the vast majority of those detained by ICE have had no criminal records. Many have been legal residents, green card holders, and asylum seekers following the legal process.
ICE’s budget is expected to triple in 2026 following the passage of Republican budget legislation last year that has allowed it to launch what it calls a “wartime recruitment” strategy, hiring as many as 10,000 new officers with minimal training. Last week, the Washington Post reported that the agency had earmarked $100 million toward online recruitment advertisements, meant to draw in “people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.”
Vance continued, “I think we’re going to see those [deportation] numbers ramp up as we get more and more people online and working for ICE, going door to door and making sure that if you’re an illegal alien, you’ve got to get out of this country, and if you want to come back, apply through the proper channels.”
Vance’s comments came shortly after news broke that an ICE agent had fatally shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis resident and widowed mother of three children, as she attempted to drive away from the scene in her car. Good was at the scene as a legal observer following a surge of more than 2,000 ICE agents to the city.
The Trump administration has stood by the ICE shooter and described Good as a “domestic terrorist” who attempted to run over the agent in her car. But video evidence contradicts this claim, showing Good attempting to pivot her car away from the agents and only accelerating the vehicle after shots were fired, while the agent walked away from the incident unharmed.
Especially in light of the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen who was legally observing agents, Vance’s comments about ICE going “door to door” to homes in the coming year sounded ominous to many.
“Door to door?” asked one incredulous social media user. “The Fourth Amendment still exists. This is starting to look disturbingly like Germany in the 1930s.”
“Under the Fourth Amendment, federal agents are generally not allowed to stop someone unless they have good reason to suspect that they are breaking laws,” explained Jesse Franzblau, the associate director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center, during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing in November. “Yet a growing number of people, many of them Latinx, have reported being targeted, harassed, and detained by ICE and CBP agents solely because of their race.”
The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed that Fourth Amendment protections are strongest in the home, where the government is required to obtain a judicial warrant before entering private residences. However, in many cases, ICE has flouted these rules when carrying out arrests.
“Whether you’re left or right, the thought of living in an America where the government goes ‘door to door,’ and that those words actually came out of the vice president of the United States’ mouth, should worry you deeply,” said Simon Samano, an editor at USA Today.
The Trump administration has increasingly promoted the idea of using ICE to target American citizens. The administration has pledged to strip citizenship from as many as 200 naturalized citizens per month in 2026, a tenfold increase from previous years. Trump and his allies have suggested using denaturalization to kick out some of his top critics, including the Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and New York City’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Last week, a post by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, glorified the idea of Trump carrying out “100 million deportations,” which, if realized, would necessitate the stripping of citizenship from tens of millions of naturalized and US-born citizens. According to a YouGov poll published last week, the majority of Republican voters support the idea of deporting over a fourth of the country.
In October, ProPublica reported that at least 170 US citizens had been wrongly detained in immigration custody since Trump returned to office last January. Meanwhile, Gregory Bovino, the commander at large of the Border Patrol, has previously suggested that US citizens must be prepared to prove their citizenship at a moment’s notice if stopped by immigration agents.
Yet on Wednesday, even after an agent shot a US citizen in cold blood, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, clad in an oversized cowboy hat, assured the public that “anyone who is a citizen of this country or is here legally has nothing to fear.”
Hours after Good was shot, another group of agents, including Bovino, were filmed demanding the identification of another driver, a Somali man who said he was an Uber driver waiting to pick up a passenger at the Minneapolis airport, asking him to prove his US citizenship.
One of the agents was heard telling the man he did not believe he was a US citizen because “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me.”
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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