ICE vs. the Rule of Law, not of Men

ICE exercises arbitrary, uncontrolled power

New Ideal is reproducing the following essay by Dr. Harry Binswanger, originally published on his personal Substack on January 16, 2026.

Politically, America is falling away ever faster from its founding principle: individual rights. But until America becomes an outright dictatorship, like Cuba or Iran, Americans owe a certain deference to law enforcement officers.

In recognition of the importance of the rule of law, some people argue that the woman shot to death in Minneapolis, Renee Good, should have obeyed the ICE agent’s order to get out of her car. Disobeying a law enforcement officer’s direct order, they say, is wrong, anarchistic, and undermines the rule of law.

“When the police tell you to get out of your vehicle, you do,” they say. “If she had shown that proper respect for law enforcement, she’d be alive today,” some add.

I’m hearing these sentiments from people on my membership site (hbletter.com), people who welcome immigrants and condemn efforts to deport “illegals.”

These political allies are arguing in defense of a genuine and important value: the rule of law as opposed to private, anarchistic violence. But independent of the disputed facts of this particular case, there’s a faulty assumption in their position. They are assuming that ICE is a law enforcement agency, like the police. It isn’t.

There’s a dramatic difference between legitimate law enforcement, operating within formalized constraints — set by long precedent and the Constitution — and the free-range force-wielding of armed agents of an administrative agency.

To concretize this difference, compare what happens to you if the police arrest you and what can happen to you if ICE agents seize you. There’s a difference between detention of citizens and of immigrants — citizens are being detained, but they are not subject (or at least not yet) to the same treatment immigrants are.

(Based on info from Gemini and especially ChatGPT Pro 5.2.)

If Arrested by Police

There’s booking and arraignment before a judge, after which the courts take control; your fate will not be decided by the police or any part of the executive branch of government.

You have a right to a lawyer; if you can’t afford one, the court will appoint a public defender to be your defense attorney.

You are presumed innocent: if the prosecutor cannot affirmatively prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, you are free.

Throughout, there is due process of law.

If Seized by ICE

You are taken to an ICE or Customs and Border Patrol holding facility, where you are searched and interrogated; your belongings may be confiscated. Then ICE, not a court, decides whether to detain you, release you on bail, or use “alternatives to detention,” such as ankle monitoring.

No judge has to review any of this.

You may be subject to Expedited Removal — in which case you can be sent to a pre-deportation holding camp, such as the infamous Alligator Alcatraz facility, and then summarily flown to some foreign country, probably its prison. The brutal prison of a dictatorship may be in store for you, with no due process, no appeal. We’ve already seen that happen.

Who decides whether or not you are subject to Expedited Removal? ICE decides. You get one opportunity to present evidence — but to the ICE agent who arrested you, with the only review being done by an ICE supervisor.

In any of your attempts to show ICE that you shouldn’t be shipped out ASAP to a foreign prison, you are presumed guilty. The burden of proof is on you. They may or may not permit you to have a lawyer — i.e., you do not have one by right.

There is no due process of law.

What’s the condensed, overall, essential difference between police arrest and ICE seizure?

The rule of law vs. the arbitrary decisions of men.

Police Arrest as Law Enforcement

Anyone the police arrest is promptly turned over to an independent branch of government: the judiciary, in accordance with the division of powers, to safeguard the rights of the individual against the power of the state.

The judiciary exists to interpret the law. It has no interest in catering to the White House or “public opinion” (a.k.a. the mob).

ICE Seizure as Fundamentally Different

Anyone seized by ICE remains at the mercy of ICE or its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Both agencies are part of the executive branch, headed by the president.

The interest of those who control your fate is to please the White House and the mob.

To make vivid the real meaning of this whole setup, imagine that a Democratic president, operating with support from a Democratic Congress, raises the same hue and cry about income tax evasion that the Republicans have raised about criminal immigrants.

