The ICE Murders Surge

We’ve discussed a number of times that the high-profile/high-violence occupations of blue cities in 2025 and early 2026 were never designed to maximize deportations. They were meant to overawe and terrorize the city’s inhabitants and the sovereign state governments of those jurisdictions. The public blowback became too extreme and then, along with canning Kristi Noem, DHS/ICE switched to focusing on deportation numbers without most of the high-visibility operations which weren’t really aimed at deportation numbers in the first place. But there have been an increasing number of reports over the last few weeks suggesting that ICE/DHS is intensifying its efforts and upping the number of arrests and detentions. It seems highly likely, though not certain, that the two recent ICE-involved shooting fatalities in the last week — one in Houston and another just today in Maine — are tied to that intensified push for deportation arrest numbers. ICE agents tend to be poorly trained and operate in a culture of violence and impunity. So events like these could happen at any time. But keep an eye on the relationship between the two things. DHS/ICE has been trying to intensify its efforts while avoiding the headlines which were so damaging last winter. But the rapid resorts to fatal violence and the culture of impunity that sustains it, so embedded within Trump Era ICE’s culture, seems to be breaking through.