The word \u201cterrorist\u201d wasn\u2019t coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it in as the United States\u2019 go-to term for demonizing outsiders and dissenters alike. The so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d transformed the way the U.S. wields power at home and abroad, enabling mass surveillance and a crackdown on the right to free speech. It became reflexive for the U.S. to disparage immigrants and protesters as supporters of terrorism.<\/p>\n
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President Donald Trump has embraced this model and manipulated it for his own ends, as author Spencer Ackerman points out. The Trump administration often peddles spurious accusations of terrorism against the targets of its immigration raids.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing about any of their action that\u2019s remotely anything at all like terrorism,\u201d Ackerman says. \u201cBut that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n
This week on the Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Ackerman, a leading expert on the concept of terrorism and its weaponization by the state. Ackerman\u2019s 2021 book, \u201cReign of Terror, How the 9\/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,\u201d traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years, and how the boomerang has come back home.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore 9\/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn\u2019t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were serious criminals, traffickers, and so on,\u201d says Ackerman. Now, he says, the contemporary terrorism paradigm has transformed immigration enforcement into something \u201coperating like a death squad.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd now we\u2019re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE.\u201d With the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, \u201cI worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Democrats in Congress struggle to leverage DHS funding for changes to ICE policy \u2014 like a ban on face masks for ICE agents, an idea on which they\u2019ve already softened \u2014 Ackerman says the parallels with the early 2000s are clear.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans,\u201d advises Ackerman. \u201cReformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Transcript\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I\u2019m Jordan Uhl.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you didn\u2019t recognize the voices, 2026 might not sound so different from the years following 2001.\u00a0<\/p>\n
George W. Bush: We are on the offense against the terrorists on every battlefront, and we\u2019ll accept nothing less than complete victory.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump: These are paid terrorists, OK? These are paid agitators.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dick Cheney:\u00a0Terrorists remain determined and dangerous.<\/p>\n
Kristi Noem: It was an act of domestic terrorism.<\/p>\n
JD Vance: We\u2019re not going to give in to terrorism on this. And that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n
John Ashcroft: America has grown stronger and safer in the face of terrorism.<\/p>\n
JU: In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the so-called war on terror transformed the way the United States enforced its laws and its priorities, both at home and abroad. The label \u201cterrorist\u201d became a catchall for a wide range of actors, and dissent against the Bush administration was often disparaged as support for terrorism. The USA PATRIOT Act codified a reduction in civil liberties in the name of protecting freedom.<\/p>\n
Bush: As of today, we\u2019re changing the laws governing information sharing. And as importantly, we\u2019re changing the culture of our various agencies that fight terrorism. Countering and investigating terrorist activity is the number one priority for both law enforcement and intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n
JU: The day he put his signature on the Patriot Act, President George W. Bush laid out how those new priorities would include a focus on immigrants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bush: The government will have wider latitude in deporting known terrorists and their supporters.<\/p>\n
JU: It was largely an era of political consensus. Both major parties lined up to support the Patriot Act and other legislation giving greater legal latitude to the government, from local police all the way up to the president. But even then, there were plenty of warnings that these powers would be abused and stretched far beyond their intended goals.<\/p>\n
Supporters argued that there were backstops, like congressional oversight and international law, basic human decency and strategic restraint. But President Trump ignored and shattered so many of those long-standing norms. A glaring example is on display in the streets of U.S. cities right now.<\/p>\n
ICE was a post-9\/11 creation as part of the new Department of Homeland Security. In his book \u201cReign of Terror: How the 9\/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,\u201d author Spencer Ackerman traces the legal and cultural evolution of the last 25 years and how the boomerang has come back home.<\/p>\n
Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and many U.S. bases. He\u2019s won a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award, and currently writes for Zeteo and his own website, Forever Wars. Spencer, welcome to the Intercept Briefing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spencer Ackerman: Thanks for having me back, Jordan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
