The United Police State of America Has Arrived

Officers stand in line as people marched from City Hall to the Federal Detention Center to protest ICE raids and unlawful detentions on Sept. 1, 2025, in Los Angeles. Photo: Ted Soqui/Sipa News Photo via AP Images

The consolidation of the new police state has not been announced. There was no press conference declaring that local, state, and federal law enforcement — plus the military — are all marching to the same drum. No news conference featuring a bunch of police captains standing before a microphone to express their commitment to the new regime.

But it is here.

In the past six months, a quiet, mass reorganization of resources and rules and personnel has rippled across the country in order to enforce the Trump administration’s desires.

This realignment is happening swiftly, smoothly and without fanfare. That the police have been so quiet in a historically loud moment should be a dead giveaway that a shift is under way. The line between order and chaos is moving. And the police are adapting to meet the changing norms.

Politics was always in their job description — whether by origin (slave catchers) or by election or appointment. But under this new order, the police — arm in arm with immigration agents, the military, and the rest of the federal agencies — are starting to function more as political police force. That is, an instrument of a specific regime. City by city, state by state, the police have been reorganizing themselves to align with the priorities of the White House. This is what the free agents of fascism do: They make themselves useful. They figure out how to stay in the mix, how to serve the emergent status quo.

Since the summer, where there have been Trump administration escalations, police have been lurking on the margins — or lending a helping hand.

Sometimes, the assistance matches the fiery timbre of repression put forth by the White House. When thousands showed up in downtown LA to protest federal immigration raids, in June, the Los Angeles Police Department seemed to cast aside decades of sanctuary city policy forbidding cooperation with immigration enforcement authorities by working alongside federal forces to violently repress protestors. LAPD officers on horseback trampled a man and beat him with batons while their colleagues alternated with members of the Department of Homeland Security and National Guard to shoot people — including an Australian journalist — with “less than lethal” bullets and pepper spray.

Other times, the help aids and abets. During a raid, the LAPD blocked in formation as Immigration and Customs Enforcement quarterbacked an operation that resulted in the violent arrest of Service Employees International Union California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta. Then, at an ICE staging area at Dodger Stadium, the LAPD helped federal agents exit though a different gate after one was blocked by protesters and the press. One month later, during “Operation Excalibur” — a “show of presence” by the National Guard and Customs and Border Protection — police officers worked crowd control at MacArthur Park. (Then, when they were done, they swerved at a few Angelenos protesting the federal scare tactics.)

In the nation’s capital, D.C. Metropolitan police, under the president’s orders and backed up by Mayor Muriel Bowser through an executive order, are formally cooperating with ICE, helping with immigration checkpoints and, apparently, responding to calls for backup. This month, when a resident followed a group of National Guard troops on patrol, playing the storm troopers theme music from “Star Wars,” one soldier threatened to call the police.

This kind of collaboration is easy to overlook. If, during the regular course of a work week or at a major community event — like the recent West Indian Day festivities or the African American Day parade in New York City — the cops are around every corner, why wouldn’t they also make random cameos during ICE raids?

You might not think much of these because they feel so banal in the face of the spectacular terror and brutality being perpetrated daily. If you’re watching political violence take place — say, ICE agents gunning down a man in Chicago — the uniformed officers directing traffic fade into the background.

But they’re signs of the Thin Blue Line’s willingness to go with the federal flow.

Gone are the days of beefs between local cops and federal agents, the plot engine of blockbusters like “Bad Boys” and “Beverly Hills Cop,” and auteur productions like “Inside Man” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” Instead of drama over one department stepping on another’s toes, the police, federal agents, and military forces are now taking turns as leading role. During the Biden administration, the local police were the strong arm violently cracking down against the student protesters objecting against Israel’s genocide. Now, they’re playing second fiddle to ICE’s top billing as America’s violent first responders.

Sworn duties and responsibilities have become blurred between jurisdictions, and, in some cases, downright bizarre. The distinctions — agencies, budgets, and even uniform design — between different departments of law enforcement are becoming subsumed under one identifier: police. Agents of the state take to the field united by the word “POLICE” on their vests.

This is, in part, a function of Trump’s relentless push to replace the rule of law with the rule of Trump, a system built on confusion and dubious legality. His deportation program and his illegitimate constitutional subventions have perverted the relationship between the immigration and justice systems, with the administrative proceedings of immigration enforcement transformed into crackdowns on so-called criminals — or even “foreign terrorists” — who can be renditioned to gulags in far-off countries with no due process.

Trump’s insistence on the presence of crime — his claim of crime as not just a feature of immigration but as the principle prism through which immigration must be understood — justifies leveraging all means of enforcement to fix the system. And that system needs endless resources.

Trump’s deployment of the National Guard has only further corrupted these distinctions and made the job duties stranger. Troops are spreading mulch and picking up trash on the Mall, and the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives are conducting traffic stops, asking for drivers’ immigration status. Meanwhile, military lawyers are being recruited to sit as immigration judges.

