Any cold war spy novel or movie worth your time will eventually mention East Germany’s secret police known as the Stasi, officially called the “Ministry for State Security” (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in German), which operated from 1950 to 1990 and was among the most hated and feared institutions of any of the cold war communist governments. It had a large, centralized structure with a vast network of informers; at its peak, it could boast around 90,000 full-time employees and an estimated 174,000 unofficial collaborators. Officially, there was one Stasi secret policeman per 166 East Germans but if regular informers and collaborators were counted there was an estimated one Stasi-connected person per every six citizens. The Stasi used intimidation, surveillance, and torture to maintain control amongst the East German population as a means of safeguarding the communist regime and suppressing any opposition to the ruling Socialist Unity Party of East Germany.
The night before the Senate voted on Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” JD Vance summed up the administration’s priorities – to hell with ballooning the budget deficit, so what if millions lose their healthcare, because all of that “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is hands down the real beneficiary of the Big Beautiful Bill. While we focused on how cuts to healthcare and food programs for the less fortunate average about $120bn each year over the next decade and the tax cuts will save households earning more than $500,000 about $120bn a year (nice symmetry, that!), we took our eyes off the fact that the Department of Homeland Security is allocated $170bn with which it intends to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, bringing the total to 30,000. The FBI has about 23,700 employees, including only a measly 10,000 agents.
In addition, ICE will receive $45bn for immigrant detention, to be spent over four years; that is more than the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations, combined. For comparison, it’s five times the entire annual budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons ($8.6 billion).
So ICE will become the largest domestic police force in the US; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance agency and prison system in the country combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI, the “official federal police force,” and it will, in fact, be bigger than the military of many countries.
There are nearly 48 million immigrants in this country, three-quarters of whom are citizens, green-card holders, or have temporary visas. 10.9 million US residents were born in Mexico, making them the largest immigrant group in the United States in 2023, 23% of the total immigrant population. And when ICE runs out of Mexicans to deport, they will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize, and detain anyone the administration considers a “threat” or just undesirable.
It’s our very own 21st century Stasi.
When you zoom out, this cash windfall for ICE, along with the blurring of the boundaries between federal and local law enforcement we are seeing in Los Angeles, starts to create a picture of a planned, purposeful, and coherent police state.
Last Monday, a phalanx of armed federal agents (ICE and “federalized” CA national guard troops) swept through Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood, with the skyline of the city in the background. The park was, for the most part, empty, and the scene, which included troops on horseback and others in armored military vehicles, one of which had a mounted rifle, looked like something out of a war movie. This really captured the reality of the moment for me: Los Angeles is an occupied city – not by a foreign invader, but by our own federal government.
Mayor Bass posted this video to X:
Let’s call this what it is: intimidation. And its not just parks! Or Home Depots. How about churches? Bishop Alberto Rojas, the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of San Bernardino (in which Palm Springs is located), has formally excused 1.5 million Catholics from their weekly obligation to attend Mass following immigration sweeps resulting in detentions at two Catholic parishes in the area. All of this has created a climate of extreme anxiety: I know one person who cancelled a doctor’s appointment out of fear he could get caught up in a raid (he looks very Mexican because he is very Mexican) and another who nixed a trip to the DMV to renew license plate tags because “you never know where they’re going to turn up.”
And the Big Beautiful Bill says: “yes!…let’s have more of this.”