JU: So we\u2019re talking 25 years now since 9\/11. Many of our listeners \u2014 as well as working journalists, and even many people working on Capitol Hill right now \u2014 don\u2019t have any living memory of that time. So can you start off by bringing us back to the days and weeks after September 11? President George W. Bush essentially had carte blanche to pass laws and change policy based on the notion that he was making Americans safer; that we had to clamp down and, in some cases, give up some of our freedoms to ensure security. With hindsight, what were the most significant aspects of the newly born war on terror that have a clear through line to today?<\/p>\n
SA: Well, one that we saw just this week really take prominence is the Patriot Act, which among other things, enabled law enforcement to more seamlessly get \u201cthird-party records,\u201d as they\u2019re called \u2014 basically, customer accounts of records kept by some kind of service provider, financial records, internet records, and so on \u2014 without a judge\u2019s signature or a finding of probable cause. It occurs instead through something called an administrative subpoena that the Patriot Act supercharged.<\/p>\n
And we\u2019re seeing just this week, there was a very good piece in the Washington Post laying out the exponential growth in administrative subpoenas being used by DHS in order to get records that would otherwise require a court order to collect.<\/p>\n
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Now, when the Patriot Act passed, the idea was that this would be the FBI surreptitiously collecting information that would prevent terrorism and uncover active links to terror networks and so forth. There\u2019s not really much of a record of it having done that \u2014 certainly not a public one. But it definitely didn\u2019t envision what DHS is doing, which is harassing critics of ICE.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, a ton of critics at the time, when the war on terror was coalescing, recognized and stated that this was going to be where the war on terror led. That it was going to become a war on dissent, that it was going to criminalize a tremendous amount of both politics in general but also resistance to itself \u2014 that we\u2019re really seeing coalesce.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For the purposes of what we\u2019re tracking, what we also saw after 9\/11, is a complete sea change in how America conducted its immigration affairs. Something that I think people probably don\u2019t remember is that before 9\/11, not only was there no ICE, there wasn\u2019t really much in the way of a robust internal mechanism for finding and deporting people who were in the country illegally. When it did exist, it was for people who were like serious criminals, traffickers, and so on.<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security gets created after Bush\u2019s attorney general, John Ashcroft, pretty much takes over immigration enforcement because ICE\u2019s predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services, is under his purview. And what he starts doing is using it to round up immigrants \u2014 not just Muslim immigrants, although there was an immediate outcry for a clamp-down on Muslim immigration, certainly. But it was a way of shoe-horning a gestating border hysteria on the far right that 9\/11 gave a kind of new security context and accordingly opportunity to pursue.<\/p>\n
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Even then, the Bush administration did not wish to create a kind of agglutination agency that would kind of stick together all sorts of domestic security functions. That took the active intervention of moderate Democrats and some moderate Republicans, who were able to basically checkmate Bush over his concerns about such an agency being kind of too large for, you know, extent conservative perceptions of government using his own logic of counterterrorism. And there is really no way for Bush to argue himself out of that. So instead he accommodated himself to it. <\/p>\n
But even then, ICE, when it starts, has only 2,700 agents. By 2008, that becomes 5,000. ICE\u2019s budget until in something like 2016 was $6 billion. For a while in the intervening decade, it\u2019s hovered around $10 billion. Trump has now made it $85 billion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is an enterprise that operated fundamentally \u2014 well, I shouldn\u2019t say fundamentally different. I don\u2019t want to suggest that the INS was a benign agency, or that immigrant Americans didn\u2019t fear INS, much as they would come to fear ICE. Just that there were constraints, both legal, budgetary, and from a political perspective, cultural, that constrained interior immigration enforcement. That doesn\u2019t exist anymore. We have seen instead \u2014 to finish answering your question in a very long-winded way \u2014 a counterterrorism context transforms, in ways both direct and structural, the apparatus of American immigration to something that today is coalescing into something that I think we can see fairly clearly is on its way, if it\u2019s not there already, into operating like a death squad.<\/p>\n
JU: One thing we saw right away post-9\/11 was the demonization of Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, or anyone remotely resembling any of those categories. What kind of connection can we make between the rhetoric and actions of that era with how otherization and fear is being wielded these days against immigrants and other populations?<\/p>\n
