A top MAGA influencer says it's the "Gestapo." Will more admit what ICE has become?

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

"Are we really going to be the Gestapo? 'Where are your papers?' Is that what we've come to?" That's not coming from the ACLU or a college Democrat. That's coming from one of Trump's most influential cultural allies — a man who endorsed him, amplified him, and helped legitimize him with millions of skeptical young voters: Joe Rogan.

The world-famous podcaster isn't alone. More and more conservative activists who backed Trump now say they feel duped. They thought ICE would go after violent criminals. Instead, they're watching videos of masked agents kidnapping people off the streets, dragging migrants — and Americans — into unmarked vehicles, entering buildings without warrants, firing weapons in public, and killing a U.S. citizen in broad daylight.

"I can also see the point of view of the people that say, 'Yeah, but you don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be U.S. citizens that just don't have their papers on them,'" Rogan said on his daily podcast. "Are we really going to be the Gestapo? 'Where's your papers?' Is that what we've come to?"

When even MAGA supporters are using the word "Gestapo," it's time for regular Americans to ask themselves the the question.

What has ICE actually become?

The agency used to be something else entirely.

I know ICE. I've worked with ICE. From Capitol Hill to the White House, I was proud to help the agency improve its ability to protect the United States. When I went into the Bush administration after 9/11, the country was still reeling and terrified. Our mission was clear. Foreign enemies wanted us dead, and the brand-new Department of Homeland Security was charged with protecting America.

ICE was born out of that moment. Its top focus wasn't terrorizing migrants — it was rooting out actual terrorists and chasing criminal cells that crossed borders invisibly. Was it perfect? Hell no. But we tried to steer it toward the mission of preventing another 9/11, and that focus brought Democrats and Republicans together, all of whom tried to build out the agency thoughtfully, across administrations.

When I returned to DHS years later, ICE had matured into a more sophisticated law-enforcement agency. Its people were smarter, better trained, and better equipped. They were using advanced technical tools to take down pedophile rings, disrupt cartel logistics, trace terrorist travel pipelines, and dismantle criminal syndicates operating across continents.

Although my work didn't involve immigration policy — I was the counterterrorism and counter-threats lead for the Department, it didn't matter. ICE did so much more than immigration. So I worked with them closely and almost daily on national-security investigations and efforts to keep truly dangerous people and goods from crossing into the United States. I got to know an agency that, while imperfect, was staffed with patriotic Americans who wanted to do what was right.

Then I became DHS Chief of Staff. And I saw something darker. I saw what Donald Trump wanted it to become.

The Trump White House had a different vision for ICE.

Once I stepped into that role, I was forced to oversee all of DHS policy, including the president's obsessive fixation on immigration. I was conversant enough in border issues from having been around DHS for so many years, but I had to become a pseudo-expert on immigration overnight.

What became clear almost immediately was that the White House didn't want ICE to carry out its post-9/11 mission, at least not in the way Democrats and Republicans envisioned, after years of forging a loose consensus on what to do with ICE. And Trump certainly wasn't interested in simply "rounding up violent criminal aliens," which was the placeholder talking point he fed to us.

What Trump really wanted was worse.

Every week, I received requests — demands, really — from the president and his henchmen to use ICE to do things they were simply not allowed to do. I don't mean "not allowed" in the sense that they were inappropriate. I mean directives that were obviously illegal. The kind that didn't take a law degree to recoil at. Plainly punitive. Things designed to terrorize, humiliate, and perform dominance against an immigrant population toward which Donald Trump had a deep, personal animus.

The president wanted more than immigration enforcement. He wanted theater. He wanted fear and total submission. While this may sound like exaggeration, it's the precise spirit with which he conveyed his vision during red-faced rants and late-night phone calls to our leadership team.

For instance, Trump wanted ICE to round up migrants at the border by the busload, drive them across the country, and "dump" them into Democratic cities for the expressed purpose of "destabilizing" those communities. We told him that was illegal.

Trump wanted to expand the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay and use it as an ICE deportation facility — deliberately striking dread into the hearts of those migrants by threatening to send them to a legal black hole that held 9/11 attack plotters like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We told him it was absurd, expensive, and also illegal.

Trump wanted to reinstate family separation, but this time he wanted it "on steroids." His goal was to antagonize would-be migrants by showing them that if they even thought about crossing the border line, America would purposefully rip their children away as punishment. Once again, we told him that would be illegal.

