Ice Recruitment Poster

The killing of two American citizens who were demonstrating against aggressive ICE/CBP operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in early January has generated renewed concern about the immigration function of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in particular, ICE. Everything, from ICE’s bloated budget and expansion (it is now the highest-funded federal police organization in the United States) to its recruitment methods, has come under increased scrutiny. One of the things that has received less scrutiny, though, is the way DHS has branded itself and ICE in its recruitment and other public communications, and in many ways this is as troubling as the aggressive, questionably legal way the agency’s employees conduct themselves on the street.

In DHS recruitment materials and other encounters with the public since January 2025, there has been a noticeable presence of Nazi and white supremacist overtones in messaging. The administration has pushed back hard against such descriptions. While the messaging being used by DHS is not a verbatim version of Nazi propaganda, when taken in conjunction with other actions, the similarities are disturbing. The white supremacist slant of DHS is nothing new. Historically, DHS has been criticized for having white supremacist and anti-government personnel in its ranks, and since the beginning of the second Trump administration, a number of top DHS leaders and other officials dealing with immigration issues have come from groups that are part of the organized anti-immigrant movement. There has been an increase in near-Nazi, white nationalist content in the DHS recruiting and social media over the past year, some of it subtle, such as messages about the loss of (white) American culture, but a lot of it bearing overt nationalist and antisemitic imagery.

The Nazification and White Nationalization of ICE hasn’t been restricted to just slogans. The conduct and dress of ICE as currently deployed on American streets bears a disturbing resemblance to the 1930s. The dress and haircut of former on-scene ICE commander, Gregory Bovino, for example, with his distinctive brass-buttoned, calf-length greatcoat and his Himmler-like haircut. As he appeared on the streets with his masked ICE thugs, pepper-spraying and physically abusing demonstrators and media, he evoked images of a senior SS officer presiding over aggressive raids in the name of the Führer. Two days after an ICE agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, DHS released a recruitment post on Instagram with the title “We’ll Have Our Home Again,’ along with a song of the same name that is popular on neo-Nazi spaces.

While the DHS rebuttal that its messaging is not ‘literal’ Nazi propaganda, the combined impact cannot be ignored, and the persistent use of such imagery tends to undercut the claims of innocence. The messages display a recurring theme, picturing ICE as the ‘crusading knights’ defending the ‘homeland’ against ‘alien invaders.’ That the knights are all white and the invaders are people of color is telling. If it’s deliberate, DHS is lying to the public. If it’s out of ignorance, it’s still inexcusable and equally frightening. The cumulative, long-term impact of this brand of propaganda is corrosive and will take a long time to erase. There isn’t a one-to-one direct parallel between the US today and Nazi Germany of the 1930s, but there doesn’t have to be. The damage is being done, and that’s what matters.

One final word on comparisons. Anti-ICE activists compare ICE to the Gestapo, a comparison that I strongly disagree with. The Gestapo, or State Security Police, of Nazi Germany was a disciplined, well-organized, intelligent organization, completely unlike today’s undisciplined ICE. A more accurate, though not necessarily totally accurate comparison would be the Sturmabteilung (SA), Hitler’s Brownshirts, a paramilitary organization founded in 1921, whose mission included intimidating opponents and disrupting activities of rival political parties through the use of violence. A historical note to those promoting ICE right now: after Hitler consolidated his power, the SA’s influence was significantly reduced, and many of its members were imprisoned or executed, falling victim to the very regime it helped bring to power.

The excesses of ICE in Minnesota might be forcing the administration to reevaluate its methods. Or it might just be forcing them to change the messaging. Pulling back on the violence and intimidation would be welcomed, but if it continues to use its current messaging to recruit, what we see is a temporary ceasefire, not an end to the war on the American people.

Charles A. Ray served 20 years in the U.S. Army, including two tours in Vietnam. He retired as a senior US diplomat, serving 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, with assignments as ambassador to the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Republic of Zimbabwe, and was the first American consul general in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He also served in senior positions with the Department of Defense and is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

The Steady State takes the opportunity to re-publish this essay that continues to be very timely.

The Trump Administration’s cascading lawlessness has now made us easy prey to “news fatigue” and its dangerous corollary – considering outrageous behavior as somehow normal or acceptable. This is one reason the national outpouring on October 18 of the “No Kings” protest was so heartening. Millions of people showed that they are determined not to accept the Administration’s destruction of our democracy.

However, sustaining that commitment is vital. Otherwise, as we know from examples all over the world, what can happen to ordinary citizens, once a country slides into autocracy, is ugly. Let’s look at the Cold War, when for fifty years after World War II, the Soviet Union (which lasted until 1991) and its client Communist police dictatorships in Eastern Europe represented the chief geopolitical threat to the United States. Over a period of fifteen years, from the late 1970’s to the mid-90’s, Foreign Service assignments sent me to live and work in or near this region. Conditions varied, of course, from country to country, but the following is typical of what I saw.

