ICE Didn't Buy Crowd Control—They Bought Gear For Ethnic Cleansing

You know what keeps me up at night: When does a law enforcement agency stop being about enforcement and start being about extermination?

The desert air tastes like dust and diesel fuel when you stand at the border fence in Arizona, that rusted monument to American paranoia stretching across the cracked earth like a scar that won't heal. But something changed this year. Something that makes the hairs on your neck stand up like they're trying to evacuate your body before shit gets real. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—those three little letters that sound so bureaucratic and boring, like a fucking accountant's fever dream—just increased their weapons budget by seven hundred percent. Not 70%. Not a modest bump to cover inflation and replace some worn-out tasers. Seven. Hundred. Percent.

And here's where it gets absolutely batshit insane: they didn't buy crowd-control gear. They didn't stock up on pepper spray or those rubber bullets that still crack ribs and shatter jaws. No, these douchenozzles went shopping for guided missile warheads and explosive components. Read that again. Guided. Fucking. Missile. Warheads. For an agency that's supposedly rounding up undocumented immigrants and processing asylum claims.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, "When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die." But what happens when the rich don't even bother with the pretense of war? When they just arm their goons with military-grade ordnance and point them at brown people trying to find safety?

This isn't law enforcement. This is preparation for something so much darker, something that smells like cordite and screams in Spanish, something that history will look back on and ask, "How the fuck did nobody stop this?"

Let's do some dickwad arithmetic here, because numbers don't lie even when politicians do. The average ICE agent already carries a sidearm, has access to shotguns, assault rifles, and tactical gear that would make a Navy SEAL jealous. They've got helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, and enough surveillance technology to make Big Brother cream his authoritarian jeans. They operate detention centers—concentration camps by any other name still smell like despair and disinfectant—that already look like minimum-security prisons crossed with refugee camps from humanity's worst nightmares.

So what the everloving fuck do they need guided missiles for? Are asylum-seeking families bringing anti-aircraft capabilities I don't know about? Did some five-year-old from Guatemala hide a tank battalion in their fucking backpack?

The cold fluorescent lighting in government procurement offices must cast shadows that reveal the truth: this isn't about immigration enforcement. This is about establishing a domestic military force that operates outside the Posse Comitatus Act, that constitutional cockblock preventing the military from acting as domestic law enforcement. ICE doesn't have those restrictions. They're a law enforcement agency on paper, which means they can buy weapons of war and deploy them on American soil against civilians, and there's not a goddamn thing legally stopping them.

Bertrand Russell warned us: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." Well, the fanatics running this shitshow aren't doubtful about anything. They're certain. Dead certain. And that certainty is about to get people dead.

The procurement documents—buried in the bureaucratic horseshit that is federal spending reports—show purchases that make your blood run cold if you're paying attention. Explosive breaching charges. Fragment-dispersal devices. Munitions that have no goddamn business in a law enforcement context unless the "law" you're enforcing is genocide dressed in procedural paperwork.

History doesn't repeat, but it sure as shit rhymes, and right now it's rhyming in German and Spanish and every other language spoken by people who found themselves on the wrong side of a government that decided they weren't human enough to deserve basic rights.

Walk through the Holocaust Museum in D.C., and you'll see the progression. First comes the rhetoric—criminals, invaders, vermin, animals. Check that box, because Donaldo Shitsburger and his asskissing sycophants have been doing that for years. Then comes the identification and registration. Check. Detention centers. Check. Separation of families. Check-a-fucking-roo. Dehumanization in overcrowded facilities where children sleep on concrete floors under mylar blankets that sound like chips bags every time they move. Done and done.

The only step we haven't fully crossed is the mass killing, and here's the thing that makes your stomach clench like a fist around bad sushi: you don't buy guided missile warheads because you're planning to be gentle.

Michel de Montaigne observed, "There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life." But what about the government? What happens when the state itself becomes the criminal, when the laws are written by shitstains who'd make Caligula look like a fucking choir boy?

The smooth wooden pews in churches across America are filled every Sunday with people praying for salvation while their tax dollars fund this arsenal. The cognitive dissonance would be funny if it wasn't so fucking tragic. Mike JesusFluffer stands at his podium in Congress, clutching his Bible like it's a goddamn security blanket, voting for these budgets while simultaneously claiming to follow a brown-skinned Middle Eastern refugee who literally said to welcome the stranger.

The irony is so thick you could cut it with a Ka-Bar knife—which, by the way, ICE also ordered several thousand of.

When confronted with this batshit crazy weapons stockpiling, the official response from ICE reads like it was written by someone having a stroke during a lying competition. They claim these weapons are for "potential threats" and "national security concerns" and my personal favorite, "maintaining operational readiness."

Operational readiness for what? A land war in fucking Arizona? Are they expecting an armed insurgency from the caravan of exhausted families walking north with blistered feet and empty stomachs? Because I've seen those caravans—I've stood in the sweltering heat of the Sonoran Desert and watched them shuffle past, and the only weapons they're carrying are hope and desperation, neither of which require explosive fragmentation devices to counter.

Isaiah Berlin wrote, "The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor." But what is freedom when your government stockpiles weapons to use against the most vulnerable people seeking it?

