Can the racist Ice be beaten back?
Renee Good’s name will be added to a long list of people killed by Donald Trump’s Ice agents. Just a day after shooting Good dead, Ice agents shot a couple in their car in Oregon. They are now in hospital.
Ice agents have been involved in 16 shootings in the past year. A further 13 shootings involved rubber bullets rather than firearms. And Ice agents caused the death of 32 people in 2025— making it their deadliest year. Some 32 people died from heart attacks, strokes and suicides in Ice detention centres.
In December 2025 alone, 68,440 people were incarcerated in Ice institutions and six of them died.
This is higher than the death rates during Covid epidemic. But support for Ice in the United States has dropped dramatically.
The Ice budget is soaring while the popularity of the agency is plummeting. Support for abolishing Ice has risen from 21 percent on election day 2024, to nearly 40 percent a year later.
This is part of a growing anger against Trump’s immigration crackdown. In May 2025, some 53 percent approved of Trump’s policies.
Mass anti-Ice protests erupted in Los Angeles a month later. And support for Trump’s attacks on migrants dropped by 12 percent.
Donald Trump’s war on the cities of the US is not just about direct violence. He has withdrawn nearly £96 million in benefit payments paid by the federal government to Minnesota and Minneapolis to punish the city for resisting the Ice killers.
The secretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Brooke Rollins, wrote to the Minnesota governor and the mayor of Minneapolis to tell them she was withholding their money.
She is now demanding that the state provides specific justifications for any past or future payments. This economic coercion is about subjugating a city that dares to resist Trump’s violent murder gangs.
Leaders of the Democrat-run cities that Trump is targeting insist that everyone keeps calm—and votes for their ticket in November’s midterm elections. But that strategy fails on two counts.
First, it depends on a Democratic Party that has itself used racism and targeted migrant communities to win votes. Under Joe Biden’s presidency, Ice arrested more than 500,000 people and removed just under 600,000 people from the United States.
Second, Trump’s reaction to midterm losses will likely see him ramp up racism and deportations. Ice could become still more vicious—and even better funded. The alternative strategy is to keep up the fight against Ice in communities, while seeking to spread it to take up wider class questions.
Millions of US workers are suffering under Trump with mass job losses and pay rises that don’t match rising bills.
Wages are so low that workers on the minimum wage are unable to afford a one bedroom flat in any US state. One in five adults say that in the past three months someone in their family missed medication because they couldn’t afford the prescriptions.
Anti-racists must try to link their struggles with those of all those struggling to get by. Such a fusion of the anti-racist and working class struggles is what the US ruling class rightly fears most. That’s why it expends so much energy on divisive racism.
US working class history is full of examples of explosive movements that have involved black, white and brown people. And they were always at their strongest when they took on the racism of the rich and powerful.
If anti-racist protesters are to hit Ice hard, it’s that tradition—not the Democrats—that they will have to look to.
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