How Police and ICE Promote State Violence
By Z Gorley
February 10, 2026
ICE is not separate from the police; it is an extension of the police.
And it’s worth remembering that police did not originate as a neutral crime-fighting institution. They emerged from systems designed to control enslaved people, oppress new immigrants, and break organized labor. That legacy continues to shape who is targeted, how force is used, and whose lives are treated as disposable.
Below are 14 ways that local police and ICE operate with strikingly similar patterns of harm:
- Both profile, stop, and harm people, especially people of color, who are simply trying to live their lives.
- Both arrest and detain people without warrants or meaningful due process.
- Encounters with both routinely lead to brutality, detainment, disappearance, incarceration, or death.
- Both recruit heavily from military backgrounds and bring war-like tactics into daily life.
- Both respond to protest and dissent with militarized force— tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray— and target protesters of color.
- Both inflict physical harm and property damage, then blame the people they harm and attempt to prosecute them.
- Both bring charges that are frequently dropped when witness testimony and bystander footage expose false or misleading police narratives.
- Both leave lasting trauma that ripples through families and communities long after an encounter ends.
- Both are mythologized through TV and film as heroic institutions, even as real-world abuses are minimized or erased.
- The full scope of harm and fatalities caused by both remains largely unknown; public scrutiny usually follows only when a particularly egregious case breaks through as “exceptional,” despite being routine.
- Both are protected by elected officials, policy frameworks, and courts that increasingly prioritize institutional power over accountability.
- Both are funded by enormous— and growing— taxpayer budgets, regardless of demonstrated harm or failure.
- Both divert resources away from solutions proven to increase safety and reduce violence, such as housing, healthcare (including mental health care), education, living-wage jobs, and community-based care and programs.
- And, by the way, local police are the primary entry point for ICE detention.
Given this history—and the ongoing, documented violence—it’s worth asking: why do we continue to give them so much power? And isn’t there a better way?
There is, and it starts with a different set of priorities.
Care, not cops. Care, not cages.