No One Will Save Us But Ourselves
Trump’s ICE thugs murder disabled Burmese immigrant in Buffalo, just one of the dozen or more people killed by the regime this year.
On February 19th, a blind Burmese immigrant man by the name of Nurul Amin Shah Alam was released from Buffalo Police custody after posting bail and accepting a plea deal for an alleged crime the previous year. ICE had requested to take custody of him after his detention. After detaining him briefly, Border Patrol had to release him on the grounds that he was not eligible for deportation. Since Shah Alam could not speak English, agents talked to him through a translator app, and he chose to accept a ‘courtesy ride’ in a van rather than being released outside the holding center to his family. Rather than figuring out where his home address was, the agents dropped off at a fast-food coffee shop near the location he had been arrested the year prior. This was 8:18pm, after the store had already closed, and despite the agents claiming it was “determined to be a warm, safe location.” Cameras on the building showed him pacing in front and eventually walking away through the parking lot south toward Niagara Street. The temperature that night was about 37°F and remained around 30°F, just below freezing, for the next few days.
The circumstances of his arrest in February 2025 were that the police were called for a man breaking into a backyard and hitting the resident’s shed. Shah Alam was blind and had trouble walking, so he carried two metal poles. What he thought he was doing is unclear, according to reports, but the language barrier, combined with the immediate aggression shown by the police, caused a rapid escalation. The two officers yelled at him to drop the poles, which Shah Alam could not understand. They threatened and then shot tasers, causing him to try to fight back by swinging the poles in their general direction. The cops tackled and beat him while he tried to resist. At some point, he either realizes what is happening or gives up pleading in Rohingya and Malay for “God’s help,” and tries to explain that he was just going to the store. Shah Alam was charged with two counts of felony assault on the officers, and eight lesser charges for menacing, criminal trespass, resisting arrest, and others. He would spend an entire year in jail. The family was wary of posting bail, as it likely would have caused him to be released into ICE custody and deported. However, after consulting with a lawyer who reviewed the case, they recommended posting bail, which led to this scenario.
A few days later, Shah Alam’s attorney filed a missing persons report after there was confusion about whether he had been released. The family “had been waiting outside the jail to take him home, and his wife had set his clothes out for him.” They were not notified of the transfer of custody to ICE or his release. On February 23rd, the Buffalo community rapid response had already posted about his disappearance and was seeking help to find him. That day, the detective working on the case opened the investigation in the morning but closed it at noon because “information was obtained that led the detective to believe that the missing person was in the custody of federal authorities.” The case was then reopened it was later that afternoon. That night, temperatures fell to 12°F. It wasn’t until the following day, on February 24th, that outreach to the family and neighbors was organized, and a search of local facilities was done.
At around 5:30pm that afternoon, a woman noticed a man walking around on Perry Street and then called the police at 8:29pm after seeing the same man lying on the ground motionless. When the police arrived, the man had no identification and was pronounced dead on the scene. The following day, the county identified him as Shah Alam, and later the medical examiner declared his death from hypothermia and dehydration was homicide by negligence. It was lightly snowing that whole week, and the temperature at the time of his death was 18°F. Shah Alam was found about 5.5 miles from the location he was dropped off at, 2207 Niagara Street, an over 2.2-hour walk away. It goes without saying that, despite the flagrantly dishonest statement released by DHS saying, “This death had NOTHING to do [with] Border Patrol. Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released,” this was clearly a murder. Border Patrol had full knowledge of his disabilities and were fully capable of contacting his family, but chose instead to leave him on the street to die in the cold.
Though it was a miracle that Shah Alam survived as long as he did, the sad reality is that he is not the only person on the street in the winter. Despite the city of Buffalo getting hit with harsh blizzards and spending many months of the year below freezing, there are still insufficient shelter capacity and resources for the homeless population. Known as the “City of Good Neighbors,” the city’s effort to spread the word about his disappearance unfortunately failed, but the greater question is; why couldn’t the city investigate a missing-person case faster than a group of activists and community members could? Why is the Buffalo police department so violent and unaccountable that it ranks as the second worst department in the state? Why is the city prosecutor so aggressive as to throw the book at a man who was blind and cannot speak English, and to whom his family is afraid to post bail?