Everyone knows that in those countries, some basic rights, such as freedom of speech, did not exist. But their governments – themselves creatures of the ruling Communist Parties, which alone decided what was the truth – controlled domestic intelligence capabilities and secret police who possessed complete freedom to do as they wished. Written laws “guaranteeing” rights did exist, but they could be officially ignored or changed at will. Anyone could be rousted out of bed, swept off the street, interrogated, or imprisoned, under whatever charges the state chose. Trials were only for show, and sentences were similarly arbitrary.

With the state monopolizing information sources, citizens were cut off from everything but official propaganda, unless they could listen to foreign news broadcasts (itself a crime) or obtain access to other information smuggled in. That meant the leadership’s deeds and whims dominated the nation’s affairs. Civil society as we know it did not exist; every organization to which the individual could belong – Scouts-equivalents or sports clubs, for instance – was a coercive state instrument, directed by the Party, molding conformity. The state had unfettered access to personal information. Privacy – even in a pre-facial-recognition software age – did not really exist, and state organs’ activities were only restricted by those offices’ disputes with each other or the leader(s) changing their minds.

The state was the only source of reward and punishment. Promotions at work, allotment of scarce consumer goods (a consequence of inequitable and mismanaged economies), precious travel privileges (but no farther than within the Communist world), access to tiny amounts of power (always meant for serving the state, often granted for spying on family, friends, and neighbors) – all arbitrarily doled out by the authorities. Individual success could only be defined within these limitations; striving for anything else brought conflict with the state. Perversely, those tiny bits of privilege themselves became instruments of control, because they could be just as capriciously taken away as awarded. Factories, offices, and other workplaces all had “minders”; i.e, party representatives whose job was to monitor political “reliability.”

With so little to reach for – since there was no correlation between effort and reward – no one had any incentive to exert oneself. Economic innovation and quality control disappeared. Firms gained nothing by attempting to produce more or better goods, and in fact were hampered at even trying, since their suppliers were subject to the same pressures. While money remained a necessity, its value declined as little could be bought with it. In some countries, alternative, informal currencies circulated – chiefly American cigarettes, which, of course, were not on sale anywhere. They were far too valuable to smoke, and people would go to incredible lengths to try to get them.

Over the decades, individuals lost the will to resist things they found objectionable. The incentives to just “go along” became too great, as each person tried to preserve a private space, away from the state and party, in which to be left alone. But the penalties for non-conformity also increased, forcing people to make greater and greater compromises with their consciences in order to stay relatively unscathed. Everyone was also plagued by how their families were exposed. Nothing hindered the state from inflicting punishments on spouses or children. A seven-year-old son wanted to join the only youth group going in order to be with his friends (even though its main purpose was indoctrination and manipulation), but whose parent, aunt, or uncle had stepped out of line? Probably didn’t happen. One’s daughter, having done very well in high school, was in line for top honors, but through no fault of her own, bore similar baggage? Also very unlikely. To say nothing of bigger stakes, like university places or better jobs denied.

The long nightmare for Eastern Europeans did finally come to an end (in Russia, things have been another story), and much of it was due to popular revolt – people had just had enough. But millions of lives were ruined in the meantime.

The frightened, chaotic, dangerous America Trump is making every effort to convince us exists, does not. His remedies would probably not deliver the uniform model described above; we are too big and diverse a country for that. But we also have no need to turn desperately to a strongman/dictator to save us. Don’t be fooled into thinking that we do.

Tom Wolfson is a former senior U.S. diplomat who has lived and worked in six foreign countries, occasionally multiple times. His work representing the U.S. has included assignments at the United Nations, in the U.S. Congress, and with an international democracy-building organization. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 340 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

In the latest episode of the Sentinel podcast, The Steady State Chair and seasoned diplomat Jim O’Brien denounces one-man rule and transactional foreign policy decisions in conversations with host Peter Mina, criticizing the Trump-created environment of cruelty that shadows our nation.

Listen on Apple Podcasts or your preferred platform. New episodes every Tuesday, special features on Fridays until March.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.

I served as a Senate staffer in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and was part of the effort that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. In the days and months after the attacks, Washington was shaken in a way that is difficult to convey to those who did not experience it firsthand. Nearly three thousand people had been murdered in a coordinated assault on the United States, and it was widely believed that more attacks were likely. There was an overwhelming sense—shared across party lines—that the U.S. government was not effectively organized to meet what seemed, at the time, a terrifying and novel threat: transnational Islamist terrorism, embodied by al-Qa’ida.