SA: I see it as a rather straight line. The early years of the war on terror proved something that politicians, particularly in the Republican Party, but also in the Democratic Party, have been sort of chasing ever since to recover its potency \u2014 like chasing a high. And that\u2019s that the politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s \u2014 really persistent throughout, but especially in the early 2000s \u2014 completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked. It worked for a really long time. Eventually, it ceased working as well. But the fact that it worked can\u2019t be overstated. Because politicians afterward, particularly when there has been no criminal liability or even significant political liability for the atrocities that result, accordingly seek to do what works. And this works extremely well.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe politics of counterterrorism in the early 2000s \u2026 completely deterred opposition, silenced dissent, and intimidated resistance. And it worked.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a broad sense, one of the things that the war on terror did in particular to Muslims in this country was redefine terrorism away from being something that people throughout history have done across cultures, into \u201cterrorism\u201d is something that a certain kind of people are, and usually only them. That when people who do not look or worship like Muslims utilize violence for political purposes \u2014 that becomes defined as \u201ccounterterrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n
So there is a really, really firm connection in how we have seen not only the targets of ICE\u2019s raids, since the Trump administration returned to power, be described as terrorists. But now people like Marimar Martinez in Chicago, Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, when they\u2019re shot \u2014 and in the case of Good and Pretti, killed \u2014 by ICE, ICE and the broader political structure calls them terrorists.<\/p>\n
They have the first-mover communication choice of basically daring journalists, politicians, whomever to prove that they weren\u2019t in fact terrorists. There\u2019s nothing about any of their action that\u2019s remotely anything at all like terrorism. But that is the fire in which ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security was forged. You are going to find this in its DNA.<\/p>\n
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JU: As you wrote in your book, \u201cTrump had learned the foremost lesson of 9\/11: The terrorists were whomever you say they were.\u201d And I\u2019m curious about this seemingly expansive scope of this label. You\u2019ve written about how the \u201cterrorist\u201d label has predominantly been used against people of color, while white people like Timothy McVeigh get different treatment, both linguistically and legally. <\/p>\n
Do you think what we\u2019re seeing in the Twin Cities is a significant development \u2014 the government calling white activists \u201cterrorists\u201d \u2014and these are white people who present as average middle class, not so-called anarchists or \u201cantifa.\u201d Is this, in your mind, a significant shift in how the term \u201cterrorist\u201d is wielded and will be wielded?\u00a0<\/p>\n
SA: Yes, absolutely. Minnesota is kind of the next stanza in the [Martin] Niem\u00f6ller poem. The poem about, \u201cFirst they came for\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
ICE and CBP have a very long history of acting lawlessly. The conditions of ICE prisons, many of which are operated as for-profit enterprises with detainees being paid a dollar a day, have often been shown to be both violent and deeply neglectful. I have a friend who contracted Covid at the ICE detention center in Batavia, New York, for instance.<\/p>\n
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So what we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis is what ICE has done to the undocumented for a very long time. What we saw in places like Portland in 2020, where, certainly in Portland, CBP tactical units, known as BORTAC, opened fire with less-lethal rounds on protesters outside the Hatfield building. That was what they were willing to do \u2014 similarly, lawlessly stuffing people into unmarked vans for detention and so forth \u2014 to people deemed enemies of the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
And now we\u2019re seeing this happen to white people on the streets of Minneapolis for little more than filming ICE. In Renee Good\u2019s case, for possibly, slightly inconveniencing ICE vehicularly. And then, trying to comply with a contradictory order to get out of the way and then stay put, get outta the car, you know? And then with Alex Pretti \u2014 helping a woman up. <\/p>\n
What we\u2019re seeing is something we can\u2019t turn away from, and I worry that a tremendous amount of our political system is geared toward either, on the Republican side, rationalizing it, justifying it, or on the Democratic side, pretending as if this is some kind of abuse that can be exceptionalized, rather than something that has to do with this 25-year history of coalescing immigration enforcement in the context of counterterrorism.<\/p>\n
[Break]<\/p>\n
JU: In some cities, we see different relationships between local law enforcement and federal agencies, and that\u2019s been a contentious issue going back to the Joint Terrorism Task Forces enlisted during the height of the so-called war on terror. Now we hear more about the 287(g) agreements that are focused on giving immigration enforcement powers to local officers. Collaboration by city and county law enforcement agencies often depends on who\u2019s in charge and sometimes local community influence. How has this idea transformed local law enforcement over the past 25 years \u2014 situating local police and sheriffs as partners in fighting a war, essentially?\u00a0<\/p>\n
SA: First, in the literal sense, it deputizes local police into an immigration function. And the implications of that are both profound and subtle. Being undocumented in this country is a civil offense, not a criminal offense. And it\u2019s a misdemeanor, it\u2019s not a felony. So being undocumented in this country now all of a sudden becomes \u201claw enforcement-related.\u201d It becomes a matter that is quickly understood in a kind of everyday person\u2019s sense of association as something that is being done by cops. <\/p>\n