Even worse, this comes after a string of high-profile murders by ICE in the past few months. Beginning with “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota on December 5th, where ICE would begin what was called “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” Over 2,000 officers were sent to Minneapolis and St. Paul primarily to target immigrants of Somali descent. The primary objective seemed to be to instill fear and provoke the public, as the agents were targeting everyone, and many citizens were detained as well. It was a severe escalation not only in the scale of the operation but, most noticeably, in spectacle. Beyond their aggressive traffic stops and racial profiling, ICE truly took on their gestapo-esque character in this period. Harassing essentially everyone, brandishing weapons, assaulting people on the street, staging daytime raids, military-style invasions of neighborhoods with armored cars, and kidnapping children at school.
In January, this reached a boiling point as citizens began forming alert networks and sending people out to protest wherever ICE was reported to be present. A few instances arose of community members getting teargassed on neighborhood streets for protesting. All of this culminated in an incident on January 7th, where a citizen, Renée Good, and her partner used their car to block the road in front of a fleet of ICE vehicles. The men tried to pull her out of the vehicle, and the pig named Jonathan Ross fired three times through the windshield, killing her instantly. The car accelerated into a telephone pole and crashed. President Trump quickly defended the shooting, lying that Ross was in the path of Good’s car but video evidence clearly shows that is false. Agents refused to perform CPR or allow a physician bystander nearby to help. Ross was caught muttering “fucking bitch” on camera as he walked away from the scene, faking an injury from a car that did not hit him. The incident prompted an immediate response from the community; the neighborhood was filled with people by the end of the night, and a vigil was held. The following day, ICE also carried out a raid at Roosevelt High School as students were leaving to go home. They violently arrested a few individuals and shot tear gas at the other students as they predictably tried to stop them. At the same time, protests in front of the ICE facility led to agents brutalizing citizens and tear gas being thrown at them.
Throughout the month, the city’s activists mobilized multiple large protests downtown, even as ICE presence did not let up. Another incident occurred on January 24th, as ICE was harassing and detaining citizens, a nurse named Alex Peretti was executed. As the thugs tried to wrestle him to the ground, they lost control and shot him to death in the middle of the street. Three days later, ICE staged a raid outside of a preschool, prompting significant community backlash and people being teargassed. By this time, ICE is said to have violated at least 96 court orders in January alone, with the majority of cases involving citizens. At least 4,000 people were arrested in total, an average of 49 per day during the surge, with the overwhelming majority having no criminal record. It was reported that only 40% of those in ICE custody have a criminal conviction of any kind, and only 8.4% have violent offenses on their record. Perhaps seeing the abject failure of the operation, President Trump finally gave in and secretly released Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino from his position, ending the surge.
Since that incident, ICE activity has been relatively reserved as it seems the administration is focused on waging imperialist wars rather than cracking down on the American people. While DHS remains a constant presence patrolling cities, after so many high-profile hiring events, it’s not clear whether it is preparing for another summer of operations. In 2025, the administration secured a $485 million budget increase for ICE in the April continuing resolution, which included hiring 10,000 more agents over the coming years. That was passed after ICE was running over $1 billion over their current budget at the time. When the budget reconciliation bill passed on July 4th, it allocated $168 billion more to immigration enforcement across all agencies, bringing the total to $200 billon. According to an estimate from last year, if this funding is allocated effectively, the number of deportations is expected to quadruple by December 2026. For comparison, the United States spends roughly $203 billion per year across all police departments in the country. For even more dismal comparison, by spending, America has the 1st, 4th, and 5th-largest security forces on Earth. In order, the US military ($921B), Chinese military ($251B), Chinese police ($218B), US police ($203B), US DHS ($196B), Russian military ($186B), German military ($107B), et cetera. This spending has had a dramatic effect on ICE’s ability to detain people, especially as holding capacity has expanded significantly. Since taking office, the Trump administration has more than doubled the number of people held in ICE custody to 70,766 at the peak in January, which has now fallen to 60,031 as of April.
