Federal Agents Are Violating the Rights of Americans

ICE and the National Guard are acting with impunity.

By Anne Applebaum

A drawing of an American military-like officer in a city holds a ballot box.

Illustration by Ben Jones

January 9, 2026, 6 AM ET

Share

Save

A drawing of an American military-like officer in a city holds a ballot box.

Listen−

1.0x

+

0:0027:02

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week. In this episode, George Retes, a U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, recounts how he was detained by ICE and held for three days without explanation. The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum returns as host of Autocracy in America and talks with Margy O’Herron and Liza Goitein from the Liberty & National Security Program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice about the potential impact of these forces on elections in November.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Anne Applebaum.

[Music]

Applebaum: In this new season, I am going to ask how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of US politics, and introduce you to some of the Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. The president and his entourage are accumulating power in ways that seem familiar to me: this is exactly how elected leaders in other countries have distorted their democracies. I want to understand how these kinds of changes work here, and what they bode for the future.

George Retes: My name is George Retes Jr. I’m 25 years old. I was born and raised here in Ventura, California. I’m a father of two, and yeah, I’m a U.S. citizen. The day I was arrested by ICE agents was July 10.

Applebaum: This first episode will focus on an issue you’ve probably heard about: the transformation of America’s immigration and customs officers into a masked and heavily armed paramilitary, and the deployment of the National Guard to American cities, supposedly to defend them. Americans may think of this as a change that mostly affects illegal immigrants, but this new federal police force is also establishing standards of lawlessness, and they are operating with an assumption of impunity that is changing the lives of U.S. citizens as well.

George Retes has already felt the impact.

Retes: I was driving to my workplace, where I work as a contracted security guard. When I pulled up, there’s just cars on that entire road, bumper-to-bumper—people getting out, just cars driving around each other. And I was like, All right, well, I just need to make it to work. So I make my way through, and it’s just this roadblock of ICE agents just standing across the road.

[Music]

Retes: There’s people banging on trash cans and just yelling and stuff. I got out and I stood right by my car. I’m basically yelling at them, like, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m a veteran. I’m just trying to get to work. I’m not protesting. I’m just trying to get to work. I thought everything was gonna be okay, and they just were hostile from the get-go.

Like, You’re not going to work today. Get back in your car. Leave. So I end up getting back in my car, and they just all start walking in a line towards me, and they just surround my car. I have the agents on the side trying to pull on my door handles, trying to open my car door, yelling at me to get out, and the agents in the front of my car are telling me to reverse, contradicting what these other agents are telling me to do.

They end up throwing tear gas. And I’m in there choking, trying to plead with them, like, I can’t see; my car’s engulfed in smoke, and eventually they hit my window again, and it just shatters. Immediately, the moment it shatters, another agent sticks his arm through and sprays me in the face with pepper spray.

They just dragged me out of the car, threw me on the ground. They just immediately kneeled on my neck and back. There’s maybe four or five other agents just standing around us, just watching as they do this. And the entire time, they’re just questioning, like, Why was he arrested? basically. Like, they were confused themselves.

Eventually, they put me back in this unmarked SUV, and then they end up driving me to the detention facility in downtown L.A. They strip-search us, they do our fingerprints, take our pictures. My hands are burning. My face is burning from tear gas still, and the entire time I was in there, no phone call, no lawyer, no shower. No nothing.

I was detained for three nights and three days. That Saturday was my daughter’s third birthday party, and that was probably the worst feeling ever. She’s my princess. It was just terrible.

So Sunday, a guard ends up coming up and is just like, You’re off, like, He’s getting released, and that’s all he says. That was it. They’re like, You’re free to go. All the charges had been dropped; you’re free to go. And I just asked them, “So I basically was locked up and missed my daughter’s birthday for no fucking reason?” And they just were silent. They just stayed silent. I was given no explanation, no apology, just: That’s it.

