They’re Turning America’s Police Into a Paramilitary Force And the Bill Lands on Your Doorstep

The ICE shake-up puts Border Patrol in charge of domestic enforcement. Economists warn the fallout could cost American families thousands.

Oct 29, 2025

Tuesday, October 28th, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced a sweeping leadership overhaul: at least 12 field-office directors nationwide are being reassigned, representing about half of ICE’s 25 field offices. Many of those vacancies will be filled by officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) or retired agents, baked into what insiders call the largest domestic enforcement shift since ICE’s creation in 2003.

Stephen Miller, architect of the current deportation push, reportedly demanded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attempt around 3,000 arrests per day. But the agency has averaged closer to 1,178 per day, underscoring the administration’s frustration and prompting the personnel purge.
At the same time, U.S. Border Patrol that are already using militarized operations across U.S. cities, including helicopters in apartment raids are now being elevated into a central role in domestic enforcement, shifting what was Border Patrol’s traditional domain deep inside the country.

Border Patrol, with its helicopter-assisted apartment raids in Chicago’s early-morning hours and its agents deploying tear gas on crowds, get them results.

And so the administration is putting Border Patrol in charge.

If you’re reading the news and feeling dread, you’re not alone.
What’s happening right now has happened before, not in America’s own story, but in the histories that warned us what authoritarianism looks like.

This is the moment when the walls crumble between border enforcement and domestic policing and when tactics once reserved for external threats are now being deployed inside American neighborhoods.

This is an agency created to stop people from entering the country begins removing them from their homes, their jobs, and their communities.

History calls this constabularization: the process by which military or paramilitary forces take over domestic law enforcement.

Who’s Policing America Now

The Border Patrol was created in 1924 to guard the physical border: the “land and water between official border crossings,” as one scholar put it.
Their job is to intercept smugglers, stop unauthorized crossings, protect sovereignty at the actual line. They operated in remote desert regions, at river crossings, along vast stretches where few people lived.

ICE, created in 2003, was meant to be a domestic law-enforcement agency operating inside the United States, pursuing people who overstayed visas, enforcing immigration law in communities, conducting targeted arrests based on investigation and intelligence.

Border Patrol agents train for interdiction and for confrontation in lawless spaces. ICE officers, despite their many failures and abuses, were at least theoretically trained for urban enforcement, for operating within communities, for something that looked like civilian policing.

That distinction is collapsing.

Border Patrol now deploys 1,500 agents in American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. They pop out of moving trucks in Home Depot parking lots. They use military helicopters for urban operations. They throw tear gas at protesters. Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol sector chief now operating as “Commander-at-Large,” doesn’t report to the head of Border Patrol or even to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He reports directly to Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, who answers to Donald Trump.

This is the creation of a parallel enforcement structure loyal to the executive, operating with paramilitary tactics, unconstrained by the limitations that apply to conventional police.

We’ve Seen This Before

In 1970s Argentina, the military didn’t seize power all at once, it crept into domestic policing under the banner of “fighting subversion.” By 1976, the country had descended into what became known as the Dirty War. Thousands were rounded up at night, held in secret prisons, tortured, and executed. Historians estimate that up to 30,000 people were disappeared or killed, most for nothing more than political dissent.

In Mexico, President Felipe Calderón launched a “war on drugs” in 2006 that sent the military into city streets and neighborhoods. The result was staggering: violence soared, and the armed forces who were never trained for civilian policing were accused of widespread human-rights violations. Amnesty International documented that nearly every woman they interviewed who was detained by soldiers reported sexual violence. When pressed on accountability, Mexico’s army could not name a single soldier suspended for rape or sexual abuse since 2010.

In Peru, during the 1990s, President Alberto Fujimori turned anti-drug and counter-insurgency efforts over to the military. Soldiers raided rural villages and urban slums alike, killing or disappearing thousands of civilians in the name of “public security.” The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru later found that state security forces were responsible for the majority of human-rights violations during that period.

Do you see this pattern? Crisis, real or manufactured, a government frustrated by civilian law enforcement’s “weakness,” the deployment of military or paramilitary forces for domestic operations, the erosion of legal constraints, the normalization of violence, and finally, the transformation of democracy into something else.

Do you think Americans are becoming desensitized to militarized policing? Where do you see power shifting, toward the people or away from them?

The Economics of Cruelty

Multiple economic analyses project that mass deportations would shrink U.S. GDP by 1.2% to 7.4% within three years, depending on the scale and speed of removals.
For perspective, the economy contracted 4.3% during the Great Recession.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that large-scale deportations could cost roughly $900 billion to $1 trillion over the next 10 years on top of tens of billions already allocated for enforcement. That’s roughly $88 billion per year, a price tag greater than the annual budgets of entire federal departments.

According to analyses from the Joint Economic Committee and American Immigration Council, construction would lose up to 1.5 million workers, agriculture about 225,000, and hospitality roughly 1 million.
We already face a housing shortage of nearly 3.8 million homes nationwide, removing one-sixth of the construction workforce would make homes even more expensive and projects even slower.

For every 500,000 immigrants removed, economists estimate about 44,000 U.S. born workers would lose their jobs as the economy contracts.

And high-skilled workers wouldn’t be spared. By disrupting the broader labor ecosystem, those who clean offices, drive trucks, build infrastructure, grow and prepare food… economists project an average wage decline of roughly $2,700 per year for U.S. professionals who depend on those networks of labor.

And SNAP? The federal food-assistance program that feeds about 42 million Americans? The agency announced that no federal SNAP benefits will be issued on November 1 due to the government shutdown. The same administration rapidly expands militarized immigration enforcement and demands billions for deportation operations.

November 1st

As SNAP benefits keep up at the edge of our seats and millions of Americans face the question of how to put food on the table, federal immigration-enforcement forces are ramping up operations in cities across the country.

They can afford helicopters, raids, tear gas, and Argentina… but can’t dip into our emergency fund to help 42 million citizens.

Here’s what you can do right now:
Immediate (this week):

Find your local food bank via FeedingAmerica.org or call 211 for community assistance.
If you have resources, donate. If you need resources, access them. This is mutual aid.
Document what you see. If you witness immigration enforcement in your community, record it safely and share it. The aim for invisibility is their advantage.

Strategic (this month):

Contact your representative about standalone SNAP-funding bills. (For example, Senators introduced standalone SNAP patches.)
Join or support local 50501 chapters at fiftyfifty.one/groups or join our Discord Server. We’re organizing mutual-aid, protests, and community defense in all 50 states.
If you’re connected to law enforcement, military, or immigration officials: speak up. One paperclip-worn resignation can shift more than a thousand marches.

Long-term (this year):
This is both an economic story and a human-rights story. Make it clear to your representatives that militarized deportations will cost jobs and economic security. If morality doesn’t move them, talk dollars. Build community power for 2026.

A historian’s note

The Founders warned about this. Alexander Hamilton cautioned that “a standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty.” (Federalist No. 8) They understood that unchecked power backed by force is how republics die.

Thomas Jefferson warned that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” Power almost never seizes control all at once, it takes it inch by inch and justified by fear and silence.

James Madison called the Constitution a “charter of power granted by liberty,” not the other way around. Its strength depends on citizens who understand that government answers to them, not over them.

And Abraham Lincoln, facing a country already split in two, said that America would never be destroyed from the outside“if we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

Fear makes us trade freedom for protection and obedience for stability. Liberty erodes slowly under the weight of our own forgetfulness. We’re not there yet. But we can see it from here.

What are you seeing in your community? What are you doing to resist? The comments are open. Let’s talk.

The 50501 Movement

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