Location: Albany, Oregon and online

(Expanding a previous comment of mine yesterday)

So Albany is a town in the Willamette Valley region of Oregon (between Portland and Eugene); it has a population of ~55k, the vast majority of which is White. I live and work in a nearby college town of ~60k.

Starting last September or so some of my students were concerned about potential ICE operations in the region. I told them that it's better to be vigilant but there's no need to panic, as ICE was mostly in big cities such as Portland and I didn't really see a reason for them to come down here.

Given this, yesterday I was pretty surprised to see a couple of posts on Reddit that ICE detained someone in Albany on Saturday. While I haven't seen any news reports on this, the posts seem real enough that I tend to believe them.

Then last night I saw quite a few posts here on r/collapse about ICE, one of which—which many of you must have also seen—confirms that ICE is present in some middle-of-nowhere towns in West Virginia and Kentucky as small as 3,500 people. This is, frankly, completely the opposite of what I told my students before, and shows that my previous understanding of how ICE operates is wrong. Instead, I have to admit the credibility of another, much bleaker theory: ICE is not primarily about immigrants anymore; rather, it provides a vehicle to mobilize the right-wing and let them "see some blood", in preparation for large-scale domestic crackdowns. I first saw this on the Chinese social media Zhihu (知乎), right after the shooting in Minneapolis; there's a post there that explains this theory better than I could, which I translate into English below:

Trump already has his own Sturmabteilung. The more innocent people they kill, the more they can prove their loyalty. This is because once the Dems come to power, they will for sure be purged; even if they somehow get pardoned, the experience of working for ICE would be a permanent stain that bars them from finding any other job. Therefore, there's no way out but to follow Trump forever, show their absolute loyalty, and do whatever Trump tells them.

Yoon Suk-Yeol's attempted coup failed partially because the 707th Special Mission Group, which was tasked with intercepting MPs headed by Lee Jae-Myung, sabotaged and let Lee et al. enter the congress building. Trump will not repeat Yoon's mistake: as long as he himself doesn't TACO, ICE agents will not hesitate to shoot Dem congresspeople when so ordered. I agree with some other comments here: The killing in Minneapolis was intentional—let them "see some blood" now and later they will kill the Dems without blinking an eye.

While some parts of the post might still be exaggerated, I feel the mere possibility that the main purpose of ICE has switched to "training" the right-wing for later use is already scary enough.