American Death Squads: ICE and the Administrative Evil of ‘Just Following Orders’

Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Parady La, Heber Sánchez Dominguez, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Geraldo Lunas Campos and Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres were all killed at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers during enforcement actions or in a detention facility.

That is eight people dead just in the first few weeks of 2026. Thirty two people died in ICE custody in 2025, with at least six more people who were either shot, hit by a truck or SUV, or fell from a roof. On New Year’s Eve, Keith Porter was killed by an off-duty ICE agent who alleged that Porter was instigating a confrontation involving firearms.

Regardless of any explanations given by the Trump administration and its representatives, deaths are never justified. To MAGA and those in power, ICE was victimized by almost all peaceful and law-abiding individuals.

That is a disgrace to American public safety, security and stability. It speaks to the rise of Donald Trump’s authoritarianism masquerading as patriotism and traditional values.

I submit to you that what is happening in the cities of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Portland, Richmond, San Antonio, Chicago, San Francisco, and in places all over the country: ICE is operating as a secret police and roving death squad unit, emblematic of the oppression of the Nazis and Soviets.

We live in an era of the new American death squads, building on the sentiment of a new American Gulag. This is an administrative evil at its heart, considering all aspects of the ongoing invasion of Trump’s goons.

Administrative evil is a complex concept. People often overlook their roles in a high bureaucratic structure as simply being innocuous to any harm caused by such institutions, especially if the harm is so flagitious to the point that citizens are either hurt, persecuted, tortured, raped, flogged or murdered.

The concept is defined and examined in “Unmasking Administrative Evil,” a groundbreaking Routledge manual written by Danny L. Balfour, Guy B. Adams, and Ashley E. Nickels.

What the authors use as key framing mechanisms is to zero in on extreme formulations of deadly administrative efficiency, like was the case with Adolf Hitler’s xenophobia and antisemitism parlayed into the industrialized genocide of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

All three authors assert that ethical public service and administration of government policy is still a viable and readily yearned-for goal, but can easily be corrupted and perverted to further the state’s ability to dole out horrific examples of real violence. Or, in the case of most authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, the innocuous guise of simple bureaucratic processes was simply a veneer of true genocidal action.

To illustrate this observation, I point to the notorious Wannsee Conference, which took place in 1942. It was this meeting of high-level Nazis and members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) that led to the industrialization of genocide against the millions of Jewish people in Europe at the time, and among other racial, religious, sexual and political minorities these men saw as “subhuman.”

The Stalin regime in the Soviet Union was also engaged in “administrative evil” acts of state-sponsored slaughter and violence, which were achieved through a vast bureaucratization of political killings and the internment of tens of millions of its countrymen.

“Gulag: A History,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning work on Soviet internment written by Anne Applebaum, explains the scope and machinery of repression that operated not through chaotic brutality alone, but through paperwork, arrest quotas, transportation schedules and carefully managed change of command and supply chains. Whether it is Stalin or Hitler, violence in hyperauthoritarian systems not merely permits violence, as Applebaum outlines, but wishes to optimize the state’s violence.

This is the core of administrative evil: it doesn’t require sadists in power and control. It requires compliance with the state, including in states that deny its authoritarian rise. It requires humans who believe in the system to clock in, follow protocols, file reports and reassure themselves that responsibility for accountability and actions lies elsewhere.

These are the people who simply say, “I am following orders,” in response to failures in the system, like the death of a civilian. Someone who justifies such unlawful actions and extremist responses to peaceful protest uses such a moral anesthetic that allows cruelty to grow.

ICE officers, their administrators and Republican policymakers operate precisely within this repressive framework. For example, when the brothers of Renée Good testified at the U.S. Capitol on the death of their sister, absolutely no Republicans were present for the hearing.

This was a part of a U.S. Capitol forum highlighting the pains of the families of ICE’s victims. Good’s brothers pleaded with the present Democratic lawmakers to hold ICE and its officers accountable and significantly reform the agency.

This was supposed to be a crucial hearing. But when no one from the GOP was present, it went as far as implicating even Republican lawmakers in schemes of administrative evil. ICE raids are justified as “enforcement actions.” Deaths are branded as “incidents” or “terrorist threats.”

Detention centers are referred to as “facilities.” Language is further sanitized so that sufferers can be managed like a corrupted inventory. And, with many parallels to history, human beings are reduced to case numbers and deportation quotas. History reminds us where this leads.

The men who coordinated and managed the deportations of Jews and Romani to Auschwitz did so without viewing themselves as monsters or doing something inherently evil.

The guards who enforced Stalin’s gulag believed they were protecting the revolution. In every case, moral responsibility was outsourced upward, while violence and blind followership flowed downward. Similar logic is unfolding before our very eyes in Trump’s America.

Each new death will simply be explained away. We must reject that logic. Not later, not after another investigation and not after more families are shattered. The lesson of the present-day administrative evil is simple and unforgiving: systems do not become murderous overnight.

They become murderous when obedience turns into complicity.