By: Aeneas Leviné

Lenin, elaborating on the nature of the State as organized violence, famously pointed out that “standing army and police are the chief instruments of state power.” As US imperialism undergoes further fascistization, it “develops a broader, more refined, more sinister violence” to pave the ground for the corporatization of the society and economy, the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” (Comintern) To that end, this definition highlights the role that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) play in the internal repression apparatus of U.S. imperialism within its own borders.

Born in 2002 from the expansion of the “security state” during the so-called War on Terror, ICE now operates as a vital cog inside the internal State security machinery. Alongside the police, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and an expanding web of fusion centers and surveillance nodes, ICE carries out the brutal directives of finance capital. It raids working class neighborhoods, detains and deports migrant laborers, suppresses popular demonstration and political expression, and wages a campaign of terror against the immigrant and nationally oppressed masses within the territory of the United States.

ICE does not merely “enforce” fascistic-immigration law. It functions as an occupying force, wielding drones, armored vehicles, biometric surveillance, and military grade ordnance against the masses. Its operations are coordinated, data driven, and increasingly indistinguishable from those of the military or the police. The agency has been transformed into a paramilitary extension of the American Imperialist State, deeply enmeshed within the broader strategy of militarized social control. The military hardware acquisitions, institutional embedding in the militarized State, and the deepened ideological, political, and organizational fomenting of ICE from its formation in 2002 by the DHS to the present day, were always in service to the counter-revolutionary consolidation of imperialism domestically.

Acquiring an Arsenal of Repression

Recent procurement records confirm that ICE is gearing up not merely for “enforcement”, but for militarized occupation. Via its so-called “One Big Beautiful Act” the Old State has allocated more than $170 billion over four years for “border and interior enforcement”, with a stated goal of hiring 10,000 new agents to deport 1 million immigrants each year. The bill also removes age limits and expands bonuses (loan forgiveness, signing bonuses, etc.) to recruit veterans and former military personnel, deepening the overlap between domestic policing and imperial warfare. Additional funds expand the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, effectively scaling up the state’s capacity to produce paramilitary operatives under the guise of immigration enforcement. Moreover, the removal of hiring barriers and acceleration of training pipelines means that the composition of the ICE workforce will increasingly mirror that of the U.S. military. The result is a fusion of domestic policing and counterinsurgency with immigrants and nationally oppressed communities cast as internal enemies to be crushed.

With its coffers full ICE is preparing a hiring surge, not just in personnel: contracts show that new agents are being equipped with autonomous drones, tactical armor, and Glock handguns. These are not “civilian policing tools” but instruments of war being repurposed for internal repression. This pattern signals a deliberate intensification: the forces of the U.S. capitalist class seek to accelerate the militarization of immigration enforcement, embedding the methods and materiel the battlefield into domestic repression. The financial bourgeoisie, which requires a reserve army of labor (often drawn from migrant populations), exerts terror through its State, in part, to control it.

The expansion funded by the “Big Beautiful Bill” is not merely a tactical ploy, but a long-term strategic measure. By pouring billions into ICE and related agencies the regime is constructing a permanent infrastructure of repression designed to outlast any electoral fluctuation. The temporary nature of the funding set to expire in 2029 reveals an effort to front load the militarization of immigration enforcement by building the state’s coercive capacity now in hopes that its institutional weight will prevent rollback later. This tactic reflects the bourgeois state’s tendency to use crisis conditions as an opportunity to entrench unpopular reactionary reforms, embedding tools of class war within the vast and stagnant bureaucratic apparatus.

The operation and militarization of ICE is shadowed by pervasive secrecy, with DHS and ICE both in litigation for withholding records regarding communications, contracts, memos, directives, and training materials related to militarized immigration enforcement. The refusal of agencies to produce clear inventories of weapon systems, doctrine manuals, or deployment directives is itself a revealing act. It shows that the imperialist state rejects the accountability of its instruments of terror. The redactions, delays, and classification shields are devices of the reactionary mask of the Old State; the internal security apparatus must not be transparent, because transparency would awaken resistance. Because these documents are withheld, investigative reconstruction must rely on fragments: contract line items, vendor disclosures, whistleblowers, procurement leaks, local reporting. These fragments already sketch an outline of a heavily armed, networked, technologically sophisticated ICE.

