Trump’s masked legions seem like a secret police force, American style
After Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik party in the Soviet Union, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1918, the party turned to its secret police, the Checka. It had the agency launch a program of state violence called the “Red Terror.”
As History reports, the so-called “All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage” under leader Feliks Dzerzhinsky proclaimed that “anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp.”
Almost immediately, though, mass shootings and hangings without trial began. “Being the wrong kind of person (a priest, a hungry food hoarder) or being in the wrong place at the wrong time or simply possessing a firearm was enough to earn someone a death sentence from newly formed revolutionary tribunals,” the outlet reports.
That launched the “shadow of state terror” over the Russian population that endures today.
Now, with another assassination-attempt survivor, Donald J. Trump, are we seeing a reincarnation of the Checka? Is the American form coming in the ever-expanding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies?
Tens of thousands of masked, armed personnel in fatigues now roam around American streets. They racially profile people as they boost the numbers of deportees daily. And a growing number of people are dying at their hands.
Just how different are they from the brutes used by Lenin, Stalin, Putin and other totalitarians?
The numbers of those killed at the hands of the Checka and successor outfits, such as the NKVD and the KGB, are enormous, of course. In numerical terms, there’s no comparison.
But one wonders if the rising numbers of deaths of people grabbed up by the U.S. agencies amount to a difference in magnitude, not kind. And one can only wonder what the coming three years will hold.
Already, we have seen the murders in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti and Renee Good at the hands of federal agents. State officials in Minnesota are probing those cases with an eye toward prosecution of the killers. But they are getting no help from federal authorities, who would rather give the agents free hands to do as they wish.
And now we have the death of a disabled man in Buffalo, New York, as a result of what the city’s mayor called “unprofessional and inhumane” conduct by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind 56-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, was found dead in a downtown street five days after agents released him from custody on a winter night, shoeless in the freezing rain.
City police had arrested Shah Alam on Feb. 15, 2025, after he had wandered onto private property, and he was held for a year in a county holding center on charges of assaulting an officer and trespassing. He spoke no English. His son told CNN Shah Alam’s problems arose from a misunderstanding, adding that the man pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in a plea deal to settle the case and avoid deportation.
Because Border Patrol had lodged an “immigration detainer” after Shah Alam’s arrest, however, the police turned him over to the agency on Feb. 19. Border Patrol quickly decided that as a legal refugee Shah “was not amenable to removal,” and as a “courtesy” — the agency said — the agents dropped him off in the parking lot of a closed Tim Horton’s coffee shop.
Shah Alam wore no shoes, only orange booties from the detention center, when he was dropped off, according to Buffalo Mayor Sean Ryan. A few days later, on Feb. 24, the man’s body was found on a downtown street. A city spokesperson said his death appeared health-related, though autopsy results have not been released.
“The preventable death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam is deeply disturbing and a dereliction of duty by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” the mayor said. “A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location. That decision from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane.”
The case raises a host of troubling questions. Why didn’t Border Patrol contact Shah Alam’s family to pick him up? Why did agents, instead, release him in the chilly night, barely protected from a freezing rain? How could such agents be so callous and heartless to a man who couldn’t even speak to them, couldn’t even see them?
And is this the sort of intimidating and chilling action one might expect from an authoritarian secret police, rather than a U.S. federal agency? Is this really the American way of law enforcement?
Disturbing as these headline-grabbing deaths are, they are far from isolated cases. At least 32 people died in ICE custody last year, according to The Texas Tribune. Inadequate medical care, along with suicide, homicide and abuse by staff, seem to be mostly to blame. And these figures don’t account for the unknown number of deaths of deportees, though in past years scores have been reported after being sent to countries such as El Salvador.
So far, Trump’s deportation machine has expelled an estimated 540,000 people since he took office, according to Brookings. While Trump and his minions insist they are rounding up the “worst of the worst,” at least one-third of people arrested do not have a criminal record.
Now, as the agencies rush to buy warehouses to convert them into detention centers across the U.S., the numbers of deportees will surely rise. So, too, it seems likely that the body count will climb. As The New York Times reported, the Trump administration aims to expand its “detention footprint” to at least 100,000 beds.