And so cops are going after criminals. They\u2019re not going after someone who overstayed a work visa. The person who overstayed a work visa is presumed to have done so because they\u2019re criminal. That is a profound shift that nativists 30 years ago could only have as the apple of their eye. That\u2019s now normal in this country.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Beyond that, beyond the kind of mimetic and cultural functions there, what the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s relationship with local police over the vast majority of DHS\u2019s existence was a patron-client relationship. There\u2019s always been a lot of focus, and not inappropriately, on the [1033] Pentagon program that takes decommissioned military equipment and gives them to law enforcement. Appropriately so.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress.\u201d<\/p>\n
DHS\u2019s grant programs to local law enforcement have always dwarfed them, in terms of budgetary capability. There is not very much terrorism in the United States of America of the sort that DHS was created to redress. However, DHS had a budget to give out to local law enforcement, you know, cop shops, that applied for grant money that it would have to disperse. <\/p>\n
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The overall point is not only was DHS for such a long time a supplier of equipment that cops did not need for terrorism, but could find a whole lot of value out of when using against their existing tasks \u2014 which means, in a lot of cases, against the people it polices. But also, it accustomed police shops to look at DHS as a source of support that didn\u2019t have to go through existing and potentially contentious budgetary processes locally that municipal, small-d democratic functions have power to effect. It\u2019s not the most potent power. I\u2019m telling you this from New York City where the NYPD has for a very long time been considered pretty much untouchable. But nevertheless, this is a more friction-free funding path than troublesome city councils.\u00a0<\/p>\n
JU: And to continue this line of thought on weaponry, it\u2019s one thing to have a heavily armed Border Patrol if they legitimately believe they may encounter a \u201cviolent drug cartel.\u201d But the images we\u2019re seeing of immigration agents in residential U.S. neighborhoods with body armor and advanced weaponry brings to mind the militarization of local police and federal agencies that\u2019s taken place since 9\/11. <\/p>\n
You talked about the equipment, you\u2019ve talked about the vehicles. There are local police departments with MRAPs. Across the board, top-down from federal agencies down to local, it feels like a war that\u2019s literally everywhere. What\u2019s been the arc of that evolution?\u00a0<\/p>\n
SA: Markets for advanced military technology get spurred on by overseas war. Eventually, those wars draw down beyond the funding capabilities of those different technological production lines. Those different technological production lines will seek out derivative markets that they can use to keep making money. That has been local law enforcement, but before that, it\u2019s been DHS. <\/p>\n
Starting around the first Obama administration, DHS, particularly for the border, starts buying up a drone fleet. Then it starts buying up really powerful military-grade camera suites that had previously been developed for protecting U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. DHS buys this stuff. It provides funding for \u2014 as we were just talking about \u2014 local police agencies to eventually start buying other stuff that DHS has.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no Gray Eagle-sized drone in police custody in the country yet. But we\u2019ll talk in 10 more years, and we\u2019ll see about that. DHS provides funding to get similar technologies, related technologies, and then it pushes what it currently has beyond the border into the interior of the country.<\/p>\n
We should also mention that the border after 9\/11 changes in important ways, where DHS \u2014 this is for the last 15 years at least been policy at CBP \u2014 the border is anywhere within 100 miles of a port of entry or exit. So if you\u2019ve wondered, why is the Border Patrol in, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina, or Chicago or Minneapolis \u2014 that\u2019s why. Because your sense of the border intuitively is not the U.S. government\u2019s definition of the border.<\/p>\n
Eventually we see this stuff move into the interior of the United States. The roundups, which had been there since at least 2005, become more ambitious, and they become, with the 287(g) program, involving local law enforcement as well as the Department of Homeland Security \u2014 and now increasingly toward critics of DHS itself. <\/p>\n
I want to say one more thing about this. When we look at what ICE and CBP deploy with, in all of the cities that we\u2019ve seen them invest since the second Trump administration \u2014 a common denominator has been they\u2019re all wearing plate carriers. The stuff that says like police, ICE, and so forth, you know, the ballistic chest protection that they wear around them.Marimar Martinez legally had a gun. She didn\u2019t draw it; she kept it holstered in her car. They called her a domestic terrorist. Her hands were on the steering wheel when ICE shot her. <\/p>\n
\u201cICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alex Pretti famously had a gun, not that he drew it on CBP. When they shot him, six of them shot this man who is completely not in any position to be threatening them. ICE and CBP are posturing as if they are the ones under the threat, not that they are the threat themselves. <\/p>\n