[Music]

Retes: When I was locked up, just that entire time, I knew If I get out of here, I’m definitely gonna take legal action. I was gonna make my voice heard because that’s the only way to hold them accountable for what they did. Someone has to be held accountable. Treating people a certain way without dignity or respect or humanity is so fucking wrong. To not have any fucking rights, especially here in America, when that’s what we’re supposed to be all about—it’s wrong. It goes against everything we stand for. And so I hope that the justice system, even though I don’t believe it works all the time, I hope that in this case it works.

Applebaum: By one count from ProPublica, over 170 American citizens, like George Retes, have already been detained by ICE.

The unnecessary deployment of armed agents onto peaceful streets has also led to tragedy.

This week a woman was shot dead in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

Last September a man was shot and killed by ICE outside Chicago.

And last November, an Afghan refugee shot two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., and has been charged with the murder one of them, a 20-year-old woman from West Virginia. She had been deployed, frankly, for symbolic reasons, to demonstrate Trump’s control over the military, and over the nation’s capital, and she was murdered, it seems, because she served as a symbol of that American military power. The assailant has pled not guilty.

ICE, and the use of the National Guard to protect ICE, has been covered as immigration story, but America’s immigration and customs agents aren’t only being used for that purpose.

The Trump administration is also using ICE and the National Guard to project power, to demonstrate that it can operate without restraint, and in defiance of the law.

How is the deployment of these agents and soldiers legal? Has anything like this ever happened before? It seems any American can now be detained or harassed, or even killed. The American National Guard can be used as puppets in a presidential game—is that legal too?

I asked two experts from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU what we should be doing to secure our own safety, and to preserve our democracy. (We spoke before the killing in Minneapolis this week.)

Our first guest, Margy O’Herron, has documented the transformation of ICE. I started by asking her about the George Retes story and what ICE is supposed to do when it picks up a citizen. (And we should add here that ICE did not respond to questions from The Atlantic about the Retes case.)

Margy O’Herron: When ICE discovers that somebody is a citizen, they are supposed to release them right away. I think what you’re seeing, too, is just a bigger phenomenon of unchecked, chaotic deportation and arrest that is dangerous, and it risks all of our rights.

Applebaum: Okay, so citizens who are detained are supposed to have a certain set of rights, though even those now seem to be at risk. What about noncitizens?

O’Herron: There’s one key fact that I think is different, that I think is really important for folks to understand. And that is that the immigration system is considered a civil system. So this is not law enforcement in the sense of going after criminals. The great majority of immigrants in the system are actually only being charged with a civil offense, if anything, and that is: You are in the country without permission, and there is a civil process to remove you. Because of that, many of the rules that do apply in the criminal context, like right to counsel, do not apply in the civil context. But they’re operating much as if these folks are criminals. They’re arresting them. They’re detaining them. And the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do still apply to immigrants. They apply to immigrants in the same way that they apply to citizens. There’s no distinction in the law. So without those things, ICE is arresting people and taking people out of the country without any kind of process, without alerting them that they’re going, without allowing them to talk to a lawyer—that is not lawful; it’s unconstitutional. Those rights exist, and they should be protected.

Applebaum: Trump’s big spending bill, which he called the One Big Beautiful [Bill] Act, will allocate over $170 billion to border and immigration enforcement, with a significant amount going to ICE. Can you give us some idea of the scale of the spending? What does it allow ICE to do that’s different from what Immigration [and Customs Enforcement] was allowed to do in the past?

O’Herron: Just to put it in context, it’s $170 billion over four years, but across the country, all states and local law enforcement, in a year, spent about $135 billion [in 2021]. And the money going to ICE is triple what they were authorized before. And what it means is that the types of raids that we’ve seen and the scale of detention that we’ve seen are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s going to increase significantly as they start spending all of those funds.

Applebaum:  Also, of course, all this funding is going to law enforcement, and very little is going to the judges or the immigration courts that for a long time have been the places where people targeted for deportation were allowed to state their case or make their arguments.