Throughout the past year and a half, there have already been dozens of leaked videos showing the horrible conditions inside of ICE concentration camps that are overcrowded after the agency has arrested people faster than they have been able to build new facilities. We should also pay attention to the fact that the strategy of ICE and the design of these concentration camps reflect the barbaric conditions of Israeli prisons. The US DHS openly has many ‘strategic partnerships’ with Israel and the IDF, sharing technology, training, tactics, research, and development. DHS will often contract with Israeli surveillance and ‘defense’ firms such as Elbit Systems, Paragon, and Cellebrite, to name a few. That effectively means the same companies working to enforce apartheid in Palestine are the same that are working to violently purge American immigrants and establish a surveillance state. As journalist Jasper Nathaniel describes, “It should come as no surprise, then, that ICE’s tactics increasingly resemble the IDF’s: executing civilians in broad daylight with impunity, blocking medical care, and issuing bald-faced lies about the circumstances of these killings. This is not to suggest that one is derivative of the other, but that this is what a fascist crackdown looks like, whether it’s carried out at home or abroad.”
Being a midterm election year, the administration may not want to risk provoking a major uprising like in Los Angeles last summer. Nationwide polling conduced in February indicated that 65% of ICE activity has ‘gone too far,’ suggesting that fascist spectacle is not what motivates the majority of the public right now. This is nothing new either. During times of relative peace in between economic crises, there has been no need to make a reactionary show for the white American middle class. In the past, allowing the ‘it just works’ of American capitalism to take care of itself has been enough for reactionary right-wing administrations to succeed and get reelected. For non-economic issues that actually affect the average white American, manufacturing the idea of the administration ‘doing something’ is usually all it takes. Ironically, Trump likely could’ve recovered its approval rating by merely coasting on the optics of ‘strong foreign policy’ and 401(k)s at all-time highs. The fact that the administration feels it necessary to unleash violence on the public, combined with the final-soultion-esque rhetoric coming from the mouths of Trump and Stephen Miller, suggests both that they believe their own lies and they need to constantly flood the zone with headlines.
In the midst of this grotesque and unpopular war on immigrants, one would expect the opposition party, the Democrats, to pose a strong opposition to ICE, right? No. Instead, they have decided to take the weakest possible stance on the issue, being very gentle in specifically denouncing “Trump’s ICE.” Possibly, this is out of self-awareness of the fact that Biden and Obama gleefully oversaw the deportation of millions of immigrants, infamously keeping families in cages at the southern border. And going back to the 1990s, Clinton was deporting between 1 and 1.8 million immigrants per year. If they took this seriously, Democrats could’ve abolished ICE the entire 12 years that they had the authority to do so but refused, making Joe Biden’s recent condemnation ever more fraudulent. More importantly, the Democrats don’t see this as a culturally significant issue, even though hundreds of thousands, if not, millions of Americans have poured out into the streets to oppose it. The party is going through a correction phase where they know that they cannot follow the general public to the left, as everyday working-class people are waking up to the reality that our country needs things like universal healthcare, a cap on inflation, a significant wage increase, an embargo on Israel, and a crackdown on billionaires.
Democrats already decided at the beginning of 2025 that their solution was to keep their head down and ride out the storm so that they can placate the fickle needs of ‘moderate’ voters. The absurdity of this should be clear if we remember what an astonishing failure it was for Biden to track to the right on immigration in 2023 and then for Harris to run on a ‘tough border policy,’ just to lose to Trump. But the average liberal likely gets a bit of memory loss when we recall Harris reciting her “prosecuted trans-national criminal organizations” line. It’s easy to forget, but the Democratic Presidential nominee just a year and a half ago was championing “backing the toughest border patrol bill in decades,” and “[hiring] thousands more border patrol agents.” The motivation for this posture, regardless of whether it was authentic, is specifically to evade the notion that Democrats don’t take the ‘border crisis’ myth seriously. Ironically, the liberal media doesn’t even care to correct course on this. In fact, rags like the New York Times are just as complicit in laundering the Democrats as ‘too far left’ on the issue of immigration, even though in reality they’re actively trying to become more fascist on the policy to appeal to the right.