All of this social media footage-ready imagery that they\u2019ve been collecting and disseminating is what we should understand as a psy-op on the American people to make it think that these are a valorous Praetorian Guard that puts itself in danger constantly. Instead, they are the ones inflicting the danger on Americans, undocumented or citizens.<\/p>\n
JU: Now we talked about this evolution \u2014 part of that is an expansive or unchecked legal infrastructure and framework that allows this. Over the past two decades-plus, were there moments when that infrastructure could have been dialed back or unraveled? Times when Trump wasn\u2019t president? Did that happen to any extent? And if not, why not?<\/p>\n
SA: There are many reasons to be deeply upset at the way the Obama and Biden administrations treated the institutions of the war on terror that they inherited. But really chief among them is the way that they embraced the existing structures of homeland security for use against immigrants.<\/p>\n
Obama \u2014 famously the deporter in chief, always under pressure from his right to deport more. Obama famously makes the massive miscalculation that if he can just, you know, bolster resources for border protection, then he can buy goodwill on the right. This was just an epic political miscalculation that really everyone could have seen coming, and many did.<\/p>\n
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Biden \u2014 4.4 million deportations on his watch; Trump left office the first time at 1.5 million. After everything that we saw the Trump administration do the first time around, in particular with child separation, with raising the number of people in ICE custody to something like 50,000 a day \u2014 I don\u2019t know if they\u2019ve gotten back to that, if they\u2019ve exceeded that by now or not. But I remember reporting on it at the time that it was in 2020, it had gotten up to, maybe a little before the pandemic, something like 50,000 a day. It was really astonishing.<\/p>\n
But Biden famously tells his donors ahead of the election that they\u2019re not gonna seek fundamental change. And I think that by the time the Biden administration takes office, the Democratic Party had successfully marginalized the voices that were calling, not just for pursuing once again, comprehensive immigration reform \u2014 which of course is stifled by the Republicans again and again and again \u2014 but to abolish ICE.<\/p>\n
I think right now we are at, you know, years before a Democrat could theoretically take power. But we\u2019re starting to see Democratic politicians go down the same very dangerous road along the politics of security that they\u2019ve played not just during the Biden administration or the first Trump administration, but throughout the war on terror. <\/p>\n
\u201cUnless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n
And they\u2019re doing it with ICE now, which is we\u2019re starting to hear people say things like, \u201cThis is not immigration enforcement.\u201d It\u2019s true. This is not what I think many people think of as immigration enforcement. But immigration enforcement is how we got to this point. And unless the nativist concept of the need for an interior deportation force is confronted root and branch, we are going to continue to see exactly what we are seeing. Not as a form of stasis, but as a form of ICE and CBP completing their transformation into a death squad.<\/p>\n
And I use a very scary term because this is a very scary moment. But we also need to be really clear about what we are seeing ICE do and behave as. You mentioned it\u2019s unwillingness to follow the law. In Minnesota, a judge found just before January of 2026 expired, around 100 violations of court orders about immigration and how ICE needed to behave, in just that month. How many gleeful videos do we have to see on our phone of ICE people telling Minnesotans to \u201cfuck around and find out\u201d? Beyond even just the actual murders and shootings \u2014 but the way that the CBP officers applauded after shooting Alex Pretti? The way Jonathan Ross, who murdered Renee Good, called her a \u201cfucking bitch\u201d after doing so? This is not something that can be reformed. The best time to abolish ICE was 2003. The second best time is today.<\/p>\n
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Every single moment that we refrain from doing this, that Democratic politicians as well as Republican ones try and push it back to the margins of political discourse, is another day closer to the time that they\u2019re going to shoot you, that they\u2019re going to deport someone you love, and on and on and on.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not something that can be reformed.\u201d<\/p>\n
JU: There\u2019s a sinister delight that we see time and time again from federal agents beyond the comments or behavior after both of those Minnesotans were killed. But we\u2019ve seen many other videos of them wielding those incidents to other observers as threats. And to your point, that\u2019s not something that you can fix with a sensitivity training. That is something ingrained in the culture. And I\u2019m curious what could be done? It doesn\u2019t seem like there\u2019s a critical mass of Democrats willing to do that. Maybe there is and or maybe we might get to one, but that\u2019s down the road. And you of course have the challenge of the current Supreme Court composition not wanting to challenge anything that Trump is doing meaningfully. So realistically, what can people hope for or work towards in terms of turning this imperial boomerang around?\u00a0<\/p>\n
SA: First, the answer to how you stop the war on terror is not easy, but it is simple. And that\u2019s organize. Force your politicians in an abolitionist direction; oust them when they won\u2019t go in that direction. Organize so you can build power amongst like-minded people in your area, in order to produce that function. It\u2019s awful that that\u2019s where we kind of have to start from, but our leaders will not do this on their own.<\/p>\n