O’Herron:  Exactly right. So you see a 400 percent increase in detention and a 14 percent increase for the number of judges. We’ve also seen attacks on the immigration courts and immigration judges. The administration has fired more than 80 immigration judges, mostly for no cause. They’re claiming this is the right of the president to decide who’s an immigration judge. One assumes that they’re being fired because their positions or history or background is something that this current administration does not like. And they’re proposing now to replace those fired immigration judges with military lawyers. And although there are excellent lawyers in the military, they are not trained as immigration judges. And without that training, without that background, it suggests that there’s something else at work. And the fear will be that those judges are there to rubber-stamp the administration’s broader deportation agenda.

Applebaum:  As the money starts to get spent, what are some changes that all of us will see, that people not directly involved in immigration, immigration enforcement, or who aren’t immigrants themselves—what will we see? How will we be affected?

O’Herron: I think we’ll see increased raids and surveillance the way that we’ve seen things happening in Chicago and Los Angeles—roving patrols of ICE agents and also other law enforcement that’s been assigned to support ICE, right? So we now have: Customs and Border Protection, which is used to operating at the border, is supporting ICE. We also have more than 2,000 other federal law-enforcement agents—I think The Washington Post reported that 25 percent of FBI agents are now detailed over to do law enforcement of civilians in the immigration system. And that’s a huge shift from having law enforcement go after who we’d consider to be bad guys, to instead go after immigrants who have done nothing except enter the country unlawfully. And even the number of people that have entered the country unlawfully is lower than the number of people that they’re arresting. Of the folks that are being arrested, 70 percent have absolutely no criminal background, and of the folks that do, there is a very slim number that have any kind of violent criminal background. Most have property crimes or—

Applebaum: Parking tickets, I read in one case.

O’Herron: Parking tickets, even. Correct. And so you’ve taken your FBI agent who’s well trained to go after a drug trafficker or child predator, and instead you have them going after a landscaper or a guy who works at the car wash—to go after civilians.

Applebaum: If this is illegal, if it breaks existing laws, why can’t courts seem to stop this kind of behavior?

O’Herron: I think the courts have been stopping this behavior, or at least they’re trying. There have been some really important rulings out of both Chicago and Los Angeles, which is where we’ve seen a lot of violence against immigrants in the last few months. A district court in Los Angeles, for example, ruled that ICE could not arrest immigrants without reasonable suspicion and couldn’t rely on certain factors, like race and speech, to support that reasonable-suspicion determination. That order was stayed by the Supreme Court, unfortunately. But in the intervening period, while the court’s order was in effect, those orders were followed.

Applebaum: But it’s not stopping them from continuing to arrest people.

O’Herron: Well, I think there is a sense from the top that the agents who are taking these actions are not gonna have any consequences for those actions. For example, there was a video that circulated quite broadly of a woman who was pushed by an ICE agent outside the New York immigration office. She was shoved across a hallway, and she fell. She ended up being hospitalized. Initially, ICE came out with a statement that said that type of action was unacceptable, but a few days later, it was reported that that ICE agent was back on the job.

The administration also has cut many of the oversight offices that are supposed to be places that compile and check that kind of abuse. These are really important offices that field thousands of complaints every year on exactly this kind of behavior. And instead, now we have to rely on the courts exclusively to take these actions.

Applebaum: Taking a step back, it seems that what you are saying is that we are granting a heavily armed federal police force permission to break the law with impunity. They are not punished for either illegal or unethical actions, and no one is keeping track.

O’Herron: You can still file a complaint with ICE. And even though that may seem like a futile exercise, it is really important for tracking what is happening. Those records are then available by [the Freedom of Information Act]. They’re available to Congress. They will be available to some future administration to be able to identify what has happened and provide redress.

Applebaum: It looks to me like the nature of immigration enforcement is changing, that it’s beginning to look something a lot more like the War on Terror.

O’Herron: Yeah, I think that’s right. What we now see is a very heavy, militarized law-enforcement presence with very little oversight. You’ve got ICE agents and their law-enforcement partners using—they’re dressed like military soldiers. They are using military weapons. They are rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters. They’re using flash-bang grenades to clear out buildings.  They’re zip-tying the elderly, children as a way of evacuating a building. These are tools that are used by armed soldiers against enemies—not that we use against civilians.

