The New American ICE Age
Newsweek
The New American ICE Age | Opinion
Thomas G. Moukawsher
Published
Jan 20, 2026 at 01:31 PM EST
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently summed up the administration of President Donald Trump in a single scary sentence: “We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Miller and Trump have made this the foreign and domestic policy of the United States. Abroad, we just snatched the president of Venezuela in a military attack while maintaining a sea blockade against the country’s oil trade.
In addition to Venezuela, in the first year of Trump’s second term, the United States has bombed Nigeria, Somalia, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Iraq. We have threatened Canada, Mexico, Columbia and Cuba. Worst of all, the United States is presently threatening military action and imposing tariffs to coerce one of our staunchest NATO allies, Denmark, to sell Greenland to the United States.
Trump’s domestic policy is the same: force and threats. Trump has ordered American soldiers into American cities, including Washington, D.C., Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis and New Orleans. He has followed them with thousands of ICE agents. They have become the perfect symbol of Miller’s force-based world. We should call this Miller-Trump era the ICE Age.
ICE agents present positively paleolithic images. Heavily armed. Masked. In unmarked cars. They hunt in packs. They strike and move on. They don’t hesitate to use force.
Thirty-two people died in ICE custody this past year. One American mother was shot and killed. Five other U.S. citizens were shot in their cars by immigration agents. Some 170 Americans were wrongly arrested in the ICE dragnet. For many Americans, images of ICE agents hunting women, children and even students have come to represent a brutal new era in American life where the only tools are coercion and force.
Trump is using those same tools to enrich himself, extorting billions in cold, hard cash from American businesses and foreign governments. Using presidential power as coercion, Trump has amassed some $4 billion by pushing his crypto currency, suing media companies, blocking mergers, extorting lawyers, pardoning donors, trading tariffs for tribute money and placing his children in businesses getting federal funds.
Those who don’t pay to play are frozen—iced—out. Just ask Congress. When Republicans Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and Marjorie Taylor Greene stood up to him, Trump pickaxed them. Now, after arresting New York Attorney General Letitia James, former FBI director James Comey and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the Trump administration has sicced federal agents on Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell.
The news is full of doors being broken down and people being dragged off to jail. Chillingly, the January 6 Capitol insurrection is now being celebrated. It’s all part of the Trump-Miller ICE Age. Force, not law, is what matters. Neanderthals lived it. Why not Americans?
Some Americans may be inclined to embrace it. They like strong leadership and a backside-kicking foreign policy. All well and good, but in the ICE Age how does a government that justifies itself on force alone have any legal or moral ground to object if others use it against them?
Having praised those who violently attacked Congress, hasn’t Trump encouraged people to attack ICE? By labelling the Capitol attack a “day of love” and the protesters in Minnesota “insurrectionists,” hasn’t Trump abandoned the idea of law and morality altogether? What moral or legal case could the Trump administration make if China took Taiwan by force? How could Trump object if Russia reconquered Ukraine and the 13 other countries that were once part of the Soviet Union? Only force matters.
How did we sink so low? Why is our government about violence instead of fixing the decline of American education, the collapse of our private health care system, the fact that most Americans feel compelled to buy their drinking water, can’t pay for higher education or a starter home, and face daily rip-offs from greedy insurance companies, deregulated airlines and Big Pharma?
Stephen Miller and Donald Trump know. As long as the country is obsessed with dog-eat-dog dominance struggles, Americans won’t have enough energy left to complain about the economy or affordability—or about the undisclosed Epstein files either. In the ICE Age, it all makes sense.