The response was a massive reorganization of the federal government, the largest since the creation of the Department of Defense. Disparate functions, immigration enforcement, border control, emergency management, presidential protection, port security, and others, were brought together under a single new cabinet-level department. The theory was straightforward: unity of effort would bring speed, coordination, and effectiveness. The costs of fragmentation, we believed, were simply too high.

But even at the moment of its creation, there was a bipartisan recognition that what we were doing was fraught with danger. Concentrating coercive and protective power inside a single institution is efficient, but efficiency cuts both ways. The same machinery that can prevent attacks can also be turned inward, to our own society.. Protective efficiency can become equally efficient tyranny.

Many of us were acutely aware of that risk which was a regular topic of conversation and debate. More than once, sometimes seriously, sometimes darkly, and sometimes a bit tongue-in-cheek, we referred to the worst-case outcome as creating a “Ministry of Interior.” It was not a hypothetical phrase. Ministries of Interior are often a feature of authoritarian systems, particularly in the former Soviet Union and its client states. In authoritarian states, similar institutions become the institutions responsible not merely for law enforcement, but for political control: surveillance, internal security, intimidation, and the suppression of dissent. We recognized that many non-authoritarian states have Ministries of Interior, including many of our allies. But the Ministry of Interior as a shorthand reference to the former Soviet Union and other dictatorships, rang, and still rings, true.

We tried, consciously, to mitigate that risk.

Guardrails were built in, some internal, some external. We allowed, even designed for, a degree of inefficiency. The Department was divided into semi-autonomous “components.” Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, each with distinct authorities, cultures, and chains of command. This internal friction was often frustrating. It slowed decision-making. It annoyed operators. But it was intentional. Fragmentation was a feature, not a bug.

We also limited intelligence authorities. Rather than granting DHS broad, free-standing intelligence powers, Congress created a narrowly scoped Office of Intelligence & Analysis, led by a Senate-confirmed Under Secretary. The idea was to ensure that intelligence activity inside DHS would be subject to meaningful oversight, integrated into the broader Intelligence Community, and constrained by law. DHS was not meant to become a domestic intelligence leviathan. It was meant to be a coordinating department, not a political police.

In retrospect, it is clear that we failed due to a tragic lack of imagination. We did not anticipate the election of a president who in fact admired the Soviet model, who would seek to suppress our citizens, to scare and intimidate rather than to protect. We assumed that any American president would instinctively recoil from the idea of centralized internal security power being used for political ends. That assumption was wrong.

A would-be autocrat does what autocrats always do, and must do. He gathers the tools of repression and coercion, consolidates them, and deploys them to enhance and protect power. This is not a matter of ideology or temperament; it is structural. Authoritarianism requires enforcement. It requires fear. It requires institutions capable of acting quickly, forcefully, and with minimal accountability.

That is what we are confronting now.

The Department of Homeland Security has, in effect, become a tool of a dictator, our Ministry of Interior. Its sprawling law-enforcement elements have been remade into a paramilitary force: heavily armed, lightly restrained, and increasingly insulated from meaningful oversight. Immigration enforcement, in particular, has been transformed from a regulatory and investigative function into a domestic security apparatus operating in American communities with a posture that looks far less like civilian law enforcement and far more like internal security services abroad.

We now have our own version of the Soviet KGB, Russian FSB without the name, an East German Stasi, a Serbian MUP without the uniform. The labels differ, but the logic is the same. Centralize authority. Blur legal boundaries. Normalize force. Declare opponents dangerous. Treat dissent as disorder.

The warning signs were always there. Many of us saw them. Some of us said so, quietly at first, then more openly. We built guardrails for a system that assumed an executive who would respect the rule of law. That assumption no longer holds. And when it collapses, the machinery in place is his to use, in whatever way he deems is in his interest .

None of this is accidental. None of it is unprecedented. And none of it is unfamiliar to those who have spent careers studying how democracies erode from within.

A Ministry of Interior was always a risk. We are living with the consequences of refusing to believe that it could ever happen here.

Steven A. Cash served as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before joining the CIA in 1994 as Assistant General counsel and subsequently serving as an intelligence officer in the Directorate of Operations. Until January 20, 2025, he served as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Intelligence & Analysis at DHS. In 2001 he joined the Senate Select committee on Intelligence as Counsel and designee-staffer to Senator Diane Feinstein. He later served as a senior staffer in the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, at the Department of Energy, and on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security . In the private sector he has advised on national security, counterintelligence, and technology policy and served on the Biological Sciences Experts Group under the Director of National Intelligence. Mr. Cash is currently the Executive Director of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.