“Of the roughly 20 warehouses being eyed for purchase, at least eight have already been bought in states including Maryland, Georgia, Texas and Pennsylvania, according to internal Department of Homeland Security documents obtained by The New York Times,” the newspaper reported.
The Trump government is also busily expanding the numbers of agents in its masked and armed ranks. As of early 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has over 22,000 officers and agents nationwide, while U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employs over 20,000 Border Patrol agents. Total personnel within CBP tops 60,000.
But there is some good news. Unlike the Soviet Union and elsewhere, in the U.S. many Americans – both ordinary citizens and officials – are resisting the growth of Trump’s armed and masked legions. Local citizens have been pushing back on the warehouse-detention center efforts. As the Times reports, some purchases collapsed in recent weeks in other areas as potential sellers faced mounting public backlash and canceled sales.
And, of course, many Americans have taken to the streets to document abuses by government agents in places such as Minneapolis, for now at least able to demonstrate the freedoms Americans have to resist illegal activities by authorities. Courageous judges, too, have been standing in the way of some actions, such as a federal judge in Boston who blocked government efforts to deport people to countries with which they have no connection.
In a Feb. 25 order, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy said the so-called third-country removal policy “is not fine, nor is it legal,” citing individual rights to due process enshrined under the U.S. Constitution. He noted that the deportees could become “targets of persecution and oppression around the globe.”
A day later, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston issued an executive order directing police in his city to intervene during clashes involving federal immigration officers, as The Colorado Sun reported. Johnston said city police are obliged to protect people’s civil rights and aid Denver residents.
Johnston’s order also requires local police to identify and record ICE agents using body cameras when “tactically safe,” and confirms the Denver Police Department will investigate criminal allegations made against ICE agents, the news outlet reported.
Nationally, Democrats are demanding changes to ICE procedures or they will continue withholding funds from the Department of Homeland Security, which has led to a partial government shutdown.
The Democrats want immigration agents to remove masks, turn on their body cameras, and wear visible, clear identification. They want no more roving patrols, an end to racial profiling and to random arrests. They want agents to obtain a judicial warrant signed by a neutral judge—not an administrative warrant—to enter private property. And they want agents to stop detaining Americans and using excessive force against peaceful protesters.
Certainly, they don’t want federal agents behaving like those in New York City who lied their way into an apartment block to arrest a Columbia University undergraduate. Five plainclothes immigration agents arrived at the university-owned apartment building of the student and demanded to be let inside, said Claire Shipman, the acting president of Columbia, in a statement released Feb. 26.
As The New York Times reported, the officers falsely told the building superintendent that they were from the Police Department and said that they were searching for a missing child. The superintendent let the officers in where they grabbed up the student, Elmina Aghayeva, Shipman said.
At the request of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Trump ordered her released — for now. The Department of Homeland Security said it had arrested Aghayeva because her “student visa was terminated in 2016 under the Obama administration for failing to attend classes.” Calling her an “illegal alien,” the department added that her deportation case remained active.
“ICE placed her in removal proceedings and she has been released while she waits for her hearing,” it said.
So, the threat looms over this Azerbaijan native, just as it does over the rest of America.
And when the administration can’t rely on brute force alone, it tries to misuse the courts to get its way. For instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 27 announced federal charges against 30 more people accused of civil rights violations in a January protest inside a Minnesota church where a pastor works for ICE.
As PBS reported, Bondi said on social media that 25 people were in custody and more arrests would follow. The new indictment comes a month after independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and local activist Nekima Levy Armstrong were charged for their alleged roles in a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul.
Democrats in Washington, like many other Americans, are fed up with such antics and with the brutality of ICE. Polling shows that most Americans disapprove of ICE’s tactics. They have no use for an American Checka.
So far, however, the Trump Administration seems more inspired by the totalitarians.
Will the forces of civility and law prevail? With three years to go under Trump and the expansion of his deportation efforts in full swing, the signs are hardly encouraging.