Outside of that I would look to efforts that the Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is building toward, in which he\u2019s been talking about, however long it takes, prosecuting ICE and CBP agents for violating relevant local laws. And one of the main lessons of the war on terror is that without legal consequence for one era\u2019s atrocity, the next is foreordained.<\/p>\n
So until ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior. This is why JD Vance and Stephen Miller have started deceitfully talking about absolute immunity for ICE after they killed Renee Good.<\/p>\n
\u201cUntil ICE killers and CBP kidnappers alike go to prison, we can expect them to continue their behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
Krasner has been hinting that there is a kind of impromptu coalition of like-minded district attorneys and perhaps state attorneys general that are seeking to go in this direction. That will either act as a deterrent, or it won\u2019t. Here in New York, the attorney general, Letitia James, announced that she\u2019s going to start sending observers from her office out on ICE-related operations in and around the state. That carries with it a suggestion of prosecutorial intervention. I think that\u2019s going to be a crucial step. But it\u2019s a step that is going to have to come in supplement, with people finding political outlets for an explosion in popularity \u2014 justifiably so, in my opinion \u2014 for abolishing ICE.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t move in reformist directions when the thing talked about being reformed laughs at killing Americans. This is something that has to be uprooted and replaced, or just simply not replaced at all, if we don\u2019t think certain functions that they perform are legitimate functions, which I think is a very, you know, reasonable conclusion. Reformist politics under two Democratic administrations got us to where we are now. These are accommodationist politics, and the thing being accommodated wants to kill you.<\/p>\n
JU: My final question for you, Spencer, is where does this go over the next three years if nothing happens? If there is no restraint, if there is no change, if there is no reform. That is certainly an uphill fight. Nothing could potentially happen until at least after midterms, but we\u2019ve seen Trump\u2019s priorities laid out in places like Project 2025, and I can\u2019t imagine this is their end game. So if left untouched, where does this go over the next three years?\u00a0<\/p>\n
SA: We\u2019ve been seeing reporting from Ken Klippenstein and others about how ICE is accessing existing, widely revealing, databases of Americans\u2019 information, building others. We saw in the beginning of the Trump administration, the massive data-snatching grabs involving DOGE that have also accumulated a tremendous amount of revealing information on Americans. This is also, I would suggest, the predictable course of the surveillance state after 9\/11. These massive and revealing data sets will go into ICE custody, probably through tools purchased from Palantir, to get an ever more refined picture of terrorism in the United States. Except by terrorism, they mean you and me. They will mean people that they can consider internal dissenters, critics, obstacles to the continued operations of ICE, and like-minded allied federal agencies.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can\u2019t stop thinking about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
This, I think, is probably coming sooner than three years. Not to sound alarmist, but the current trajectory of this is really, really ominous. And that is an extremely realistic possibility. Your friend and mine, Derek Davison of the American Prestige podcast a couple months ago, was predicting that it might not be long before we see a drone strike in an American city. And I can\u2019t stop thinking about that. And I wish I could say I found that an outlandish possibility. But the crucial framework for that was laid when the Obama administration decided that they could execute an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without any kind of criminal process, let alone a conviction, because it would be too inconvenient to send a team of CIA operatives to kidnap him.<\/p>\n
It won\u2019t be long, I think \u2014 as long as that Chekov\u2019s president remains blessed by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice \u2014 before we start seeing that applied on American soil. And those are some places that I think are realistic possibilities for what we might see unless this apparatus is aggressively dismantled.<\/p>\n
JU: That is absolutely chilling. And in some way, I\u2019m at a loss for words, just something that I never thought we might encounter. But that is a situation we seem to be finding ourselves in. Spencer, as always, I appreciate your insight, your analysis, and thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.<\/p>\n
SA: Thank you, Jordan.<\/p>\n
JU: That does it for this episode.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This episode was produced by Andrew Stelzer. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.<\/p>\n
Slip Stream provided our theme music.<\/p>\n
If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com\/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven\u2019t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.<\/p>\n
If you want to send us a message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.<\/p>\n
Until next time, I\u2019m Jordan Uhl.\u00a0
\nThe post \u201cTerrorist\u201d: How ICE Weaponized 9\/11\u2019s Scarlet Letter appeared first on The Intercept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The word \u201cterrorist\u201d wasn\u2019t coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-investigate-unsolved-mysteries"],"yoast_head":"\n