In February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a list of demands for ICE. Nowhere did it even mention reforming the agency; it quite literally listed existing laws that ICE needed to follow, aside from a pitiful request for “no masks.” The Democrats have no leverage, and instead of making popular maximalist demands like “ABOLISH ICE” and using the bully pulpit, they sulk. The same thing goes for Corey Booker’s embarrassing statement in which he said, “New legislation I’m announcing will require ICE to adopt rigorous training hiring standards, and for their agents to wear body cameras… We need to bring transparency and accountability to ICE in order to make Americans safer.” Nothing about the immigrants being thrown in concentration camps. No, Booker wants to train ICE agents. As rational people paying attention, we should know there is no world where an ICE agent gets training and then magically does not want to brutalize innocent people. Jonathan Ross, the man who murdered Renée Good, was an army machine gunner for 6 years, was deployed to Iraq, has been with CBP/ICE for 19 years, and is a firearms instructor. How much more ‘trained’ can you get? These are mentally twisted fascists; you cannot ‘train’ them out of it.
The liberal darling and Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz, when confronted with the reality that ICE was raiding cities in his state, had the same approach: keeping his head down and shifting blame. Instead of leveraging the National Guard or seriously confronting this crisis, he was there pretending like he had no power. In an interview, Walz said regarding the border czar, “I don’t agree with Tom Homan’s philosophy on things, but I do understand that he is law enforcement and he understands right and wrong.” Essentially, the rhetoric of a loser, someone who is acting as controlled opposition. This is the same Tom Homan who, after Trump won the election, said that his strategy was “shock and awe.” But it’s even worse than that, because during this crisis, in the streets, there were state conservation officers corralling citizens and protecting armored ICE vehicles. When Walz finally deployed the National Guard on January 24th, 54 days after the start of this raid, after people had been begging for the state government to do something for weeks, they were used specifically to intimidate and prevent a popular uprising, not to stop ICE from brutalizing people. Even the Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, refused to endorse the moderate demand of abolishing ICE when the agency has been used as a gestapo force for decades.
While this was going on, the Democrats in the House capitulated for no reason on funding the government— including ICE— in the appropriations bill, allowing it to pass 341-88. Reporting the day after confirmed that House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries simply refused to whip votes against the funding bill, which would’ve at least given them some leverage in ending the crisis in Minneapolis, as agents were calling citizens ‘terrorists’ for recording them. Confronted with overt fascism, where Trump is testing what he can get away with, Democrats are using what little leverage they have to roll over. But we must realize that this is not an accident. The Democratic Party is backed by the same capitalists that back the Republican Party, so it’s no wonder the two parties are effectively not that different. Certainly, these politicians don’t want to risk their lives, or hell, even just their jobs, over something that doesn’t affect their corporate donors. It isn’t just about donors either. The electoral system naturally selects for pathetic husks like Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio who have no morals or higher purpose. University political science programs funded by capitalists produce uncreative, conformist individuals who then go on to work for capitalist-funded political machines. From there, they are the ones with the connections and institutional backing necessary to run for office. By then, many of them don’t even need to accept direct bribes (though they almost always do); they’re already conditioned to be as docile and unquestioning. It’s a self-fulfilling loop where the entire political system is oriented towards capitalist interests.
That’s all to say that Democrats will not save you. They support the ICE gestapo, none of them hold each other accountable, and yet they blame you, the citizen, for not supporting the ‘lesser evil.’ Any solution to this needs to begin with this: stop voting for them, stop caring about them, stop investing your time in them. The bare minimum for any sensible political party is that it isn’t full of capitalist puppets and has actual inter-party discipline. If Democrats truly cared, they would purge party members who support ICE. How can you square having first-generation immigrant Congress members in your party alongside members who support funding the ICE gestapo, who are terrorizing and killing people?
The real resistance is not found in Washington. It’s in places like Los Angeles where protestors broke into and set fire to an ICE facility. It’s in St. Paul where protesters stormed a hotel where ICE thugs were staying. It’s in Minneapolis where citizens began blocking off areas with barricades to keep ICE out, and tens of thousands of people demonstrated against the murder of their neighbors. And finally, it’s through revolutionary organizing that we can show the masses that we cannot defeat fascism by relying on a politician’s empty promises. We have to build our capacity to leverage our power as a working class with labor unions, tenant unions, and boycotts using a united political body. No one is coming to save us; that’s our job.