Trump wanted ICE to stop sending detained migrants back to their home countries safely because going home wasn't "punishment." Rather, he wanted some of them flown straight into foreign prisons — an act that would disappear people into other countries' jails as a warning to anyone who would dare to seek a better life in the United States. That, too, would be flagrantly illegal, we told him.

Did the president do bad things on immigration in his first term anyway? You bet he did. The internal battles were messy. But what he really wanted to do was so much worse. That's partly why I spoke out. If he won again, I knew it would get dark. Fast.

Donald Trump desired to turn DHS into a stage to act out his authoritarian cosplay. He wanted stormtroopers. And now here we are. Back in office, the president has recruited a theater troupe more than eager to play the part — a cast of seedy characters who are bringing Trump's most repressive fantasies to life, not just on the national stage, but on the world stage. And ICE is his grand set piece.

I got the worst feeling when he looked at an agent, grinned, and said, "You are straight out of central casting."

Those were Donald Trump's words. On more than one occasion, we'd show up at a border facility, and the president would scan the men assembled to find the toughest-looking one. He'd waddle over and put his hands on the shoulders of that agent and look him over. Shaved hair. Sharp jawline. Beefy arms. The president liked the look. Maybe a little too much. Staff would exchange awkward glances.

"Mmm mmm," he hummed to himself on one of these occasions. " You are straight out of central casting." This was Trump's not-so-subtle hint that he wanted his ICE agents to appear like this guy. To look like soldiers and less like frumpy beat cops. Perhaps more importantly, he wanted them to act like it.

Whatever daydreams Trump once had about the look and feel of his ICE agents, he's now trying to apply to the whole force. When I ask friends who are still in the Department about what's happened to the agency, they're at a loss for words. The White House has effectively taken the whole place over, micro-managing its operations sometimes down to individual migrant arrests.

And those illegal things Donald Trump wanted to do? Well, he's started doing them.

On day one, Trump skipped the part about busing-and-dumping migrants from the border into U.S. cities and simply shut down asylum processing altogtther. In other words, he decided to just deny people fleeing violence and persecution of their right to seek protection under U.S. law. Instead, those migrants are put on ICE planes and vanished. A federal judge has already ruled that this is unconstitutional. Now the Supreme Court is reviewing the case.

Within days, Trump also ordered DHS and ICE to dramatically expand operations at Guantanamo Bay, converting a site synonymous with terror and lawlessness into a place to punish migrants. A federal judge has now ruled what many of us knew years ago — that this ICE facility is illegal and unconstitutional.

Then Trump invoked an obscure wartime statute (the Alien Enemies Act) to strip migrants of due process and imprison them after deportation. His administration cut a deal with El Salvador for ICE to send people straight into the Latin American nation's most notorious terrorist prison. Federal judges found this to be illegal and unconstitutional.

What's more, immigrant rights groups now allege the administration has quietly revived "family separation" by having CBP and ICE misclassify children as "unaccompanied" to justify taking them away from their parents. Those cases are still pending. But I remember how furious Trump was when we demanded he reverse his family separation policy. He regretted it, so of course he's trying to bring it back.

These are just a handful of the examples I warned about. The fears came true. Trump pursued those illegal moves right away. But that's not even the worst part.

The worst part is what you see on social media now every day — that ICE has been transformed into a visible, roaming domestic police force that is operating in public spaces across America. We don't need some investigation into the agency to determine if it's abusing its power at the White House's direction. Daily viral videos show agents roughing people up, ignoring warrants, detaining U.S. citizens, and shooting Americans dead in the street, while the president and vice president declare they have "total authorization" to do so and "absolute immunity."

What other conclusion can you come to?

Americans must call it what it is.

Millions of people sense something is deeply wrong, but they're afraid to name it, as if saying it out loud makes the nightmare real. If you're reading this, you're probably not one of those people. You already know what you're watching. But your neighbors don't want to believe it. Your coworkers don't. Your family members don't. The president of the United States is building his own personal police force to break the law and enforce his will; I get why people are scared to acknowledge it.

So say this to them: If Trump's own supporters are now calling ICE the "Gestapo," then no one should be afraid to acknowledge what it is becoming.

What they should be afraid of is whether their conscience will allow them to keep denying it. History is unforgiving to those who looked away in the face of fascism, especially when the uniforms were still new and the victims were easy to dismiss. It starts with people saying, "Surely it can't be that."

Until it is.