The advanced repressive apparatus of ICE embodies the concentrated force of the imperialist State in its growing internal counterinsurgency. These instruments of class domination represent the direct material expression of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, wherein the technological fruits of capitalist profits and imperialist super-profits are redirected not toward social reproduction but toward the consolidation of capitalist hegemony through coercion. Today, this process is greatly sped up with the sharpening of the principle contradictions of imperialism. Each procurement is another step in the American economy’s progression towards greater corporatization, forming the sinew of a more reactionary and openly terrorist form of bourgeois rule. This arsenal is not a deviation but a necessity in maintaining control as capitalism decays and generates worse and ever more frequent crises.

The deployment of such technologies thus reflects not merely administrative policy, but the objective function of the American bourgeois State as an instrument of violent class rule and oppressor nation domination in the epoch of capitalist decay. Analysis of contracts, reports, and photographic evidence demonstrate the wide catalog of the military-grade ICE arsenal such as:

• Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPV or MRAP), are a type of armored personnel carrier (APC) designed specifically to withstand the impact of land mines and improvised explosive device (IED) attacks. Oshkosh Alpha is a common MRAP variant amongst border patrol, being built for domestic use by law enforcement and federal agencies. ICE has recently signed a $8.2 million contract for 20 more BearCat MRAPs from Lenco Industries. Contracting data indicate that ICE has previously allocated around $11 million to Lenco for BearCat vehicles.
• ICE has been spending millions through direct contracts with military suppliers, including for surveillance-capable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAVs) that integrate with AI-driven facial recognition software offered up to them by capitalist firms such as Google. The MQ‑9 Predator military-drones are common, being deployed over Los Angeles during the ongoing anti‑ICE protests. This aerial coverage is fused with private contractors who operate 24/7 social media surveillance to assist in enforcement targeting and tracking. This is indicative of the trend in which a growing share of ICE’s arsenal is both reliant and feeds into the connected international financial system of which the expanding global drone economy is a part. The military drone market being expected to reach $47 billion by 2032.
• ICE has significantly expanded its surveillance arsenal through contracts totaling millions of dollars, enabling an unprecedented level of technological repression. Cell site simulators, often referred to as Stingrays, are surveillance devices that mimic legitimate cell towers in order to force nearby mobile phones to connect to them. Once connected, the device can intercept metadata, call logs, text messages, and in some cases, content data such as location and communications. Law enforcement agencies, including ICE, use these tools to conduct dragnet surveillance over entire areas without needing individual warrants. It currently employs phone hacking tools from firms such as Magnet Forensics to extract encrypted data from mobile devices, while also utilizing Clearview AI’s facial recognition software to identify and track individuals across vast photo databases. A reactivated $3 million contract with “Israeli” spyware firm Paragon Solutions allows IE access to the Graphite software which can infiltrate encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal. Additionally, ICE has secured a new $3.1 million contract for device-access tools and has revived data acquisition via PenLink, which allows real-time tracking and social graphing of user metadata. Through these tools, ICE is capable of reconstructing entire personal networks, conducting live audio surveillance, and geolocating targets by siphoning data from hundreds of millions of mobile users across the United States.
• In ICE’s standard issue armory, small arms, assault weapons, and riot munitions include standard issue duty pistols (Glock 9mm models) as well as SIG Sauer rifles and accessories under active IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity Contracts) contracts for tactical units. Riot munitions such as flashbangs, tear gas launchers, and “less-lethal” impact rounds (rubber bullets) are routinely reported in ICE raids, especially in crowd suppression and residential raids.
• In the domain of imaging, agents are equipped with red dot sights, night vision scopes, infrared/thermal optics, and Predator drones which carry electro‑optical/infrared sensors for heat signature detection. Many law enforcement surveillance systems incorporate night vision, thermal imaging, and infrared sensors in drone and fixed installations. These systems enable suppression under cover of darkness, covert entry, and long-range target acquisition in low‑light environments.
• For tactical body armor, gas masks, and modular battlefield gear, ICE purchases include Level IIIA soft body armor kits, ballistic helmets like the Galvion Caiman 24, modular helmet mounts, chest rigs, and gas masks for chemical agent defense The National Firearms and Tactical Training Unit (NFTTU) supplies these defenses and ordnance to federal agents, reinforcing the militarized gear pipeline across agencies.
• In acoustic weapons and crowd control devices, ICE and state actors utilize systems like LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) to project painful high-decibel sound over distances, capable of causing ear damage, nausea, and disorientation. LRADs, produced by Genasys, are marketed for crowd control use by law enforcement to broadcast warnings or deterrent tones over up to 5.5km. These devices can shift between intelligible voice projection and deterrent “pain tones,” making them dual‑use as communication and sonic weapons. Exposure may lead to hearing loss, tinnitus, headaches, and permanent auditory damage.

