Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, is quickly emerging as the Trump administration’s authoritarian secret police force, aggressively sowing terror and suppressing political speech, not just at the country’s borders but throughout the country. But ICE wasn’t founded by President Donald Trump: it was a product of President George W. Bush’s so-called War on Terror and has played a fascistic role in the U.S. under both Democratic and Republican administrations ever since.
There were warning signs about the role ICE would play in the event of an authoritarian turn. B.C. and Canada must learn from the American experience by heeding these warning signs in advance, curbing our most fascistic police forces — particularly, the RCMP’s CRU, formerly known as the C-IRG (Community-Industry Response Unit) — before it’s too late.
In the past 100 days, ICE has raided university dorms; kidnapped people in broad daylight in Boston; publicly threatened students; and detained would-be tourists, at times in solitary confinement, for weeks. The majority of these cases have been instances of direct suppression of political speech: indeed, the administration publicly brags that it has revoked more than 300 student visas solely on the basis that these students spoke out against the U.S.-backed genocide of Gaza. Some of these students, like Mahmoud Khalil, have been protest leaders, but many have been targeted for little more than a social media post. In March, Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts University, was snatched by masked, unidentifiable ICE officers in front of her apartment, an event captured in a chilling video. Her crime? Co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for the Tufts administration to honour a divestment resolution passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate.
The Trump administration is using activism for Palestine as a kind of test to see how far it can go, and there are signs that it intends to expand the mandate of its secret police beyond visa holders and permanent residents, to naturalized citizens, and on to other forms of critical political speech.
A French scientist en route to a conference in the U.S. was detained because they found texts criticizing the administration’s cuts to research funding, for example, and I have heard from colleagues in the academy that they are being required to show presentation materials to border agents before being allowed into the country — or not.
On top of these high-profile instances of speech suppression, ICE is escalating its longstanding terror campaign against documented and undocumented immigrants around the country. Random raids, including just across the border last week in Bellingham, WA, are intended not to remove all of America’s millions of immigrants but to create an environment of fear. Many detainees are shipped to privately owned prisons in Louisiana, or, in an arrangement that is new with Trump, to a massive prison facility in El Salvador, where the U.S. pays the country to torture people. Their families often have no idea where they have been taken. In many cases, these deportations are happening in direct opposition to court orders — who’s going to stop them?
This is the fundamental problem with ICE: it is an unaccountable police force originally created after 9/11 to facilitate multi-agency coordination in an unconstitutional Islamophobic witch hunt. It’s always been fascistic in nature, with the ability to transform at any moment into the group of jackbooted stormtroopers kidnapping students off the street that we see today.
CRU has become internationally infamous for videos showing officers pulling down masks and pepper spraying protestors in the face and eyes at Fairy Creek; for referring to Indigenous land defenders as “orcs” on Wet’suwet’en yintah; and for enforcing illegal “exclusion zones” and arresting journalists.
The only way to ensure that a would-be authoritarian leader doesn’t have access to this armed militia is to stop the creep of police militarization and surveillance before they have the chance to take control. It is here that we in Canada can draw our warnings. In BC, we need to abolish the RCMP’s CRU unit before its rampant disregard for Charter rights and freedoms can be used by right-wing leaders to upend democracy as we know it.
CRU — née C-IRG — was formed specifically to defend the federal government’s Trans Mountain Expansion Project. The RCMP justified its creation based on the difficulties that Indigenous-led protests at Standing Rock, North Dakota, created for the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. According to documents obtained by the CBC, the unit was intended to be temporary and limited in scope to the Trans Mountain project. But just last year, the BC government announced permanent funding for the unit and expanded its official scope to responding to “critical incident[s].”
CRU has become internationally infamous for videos showing officers pulling down masks and pepper spraying protestors in the face and eyes at Fairy Creek; for referring to Indigenous land defenders as “orcs” on Wet’suwet’en yintah; and for enforcing illegal “exclusion zones” and arresting journalists. They’ve wrongfully arrested hundreds, if not thousands, of people, inevitably dropping charges, a tactic that they use to undermine protest movements in the moment and defend corporate interests. And they have lied extensively about all these incidents. Rank-and-file CRU members have regularly obscured their badge numbers and refused to identify themselves during police actions, all while wearing “thin blue line” patches, imagery associated with far-right and white supremacist movements.
A 2022 APTN investigation found “evidence of vast spying — including casual surveillance of law-abiding groups engaged in the democratic process — collusion with private security, collaboration with industry lawyers and wilful violations of RCMP policy.” The list goes on and on.
For all of this, C-IRG/CRU has faced little to no consequences. A review by the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for the RCMP (CRCC) confirmed that the unit had acted “unreasonably” in numerous instances at Fairy Creek but levied no consequences. Despite this, along with numerous other investigations and lawsuits, the province has doubled down on this unit.
They’ve also expanded its mandate, deploying it — secretively — to police Palestine solidarity organizing in urban centres, which the RCMP refer to as “pro-Hamas demonstrations.” At protests in Vancouver, I have witnessed CRU and their colleagues in the Vancouver Police Department deploying surveillance drones, cameras, and other devices that are capable of monitoring all cell phones operating within their range.
I have also heard reports that activists in Vancouver have had unexpected visits from the police asking probing questions, including bringing up their social media posts, but making no charges, tactics clearly designed to intimidate and suppress political speech.
CRU and other elements of the RCMP involved in widespread surveillance and criminalization of protest are not ICE. But they bear many of its most dangerous hallmarks. They are violent. They act as though they are above the law. They protect themselves and their corporate allies by suppressing journalism and political speech. And they have no problem doing the bidding of those corporate allies, or of politicians interested in shutting down public debate, whether that debate is over extraction on Indigenous lands or Canada’s ongoing support for Israel’s rampant violations of international law in occupied Palestine.
CRU is an unaccountable force with already-existing fascistic tendencies that, under the wrong circumstances, could relatively easily transition from its current state of rampant rights violations and overreach to full-fledged secret police. The only way we can protect ourselves from that is by reigning in these out-of-control police forces while we still can. As the Union of BC Indian Chiefs and countless other organizations have called for, in BC, we should start by abolishing CRU.
