Trump, ICE, and Amit Shah's Coercive Politics

After living in America for a month, one notices a resemblance between Home Minister Amit Shah and President Donald Trump’s political advisor Stephen Miller, who holds the titles of deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor. No, it’s not that they’re both bald, though Miller is smaller and unable to charm ladies like Shah does with the “Godi” media.

Miller drives the USA’s new immigration policy: he has resurrected and reinvented the Alien Enemies Act, which criminalised anti-government statements, and he reinstated Title 42 expulsions, which includes deportations of those who recently visited a country where a communicable disease was present. Just last month, Miller told reporters that America was effectively closed to asylum seekers. What is ironic is that Miller’s great-great-grandfather was a Russian Jew who immigrated in 1903.

His, and Trump’s, weapon of choice has been Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), though technically it’s run by the Department of Homeland Security. ICE on any given day has 65,800 people in detention, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Of those, 71 per cent have no criminal conviction. Since Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, over 3 lakh persons have been arrested by ICE; and 5.9 lakh have been deported. This included Indian illegals who, in February 2025, were shackled, chained, and transported in a military aircraft to Amritsar.

It is no coincidence that those detained by ICE are brown-skinned. The US does, in fact, see illegal immigration by white-skinned people—even Trump’s latest wife Melania is reported to have entered on a visitor’s visa and later obtained an “eminent person’s” green card. Trump famously, in his first term, decried immigration from “shithole countries” in Africa, saying he preferred people from countries like “Norway, Sweden, and Denmark”, all in Scandinavia. His racism plays well with his base; and since Latinos from Mexico and South America are most visible as immigrants—often providing the manual labour that overfed whites are reluctant to take on—ICE actions keep Trump‘s base intact (despite the ill-advised war on Iran).

ICE’s heavy-handed tactics, however, are now a sore point for middle-of-the-road voters. On July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who lived in America for 35 years, was shot and killed by ICE agents in Houston, Texas. Six days later, 25-year-old Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot dead by an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine; the shooter was a man with a history of domestic violence. There have been 41 shootings which included 11 deaths, most famously of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in January 2026, both 37-year-old US citizens of Minneapolis, Minnesota, both killed by ICE in separate incidents.

What angers Americans the most is that ICE agents legally lack any policing power or authority; they act as if they are above the police. They wear no identification badges or nameplates; they wear dark glasses and cover their head and faces to stymie identification. Liberal commentators refer to them as Trump’s private army, and a modern-day Gestapo (the Nazi secret police under Heinrich Himmler), and they fear that ICE will be used to disrupt the mid-term polls in November, when Trump’s party is expected to be given a shellacking.

A similar lack of identification was glaring during the brutal police crackdown on protesting students in New Delhi on July 20. Egged on by cheerleaders like Zoho honcho Sridhar Vembu and demonetisation geek S. Gurumurthy, who used terms like “iron hand” etc, Amit Shah, to whom the Delhi Police and the paramilitary forces directly report, unleashed his fury on the kids. All that it achieved was the eternal enmity of a new generation of voters, and many other Indians whose jaws hung in disbelief as their nation was beating up its children. Americans express a similar disbelief with each ICE brutality.

We’ve already seen Amit Shah’s anti-immigrant drives and his terming of Bangladeshis as “termites”. Is it any wonder that Chief Justice Surya Kant Sharma used the term “cockroaches” for unemployed activists and dissenters? His Honor has seemingly begun to rue being forever tainted by his own tongue, by telling the government not to file cases.

And Shah’s deportations are organically linked (many of them not kosher) to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral roles, which made the battlefield lopsided in favour of the BJP, during the recent string of Assembly elections. Miller is hoping to replicate such tactics in the coming mid-term, by restricting mail-in votes, and by requiring proof of citizenship and mandatory photo ID at the ballot booth. This will be part of Trump’s SAVE America Act, which some legislators have so far stymied.

Like Miller, Shah is obstinate; even after assurances to the Cockroach Janata Party, his police are going around arresting kids who made reels and posts on social media, lampooning the hapless Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. After the court’s direction on no cases, Shah’s street-level goons, looking like unclejis, have been captured on videos as they corner and beat youngsters.

Shah, like Trump, is waging a losing war. The kids will never forget. Modi is in a panic because he knows his time is up. He’s making reels that are worse than the lampoons. The opposition has smelled blood. Assam and Bihar had to officially rescind any action against students. Amit Shah, who thinks he’s next in line after Modi—no doubt he sees Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath as clueless—is in for a rude awakening. Our Home Minister was externed from Gujarat in 2010, during the Sohrabuddin murder case, and is occasionally known as tadipaar (fugitive). Today, the echoes of tadipaar are back.

Similarly, for Stephen Miller, his fellow Americans diligently keep a record of each ICE incident of brutality. The day before Trump loses power, Miller will flee the US and seek asylum in a nation with which the US has no extradition treaty, thereby also becoming a tadipaar. The people are, as they nowadays like to say, keeping receipts.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.

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