Suppose that this Democratic president sets up within the Internal Revenue Service a division called “Enforcement.” The IRS hires tens of thousands of tough guys to be armed, masked, and sent around the country to conduct raids on homes and businesses, looking for “tax cheats.” In the view of the IRS enforcers, anyone with a big house, luxury automobile, or Rolex watch should be assumed to be a “tax cheat” and has to prove to the IRS enforcers that he isn’t. And assume that the actions of IRS enforcers are shielded from outside review just as the actions of ICE agents are now.

Is this too outrageous? The Left’s demonization of “millionaires and billionaires” closely parallels the Right’s demonization of immigrant hordes of “rapists and narco-terrorists.” Just as the charge of “tax evasion” is a cover for hatred of the self-made man, so the charge of “criminality” among immigrants is a cover for xenophobic fear of anyone who looks different (the Left is correct on that).

The only difference between ICE and the hypothetical IRS enforcement division is that IRS enforcement would keep its victims here, in its own “Alligator Alcatrazes.”

Now, what if some of these armed IRS enforcers saw you in your car protesting them and ordered you to get out of your vehicle? What would you do?

You might obey, out of fear. You might obey to prevent violence, which you know would serve the goals of the Democratic president. Those are real, prudential considerations to weigh.

But I am raising the moral question: Would respect for the rule of law morally oblige you to obey the IRS enforcers and get out of your car?

No. There could be no moral or philosophic reason to treat such “orders” with respect, to pretend that these IRS goons are “officers of the law.”

Even if created by an act of Congress these enforcers would be uncontrolled, hired guns, isolated from the legal system and accountable only to their superiors in the Democratic executive branch, run by the Democratic president.

The moral principle does not change when the party changes from Democratic to Republican.

ICE’s hired guns are not agents of law enforcement. Law enforcement in America is part of the fabric of the whole government, with its separation of powers among the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch, and with the Constitution’s safeguards of rights of the accused. ICE is a paramilitary group operating within the executive branch, answerable to the president.

It is ICE itself that has no respect for the rule of law, not just in the frequently brutal and sometimes deadly behavior of its agents, but in operating as “enforcers” outside the actual legal system.

ICE makes its own rules and is not part of American justice.

As we’ve seen in Minneapolis, ICE is the strutting, swaggering personification of a government of men, not of law.

“Get out of the f—ing car!” an agent barked at Renee Good. After agent Ross shot her in the face, he or another ICE goon muttered, “F—ing bitch!”

Further videos and eyewitness testimony will settle whether or not Ross shot Renee because he was in fear of life or limb. Personally, I’m already convinced that there was no objective threat of serious harm to him. But what’s relevant to this post is only this: Renee had no moral obligation to obey the orders that a pack of untethered, unaccountable goons shouted at her.

If you agree with that analysis, there’s a wider lesson. In evaluating a current event, focus on the essential of the full context. The full context here includes the nature of the American legal system. The purpose of our legal system, of our laws and law enforcement, is to protect individual rights by “placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control.” [Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal]

What does being under “objective control” mean? I can’t put it better than Rand did in that same essay:

[A] government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force. . . . its actions have to be rigidly defined, delimited and circumscribed; no touch of whim or caprice should be permitted in its performance; it should be an impersonal robot, with the laws as its only motive power. If a society is to be free, its government has to be controlled. . . . A private individual may do anything except that which is legally forbidden; a government official may do nothing except that which is legally permitted.

And the essential of ICE is that it is designed to be arbitrary, uncontrolled power.

The actions of an entity follow from its nature. The tragic death of Renee Good is a logical consequence of letting loose on the country a horde of unaccountable masked gunmen, loyal to their bosses’ boss: Donald Trump.

More deaths are sure to come. I worry that ICE is the nucleus of an elite presidential guard.

A guard against what? Against defeat at the polls. January 6, 2021, may be only the overture to a tribal civil war.

“Tribal” is the right term because both sides are held together not by ideas, not by any understanding of political philosophy, but by their hatred of the other tribe. There can be no victory in a blind struggle of that kind — only fear, destruction, and transient, regional war-lords.

Things don’t have to come to that. A way out is available: a return to the rule of law, not of men.

Image Credits: Star Tribune via Getty Images