The perversion of job duties might seem like a natural progression. To encounter a police officer taking on tasks that might seem beyond the core job of a cop — “being asked to do too much,” in the words of New York mayoral favorite Zohran Mamdani — is unremarkable because that has been the norm for some time.

In New York, all sorts of services mysteriously and bafflingly fall under the stewardship of the police: school crossing guards, street vendor citations, traffic enforcement, staffing summer and after-school programs at what are, ostensibly, community centers administered by the Police Athletic League.

But the mission creep has accelerated.

As of October 1, 2025, ICE has signed 1,036 memorandums of agreement for state and local cooperation in 40 states, including New York, under its 287(g) program. Police surveillance is merging with federal surveillance more than ever before. And the technology is advancing faster than regulators, the media, and the general public can keep track of.

In March, a Guardian investigation found that local police and ICE had “gained access to troves of data” in sanctuary cities such as Westchester from vast networks of license plate readers. In April, New York Focus revealed that the New York State Police are funneling information from the 20-year-old gang database it maintains into a federal database used by ICE to further its deportation efforts. In June, 404 Media reported that ICE has been field-testing Mobile Fortify, an app that uses facial recognition captured via a smartphone to access your biometric data in various government databases. 404 Media also reported that, in Oregon, local police “casually offered various surveillance services to federal law enforcement officials from the FBI and ICE, and to other state and local police departments, as part of an informal email and meetup group of crime analysts.”

According to Forbes, ICE has a $4.4 million contract — first procured during the Biden administration — with a manufacturer that produces Stingray, the fake cell tower that can be used to trace the whereabouts of anyone in range.

This month, The Guardian reported that ICE obtained access to begin the use of Israeli spyware to hack phones and encrypted apps. And a week later, 404 Media reported ICE spent $10 million on Clearview AI facial recognition software to support Homeland Security Investigations, supposedly allowing the agency track people it accuses of “assaulting” officers. This is all on top of HSI’s contract with Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which, according to a dossier of documents reviewed by The Guardian, built a platform called ImmigrationOS that “will service ICE branches beyond HSI” and includes a “searchable super-network” for agents to comb through government and private databases. One wonders if and when the NYPD’s elaborate operation of data collection, which includes everything from OMNY taps to CCTV feeds taken from “free” Wi-Fi networks at public housing developments, will be the next searchable feast for federal authorities to sink their teeth into.

The budgetary allocation to immigration enforcement contained in the Big Beautiful Bill will soon kick into overdrive, meaning there will be a huge leap in recruitment and the acquisition of more tools of technological surveillance and repression. (DHS claims any “lapse in funding” brought on by the government shutdown “will not slow ICE down.”) ICE recruitment is moving ahead swiftly and will surely accelerate. The agency is working full stop to crush counter-surveillance efforts by organizers and concerned citizens. At the same time, its propaganda machine is hard at work creating hero narratives and poisoning the discourse.

The police state of our nightmares is nearing its final form. Even the so-called opposition leaders have proven themselves useful stewards of the cause. In many of the blue cities and states Trump has attacked, Democratic elected officials have used Trump’s actions to serve as cover for their desired expansions of the police at the expense of taxpayers, while appropriating the president’s crime narrative to fit their own ambitions.

Ahead of Trump’s invasion in Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass signed off on increasing the LAPD’s $1.86 billion budget to $1.98 billion just before she found herself holding press conference after press conference decrying the president for sending in troops to do what her LAPD could handle on its own. And she has all but assured that liability claims against the city, exacerbated by the police-fed crowd control crackdown, will continue to be mount, despite huge budget shortfalls made worse by lawsuits against the LAPD.

In D.C., Mayor Bowser has greenlighted her Metro police force, home to the now infamous “jump out boys,” to implement Trump’s desired broken-windows policies. “We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” she said, wishing out loud for more local police. (In her executive order, announcing her compliance with the White House, she even adopted Trump’s branding in establishing a “Safe and Beautiful Emergency Operations Center.”) In other words, it’s jump-out season once again.

“In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul boasted of her deployment of National Guard troops and cameras in the MTA to boost safety, then she asked the president by phone not to deploy troops to the city. When DHS cut $187 million in security funding for police, she worked with Trump to reinstate it.

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a constant Trump critic, seized on the president’s conspiracies and deployed the California Highway Patrol to fight “crime.” He doubled-down on this deployment at the end of August, citing its overwhelming success.

There never was a red police state or a blue police state, only a United Police State of America.

The rounds of beta testing are behind us. We are through the looking glass already. The police state expansions long pre-date Trump’s deportation program. The level of coordination is just getting more sophisticated. Propaganda and technology and fascism are all working together in overdrive. The police are collaborating across that trinity. They’ve figured out how to adjust their tune to meet the dystopian new reality that’s emerging. Their quietude in this moment should be setting off all the alarms that the Gestapo are already hard at work. Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth and are openly preparing to wage war on the “enemy within” — but the political police have been moving in the shadows for quite some time.

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