So I do think there is an effort to terrorize, to intimidate, and probably to get people to self-deport or to not come in the first place. And I think it also is an effort to enforce this narrative that we’re going after the worst of the worst. That has been the line that the administration has been using, but that’s not what they’re actually doing. By making it look like they need all of this backup, they need this heavy-duty equipment, it suggests that that is in fact what they’re doing. But the data does not support that claim.

Applebaum: So they’re trying to convince people that this is a real military operation against real terrorists. They even made a recruiting video out of the raid that deployed Black Hawk helicopters, making it seem something like the Marines in Iraq. But even that raid, it was allegedly meant to target a Venezuelan gang, and yet no one who was detained appears to be a member of a gang, or even a criminal. So it seems that it’s ordinary people.

O’Herron: Correct. Being pulled out of, you know, in the middle of the night to sit in the cold and wait for a chance to say that they’re a citizen.

[Music]

Applebaum: We’ve been talking about ICE, but that is only one aspect of the new military presence on America’s streets. The other is the National Guard.

Liza Goitein: To me, a police state is a place where the presence of, whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement, is so heavy that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave.

Applebaum: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Applebaum: In addition to ICE, President Donald Trump has also deployed the National Guard in several big cities. I’ve seen them hanging around Metro stops in Washington, D.C., fully armed, which I find very jarring. I asked my second guest, Liza Goitein, also of the Brennan Center, whether there are any precedents for this.

Goitein: No president has used the military domestically in the way that President Trump is using the military.

Applebaum: Never?

Goitein: Never. For street crime? In our nation’s history, presidents have deployed troops to quell civil unrest or to enforce the law a total of 30 times. And the last time was in 1992, so over 30 years ago.

So what we’re seeing now, not only has Trump deployed the military into American cities three times in just over eight months in office, compared to 30 times in the nation’s entire history before this, but he’s also doing it in circumstances where it just hasn’t been done this way before.

Applebaum: Right, so neither is the state asking for help, nor is the state acting in violation of federal law. So there’s no—none of the excuses that have ever been used before are being used.

Goitein: Exactly. I mean, the only time I think the military has been used for street crime was in Hawaii during World War II when Congress authorized martial law. And Hawaii wasn’t a state at the time. Having said that, the law is—it’s 10 USC § 12406. I wish it had a catchy name.

Applebaum: (Laughs.)

Goitein: It doesn’t. Okay, so I’m just gonna call it Section 12406. And that’s a law that allows the president to federalize National Guard forces. Now, this law has never been used to deploy troops to quell civil unrest, at least not on its own. He’s using it in an unprecedented way.

Applebaum: And he’s doing so on the grounds that there’s an emergency, right? He’s claiming he’s claiming emergency powers. There’s a very bad tradition of leaders using emergencies to do things that are illegal. I mean, it goes back to the 1930s and earlier.

Goitein: Well, yeah, and it’s a hallmark of authoritarian regimes around the world, because emergency powers free leaders from legal constraints that they would otherwise face. And so there’s obviously a temptation to either exploit real crises or to manufacture crises in order to act without these legal limits.

Applebaum:

Right. Of course the president has already used exaggerated claims about “unrest,” and therefore “emergency,” in Portland to try to justify the use of troops there, possibly after being shown outdated video. Historically, wars have also given leaders an excuse to crack down on protest or to claim emergency powers. You know in the run up to the U.S. incursion into Venezuela, I did wonder whether the purpose was to create a reason for the president to declare an emergency. Which leads me to the next question, which is whether the military is now at risk of becoming a political tool, used by the White House, not to defend Americans from their enemies, but to promote the President’s power or status and to punish his enemies.

Goitein: When soldiers are dragged into what is widely perceived to be a domestic political fight, that this—first of all, it’s really bad for the morale of the soldiers. That’s not why they enlisted. They don’t like being dragged into politics. But also, it undermines public trust in the military. When you do that, that really weakens our military, when it cannot appeal to and draw from all sectors of the U.S. population, when it loses the public confidence.

