Israel Trains ICE Agents
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, militarized ICE agents gather at a crime scene after a fatal raid. This image could just as easily be from occupied Palestine – and that is no coincidence. America’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ostensibly meant to “protect the homeland,” has become a roaming army terrorizing immigrants and even U.S. citizens. Its raids and tactics increasingly resemble those used by the Zionist occupation forces against Palestinians. After two years of brutal Zionist slaughter and genocide in Gaza and the West Bank – all backed by the American empire – those same repressive methods are being unleashed on communities here in the United States. The American empire is importing its genocidal foreign policy and wars, bringing them home to target the marginalized. We must condemn and dismantle this deadly alliance. We must abolish Zionism and abolish ICE, for they are two heads of the same monster of colonial oppression.
In early 2026, Minneapolis was placed under siege in what Homeland Security trumpeted as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever. On January 6, 2026, 2,000 armed agents – many in masks and tactical gear – flooded the Minneapolis–St. Paul area in “Operation Metro Surge”. These were not calm legal processes; they were “showy sweeps” designed to instill fear. Residents described that first day as “unlike any other day we’ve experienced,” and an eyewitness said people had been “terrorized by ICE for six weeks” during the buildup. This campaign of intimidation turned deadly on January 7, when a 37-year-old local mother, Renee Good, was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a confrontation. The agent fired multiple rounds into her car as she tried to drive away – killing her in broad daylight on a residential street. Federal officials, led by Trump’s Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, outrageously claimed Good had committed “an act of domestic terrorism” by attempting to flee, even labeling her a “deranged leftist” in an effort to justify the killing. But video footage and eyewitnesses flatly contradicted the official story. What unfolded in Minneapolis felt eerily familiar to many – a page ripped from Israel’s playbook of state terror.
Indeed, one journalist observed that following the ICE killing of Good and the government’s lies about it, “it was as if someone had taken Israel’s playbook for Gaza and tested it out stateside.”. The impunity and brutality on display mirror how Israeli occupation forces operate: shoot first, then manufacture a narrative to paint the victim as a dangerous terrorist. Just as Israeli officials routinely excuse the killings of Palestinian civilians by posthumously accusing them of attacking soldiers or being “human animals,” U.S. authorities immediately smeared Renee Good to deflect blame. This is state terror, plain and simple. In the months preceding Good’s death, ICE agents had opened fire on people at least nine times across multiple states, killing at least four other individuals during deportation operations. Masked ICE squads have been snatching people off the streets, kicking down doors in pre-dawn raids, and prowling neighborhoods as if occupying forces. Like an army of occupation, they even blocked medics from helping Renee Good as she lay bleeding, preventing a doctor and ambulance from reaching her. Such cold-blooded disregard for life – letting a wounded civilian die without aid – is exactly the kind of cruelty Palestinians endure under Israeli occupation. It should horrify every person of conscience that it’s happening in American cities.
Thousands of people across the country responded in outrage to the Minneapolis killing. The city’s own mayor and Minnesota’s governor demanded ICE leave the city, while protestors flooded the streets night after night. From Minneapolis to Chicago to New York, crowds chanted for justice and held signs proclaiming “Abolish ICE” and solidarity with Palestine. The connection was not lost on the people: many protests against ICE’s abuses have featured Palestinian flags and slogans, recognizing that the struggle against racist state violence is global. Yet mainstream politicians still pretend that ICE’s ethnic cleansing at home is unrelated to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In truth, they are deeply intertwined – two fronts of a war on the oppressed.
How did we get here? How did an American agency come to behave like an occupying army? Follow the trail to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. For decades, U.S. law enforcement – including local police, border patrol, federal agents, and ICE officers – have been training directly with the Israeli military and police. In fact, internal documents obtained by activists show that “well over a thousand” U.S. police chiefs, sheriffs and federal agents (from the FBI, DHS, and ICE) have flown to Israel for training in surveillance, racial profiling, crowd control, detention, and deportation. This extensive collaboration, exposed through Freedom of Information Act requests, was the target of a campaign launched in 2017 by Jewish Voice for Peace called Deadly Exchange, aiming to sever these ties. The campaign documented how U.S. officers in these exchanges watched “live demonstrations of repressive violence” – observing Israeli forces suppressing protests in the occupied West Bank, patrolling militarized zones in East Jerusalem, and managing the open-air prison that is Gaza. These were not mere PowerPoint seminars; American agents stood on the ground as Israel showcased its tools of control. As one report noted, U.S. delegates even met with Israel’s Shin Bet security service and military prison officials to learn interrogation and “counter-insurgency” tactics used on Palestinians. In the cynical name of “counterterrorism,” American police were being schooled in the mechanics of apartheid.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – a U.S. based pro-Israel organization – has been a key facilitator of these police exchanges. In 2015, for example, a top ICE official (Peter Edge, then ICE’s associate director) attended an ADL-sponsored “counterterrorism seminar” in Israel. Before his trip, this ICE leader explicitly stated he wanted to learn how Israel “manages perpetual and elevated threat levels” and “how those techniques can be applied more broadly” back home. Let that sink in: ICE’s leadership sought to import Israel’s tactics for dealing with an occupied population and apply them on U.S. soil. The ADL and similar groups proudly call these junkets an exchange of “best practices” – but what is being exchanged are worst practices of militarized repression. American officers return with a toolkit honed by decades of subjugating Palestinians: high-tech surveillance systems, biometric databases, collective punishment techniques, and a mentality that views the “other” as an enemy combatant.