The talking heads on TV—those shitweasels with their perfect hair and practiced concern—dance around the issue like it's a pile of dogshit they don't want to step in. They use euphemisms: "enhanced enforcement capabilities," "tactical upgrades," "security enhancements." They never say what it actually is: an armory for atrocity.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, ICE has consistently failed to track its weapons inventory, meaning thousands of firearms and other equipment have gone missing over the years.[1] And now we're trusting these same incompetent fuckwads with guided missiles? The same agency that can't keep track of a pistol is getting warheads?

The rain would smell sweet if it ever fell on these conversations in Congress, but it doesn't rain in the Capitol building. It's all recycled air and recycled lies, the same bullshit about borders and security, about protecting America from the scary brown people who do the jobs Americans won't, who pay taxes without receiving benefits, who contribute billions to an economy that treats them like disposable labor.

Let's cut through the horseshit and say what everyone's thinking but nobody wants to admit: this is ethnic cleansing with a procurement budget. This is genocide in the planning stages. This is the infrastructure of industrial-scale violence being built right in front of our faces while we argue about pronouns and gas prices.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed." And fuck, if that doesn't nail it. We've got immigrants who came here legally voting to deport other immigrants. We've got Latino ICE agents participating in raids on Latino communities. We've got Americans of all colors shrugging their shoulders because hey, it's not happening to them, right? Yet.

The smell of gunpowder is coming. You can sense it in the air like ozone before a lightning strike. Every piece is being positioned—the weapons, the rhetoric, the legal frameworks that strip due process, the Supreme Court packed with ideological dipshits who think the Constitution is a suicide pact we all signed in invisible ink.

They're not building this capability for no reason. Governments don't spend billions on weapons they don't intend to use. You don't buy a flamethrower to toast marshmallows. You don't purchase guided missiles for crowd management. This arsenal exists for one purpose: to kill efficiently and at scale.

When The Dumping Donald or whatever his name is this week talks about the "largest deportation operation in American history," what do you think that looks like? Do you think it's orderly busloads of people voluntarily leaving? Do you think eleven million people—that's the estimated undocumented population—are just going to peacefully surrender when the fuckwad with a badge shows up?

Albert Camus reminded us, "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." But rebellion against missiles is called martyrdom, and martyrdom doesn't save children sleeping in cages.

The coffee in the ICE field offices must taste bitter as they plan operations with names like "Operation Guardian" or some other Orwellian dogshit designed to make slaughter sound noble. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead while they map out neighborhoods, identify targets, coordinate with local police departments that are all too happy to collaborate.

A study by the American Immigration Council found that mass deportation would cost between $400-600 billion and devastate the American economy, removing workers, taxpayers, and consumers who contribute $1.7 trillion to GDP annually.[2] But they're spending the money anyway, not on deportation logistics but on weapons. That should tell you everything.

The gravel crunches under boots—whose boots will determine whether we're witnesses or accomplices. The sun beats down on detention facilities where children cry themselves to sleep. The wind carries sounds across the desert that nobody wants to hear but everybody needs to witness.

We're at the precipice of something monstrous, standing at the edge with our toes over the void, and the people with the power to pull us back are the same shitheads pushing us forward. Elon MicroTool is busy jerking off to his government efficiency bullshit while ICE builds an execution apparatus. Not Michael Jackson is reading Bible verses while signing weapons contracts. The whole fucking system is a cocksucking ouroboros of evil eating itself while spitting out violence.

John Dewey wrote, "Every generation has to accomplish democracy over again for itself." But what do you do when the generation in power is actively choosing fascism? When the accomplishment they're pursuing is perfecting the machinery of oppression?

The truth tastes like bile: we're watching it happen. We're documenting the buildup to atrocity in real-time, posting about it on social media between cat videos and vacation photos, treating genocide-in-progress like it's just another news cycle to scroll past. Future generations will study this moment and ask what the fuck we were thinking, why we didn't burn it all down to stop it.

Because that's what it would take. Not hashtags. Not voting in the next election that these asswipes will probably steal anyway. Actual resistance. The kind that scares governments. The kind that history remembers.

But we're comfortable. We've got streaming services and smartphones and just enough privilege to insulate us from the immediate horror. The screams haven't reached our neighborhoods yet. The missiles haven't launched in our direction yet. The blood hasn't stained our streets yet.

Yet.

Martha Nussbaum argues that "The basis of democratic society is the belief in the equal worth of all citizens." But show me where that belief exists in a budget that allocates more for weapons to use against desperate immigrants than for processing their asylum claims humanely. Show me the equal worth in a system that buys warheads to point at children.

You can't. Because it doesn't exist. And the sooner we admit that America has abandoned even the pretense of its supposed values, the sooner we might—might—find the courage to do something about it before the weapons ICE is stockpiling move from procurement to deployment.

The night falls heavy on America, and somewhere in the darkness, a bureaucrat signs another purchase order. Somewhere else, a family huddles together in a detention cell. And somewhere between those two locations, the future is being decided by people who chose missiles over mercy.

History will judge us. Hell, we should judge ourselves right fucking now, standing in front of mirrors asking how we let it get this far. Because it's not too late to stop this, but the window is closing faster than a butthole clenching at the sound of jackboots.

The question isn't whether ICE will use these weapons. The question is how many people will die before we finally say enough is enough—and whether we'll say it with our comfortable words or our uncomfortable actions.