And you have to worry about the long-term effects on the military in terms of who is going to join up and who’s going to stay in the military. And increasingly, are we going to see that the people who enlist, the people who stay in the military, are people who either agree with the president’s political agenda, agree that the military should be used to police fellow Americans, or at least are okay with the military being used in that way? And that would very fundamentally and dangerously change what our military is.

Applebaum: Yeah. One of the sources of legitimacy of the U.S. military is that it is perceived as bipartisan, and it is perceived as an institution that protects all of us. And so, presumably, if it loses that, then it loses some of its legitimacy in the eyes of Americans.

Goitein: Absolutely. And that’s really one of the main dangers of what’s happening now that I think not enough people are focused on.

Applebaum: Let me ask you a different question about the future: Do you think, as some governors have warned, that the deployment of armed forces on our streets—National Guard, ICE, and others—will be used to shape public opinion in the run-up to midterm elections this year and maybe during the elections themselves?

Goitein: Yeah, there’s certainly a risk that the president would attempt to deploy troops around the time of an election on the theory that people are less likely to come out and vote if they think that the streets are gonna be full of, you know, heavily armed, federal law enforcement or military troops. That’s going to dissuade some people from getting out and exercising the right to vote.

You really have to worry that not only that this is happening so often—we’re seeing a routinization of the use of the military domestically—but also that we’re seeing a real creep in terms of what it’s being used for. So first it started with protests against ICE raids that were supposedly interfering with ICE’s ability to conduct those raids. Then it was general crime control in Washington, D.C., and you have to wonder what the next reason is going to be. Now, it might continue for a while to be crime control or, you know, protests. But the next reason could be claims of voter fraud, which is a phenomenon that is statistically almost nonexistent.

Applebaum: So you could imagine ICE or the military being used to police polling stations?

Goitein: Well, no, they can’t be used to police polling stations. No. The law very explicitly says that U.S. military and federal armed agents cannot be present at polling stations unless force is necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States. We do have these very strong laws in place that prohibit interference with elections generally and specifically by the military. So that’s off the table. Or at least if they were to do it, it would be flagrantly and obviously illegal.

Applebaum: So technically, we have laws on the books that should prevent troops from being used inside a polling booth. But this administration has already demonstrated that it’s willing to break laws. And maybe, one of the purposes of troop deployment in cities is just to create a general climate of fear, to make people afraid to participate in public life?

Goitein: I mean, it’s certainly the predictable effect of deploying the military on the streets on a sort of routinized basis—to change people’s behavior so that they are afraid to exercise their rights, so that they do behave differently.

So my concern is that we’re moving towards a status quo in which the cities of this country really feel like police states. And to me, a police state is a place where the presence of—whether it’s the federal military or law enforcement—is so heavy and the chill on people’s exercise of their rights is so acute that people are really kind of living in fear, and they’re changing the way they behave.

I personally know several people who are U.S. citizens or immigrants who are lawfully in this country, who have told me that they are staying inside as much as they can, and not going out unless they have to.

[Music]

Goitein: To me that kind of chill and that kind of change in behavior is what really marks life in a police state.

Applebaum: Thank you, Liza.

Goitein: Thanks for having me.

Applebaum: Autocracy in America is produced by Arlene Arevalo, Natalie Brennan, and Jocelyn Frank. Editing by Dave Shaw. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado and Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Anne Applebaum.

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Brandon LaRoque: Somehow I was hacked. I don’t know. And I still don’t even know how to this day. It was 1,210,000 XRP. It was our life savings. If I had President Trump’s ear, I would ask him to please work with Congress and make crypto safer and easier for everyone.

Applebaum: How the crypto industry is making billions for President Trump and his family, how ordinary consumers are losing money, and what that means for our democracy.

That’s next time.

https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/01/autocracy-in-america-ice-and-the-national-guard/685279/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5819988&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310917#49576547)