The Law Enforcement Support Office (LESO), which oversees the 1033 Program under the Department of War’s Defense Logistics Agency, facilitates the transfer of military-grade ordnance, vehicles, surveillance systems, and tactical gear into the hands of federal, state, and local law enforcement. Section 1033 of the 1997 National Defense Authorization Act, which itself evolved from the earlier 1208 Program of 1990, traces its lineage back to the Surplus Property Act of 1944, which was enacted at the end of World War II to manage and dispose of the enormous stockpile of wartime production. While not a direct recipient under the 1033 framework, ICE has materially benefited from this program through partnerships, joint task forces, and interagency pipelines. ICE leverages this channel by integrating with police departments that have received 1033 equipment and through that enables resource and intelligence sharing across agencies.

In many cases, the line items and vendor contracts ICE engages in mirror those found in local 1033 inventories: high-powered rifles, thermal optics, advanced body armor, and surveillance drones. Because 1033 property can be transferred or loaned between agencies and used in joint operations, ICE regularly conducts raids and sweeps alongside departments equipped with surplus Pentagon gear.

This militarized cross-pollination reinforces ICE’s role not as a conventional law enforcement entity but as an extrajudicial tool of force embedded in the increasingly fascistizing architecture of American Imperialism. The ideological shift that accompanied this material upgrade portrays entire communities, especially those of the nationally oppressed, as internal threats requiring pacification. ICE is not a rogue actor; it is one part of an internal security architecture that mimics the military apparatus.

ICE’s Militarization is Part of a Broader Trend

The intensification of ICE’s armament is not something new to the Biden and Trump regimes, but part of a longer-term trend of U.S. imperialism. From its very beginnings, the American State developed a security apparatus fundamentally rooted in national oppression and the protection of private property, beginning with slave patrols and militias used to exterminate the Indigenous and suppress the enslaved in order to maintain the plantation economy. As U.S. capitalism expanded westward and industrialized, and became a global imperialist power, this apparatus consolidated through federal agencies like the FBI and CIA, formed primarily to neutralize labor movements, national liberation struggles, and perceived threats to capitalist order both domestically and abroad.

In the modern era, the 2001 Patriot Act marked a qualitative leap, formalizing the fusion of domestic policing with the logic of counterterrorism, legalizing mass surveillance, indefinite detention, and the erasure of constitutional protections in the name of “national security”. U.S. domestic policy underwent a paradigm shift wherein “security” became a framework for treating civilian spaces as war zones. Drawing from the strategies and tactics of repressions learned during the anti-communist “Cold War” period, the so-called “War on Terror” internalized this already growing militarism, reconfiguring immigration, policing, and surveillance under counterinsurgency. It was through laws like the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act during this period that mechanisms of the Department of Homeland Security, and with it ICE, were first formed. ICE has, since then, served as a complementary paramilitary arm to the existing apparatus of State repression (Police, FBI, NSA, CIA, DOJ, DOW). It has been reinforced via the expansion of the national security apparatus, intelligence apparatus, and border enforcement organs through surplus transfers and federal grants.

This leap must be situated in the concrete reality of the decaying of US imperialism, which is in its general and last crisis and continues to be weakened by cyclical crises that worsen with each iteration. Despite having temporarily defeated its rival, Soviet social-imperialism, the US did not enter the “end of history” like its court intellectuals have claimed. On the contrary, it finds itself engulfed in waves after waves of mass resistance across the world, as it faces new competition from China and Russia to divide the world. Under these circumstances, big industrial capital increasingly finds sources of profit equal to or greater than through industry in the speculative–financial sphere. The big industries become intertwined with the activities of the financial sector, which culminate in even larger crises that bring the entire productive sectors into recession. In response, the State intervenes to restructure the financial system, safeguarding banks and financial institutions and forcing the masses of people to pay the price, through wage depression, extension of retirement age, contractualization, cuts to public services, etc. These measures necessarily require more corporatization of the society. The overall rate for the profit to fall, accentuated by the increased financialization, resulted in more unemployment and sharpening of contradictions between the workers and the capitalists. The growth of parasitic profits deriving from an unproductive economy is merely sourced from a different pattern of distribution of the already produced surplus value, and nothing “new” in substance: ultimately, these crises can only be resolved through imperialist war and re-division of the world. The tendency towards imperialist war goes hand in hand with fascism, as it requires social and political stabilization and disciplining on an ever-widening scale to combat the developing crisis. Concretely, this manifests in the full-scale attack on the democratic rights of the working class and popular masses as to facilitate the attack on their living and working conditions.

For example, in an escalation of the months long siege of Chicago by ICE at the behest of the Trump administration, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a sweeping 15‑mile radius temporary flight restriction (TFR) over the city, effectively banning most non‑government drones for the first twelve days of October, 2025. The ostensible justification was to prevent “small, unmanned aircraft systems” from attacking law enforcement during the so‑called “Midway Blitz” ICE operation. The closure of air space is a tactic to suppress aerial journalism and block the public from documenting State violence. This airspace lock down demonstrates how ICE, DHS, CBP and allied forces are asserting total control over the theater of operations. The drone no‑fly zone is not merely defensive; it is aggressive spatial domination which serves as a material barrier to the mobilization of counter-power. During the Chicago blitz, ICE deployed flashbangs and riot munitions in residential areas, brutalizing and terrorizing the masses. ICE has also targeted activists, immigrant solidarity organizers, and journalists by labeling them internal threats. Meanwhile Attorney General Pam Bondi drafted a memo to form a task force specifically to protect ICE from protesters.

ICE’s deployment of MRAPs, AI drones, and mass surveillance constitutes a logic of imperialist warfare in the domestic sphere. For the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie, poor, nationally oppressed, and immigrant communities are treated not as citizens, but as enemy populations whose labor is exploited and whose resistance must be crushed. Every new piece of equipment in ICE’s arsenal is a new weapon against the people. The drone no-fly zones, the armored raids, the targeting of organizers, all represent a ruling class investing in tools of terror. Militarization is not about safety; it is about suppressing the contradictions of a decaying capitalist-imperialism through brute force. Latino migrant workers and other migrant workers from oppressed nations and national minorities are the first targets of this imperialist offensive, which has its goal as dividing the working class with national oppression and destroying the forces of production in order to solve the growing economic crisis. In this sense, the militarization of ICE is but the first step towards the militarization of the entire society as the ruling class prepares for the worst that is yet to come: mass rebellion and revolution.

Militarization begets repression, which begets resistance, which in turn justifies more militarization. This is the dialectic of fascistization. The State must escalate because it is increasingly losing its legitimacy. As the Old State is an apparatus of class rule, it relies on violence because it has nothing else to offer the people but austerity, surveillance, and endless multi-sided crisis. ICE is not merely an immigration agency. It is a crystallization of the current imperialist offensive against the masses in the United States and all over the world, whose violence is aimed at preventing the politicization of labor and national liberation struggles, the growth and linking up of these struggles on a global scale, and the unification of the world’s revolutionary movements. ICE must be understood not as a mechanism within the security apparatus alone, but a strategic weapon of capitalist reaction deployed at a time of instability.

Only class struggle and the revolutionary overthrow of the imperialism can end ICE’s campaign of terror. The revolutionary masses must build up their organizations such as the People’s Defense Committee. They must turn every neighborhood into a trench of combat by intimately linking and raising this struggle to the overall struggle for daily economic and political demands of the entire class and its allies, in other words, the struggle against fascistization and for socialist revolution.