Consider the testimony of one U.S. law enforcement officer who participated in an ADL delegation to Israel. Bill Ayub, a sheriff from Ventura County, California, recalled being amazed by the “Hollywood-esque” surveillance systems Israeli forces use – technologies that record and track people’s movements and even listen to conversations across an entire city. He admitted the software was “more invasive than you would see here in the U.S.”, yet he was impressed by how it allowed Israeli authorities to monitor and control dissent. Ayub also witnessed Israeli arrest techniques and found the use of force “shocking”: “It was like, ‘Wow, you do that?… We’d be in jail if we did something like that here.’”. Nevertheless, he described the exchange as broadening his perspective – apparently normalizing tactics that violate civil liberties and brutalize civilians. This mindset shift is precisely the point of the exchange programs. They erase the boundary of what American officers consider acceptable: if Israel can do it to Palestinians with impunity, U.S. agents learn they can do it to immigrants, Black and Brown communities, Muslims – anyone deemed a threat – and get away with it.
These exchanges have concrete outcomes. U.S. police and ICE now deploy surveillance and control technologies straight from the Israeli arsenal. For instance, the same Israeli companies that build military-grade radar and spying systems for monitoring Palestinians have contracts to provide border surveillance on the U.S.-Mexico boundary. And one notorious U.S. tech firm, Palantir Technologies, has fingers in both pies – powering ICE’s mass surveillance and aiding Israel’s targeting of Palestinians. Palantir, co-founded by a Trump ally, sold ICE a high-tech case management system to track and hunt immigrants. At the same time, Palantir helped develop an AI battlefield platform for Israel that decides whom to target for assassination, using data that shockingly included private communications of Palestinian-Americans. This is the bleeding edge of oppression: predictive policing and autonomous targeting, bred through U.S.-Israel collaboration. It blurs foreign warfare with domestic policing. When ICE mines data to identify “threats” and sends paramilitary teams into neighborhoods, it is channeling the algorithms and ethos Israel uses to lock an entire population in an open-air prison.
Moreover, ICE’s coordination with Zionist entities goes beyond training and tech – it extends into ideological policing. In U.S. immigration courts, an ICE official testified that the agency had even utilized a far-right Zionist blacklist website, Canary Mission, to identify pro-Palestinian students for surveillance and deportation attempts. Canary Mission is a shadowy site that profiles and smears advocates for Palestinian human rights (primarily Muslim and Arab students) as “terrorist” sympathizers. That ICE resorted to this McCarthyite “doxxing” list run by Zionist hardliners to decide who to arrest shows how entwined the agency is with the agenda of silencing Palestinian voices. And in one particularly egregious case, ICE directly acted as an arm of Israel’s propaganda machine: ICE agents arrested a Palestinian American activist in 2019 using information from an Israeli minister, in retaliation for her support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. Under Trump, the message has been clear – if you oppose Zionism, you are a target. ICE, which already behaves like a secret police for immigrants, is more than willing to assist Israel in punishing its critics. This is the Deadly Exchange in action: not only are tactics exchanged, but the very mission of these agencies merges into one – protecting systems of racial supremacy on a global scale.
Why do the U.S. and ‘Israel’ find such natural common cause? It’s simple, they are both settler-colonial projects rooted in ethnic supremacy, and both rely on violence to maintain that order. The alliance between American empire and Zionism is a partnership of ideologies.
The Trump administration and the Zionist regime are operating from the same playbook to achieve visions of ethnic and racial supremacy. For Trump and his MAGA base, the dream is a white, Christian America purified of immigrants, Muslims, and people of color.
For the Zionist project in Palestine, the goal is an exclusively Jewish ethno-state from which Palestinians (overwhelmingly Arab and largely Muslim) have been dispossessed and replaced.
We must be unequivocal in our demand to abolish Zionism and ICE. This means dismantling the structures of oppression entirely. ICE, born in the post-9/11 paranoia of 2003, is an instrument of terror that has ripped apart families and now murders American citizens in broad daylight. It cannot be “fixed,” it must be shut down.
Similarly, Zionism as a political project has, for over 77 years, meant the dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people. It has no “kinder” version and its core premise is exclusivist and supremacist. It must be abolished.
The American empire’s moral bankruptcy has been laid bare as it mimics and bankrolls ‘Israel’s’ genocide. We will not have the blood of Gaza’s children and America’s immigrant families on our hands.
ICE and Zionism are two blades of the same pair of scissors, cutting through our freedoms.
SOURCES:Truthout – “ICE and the Israeli Military Are 2 Sides of the Same Coin — We Must Resist Both”Truthout – JVP FOIA on Deadly Exchange (police training in Israel)Truthout – ICE official Peter Edge on learning Israeli tacticsDefector – “ICE Is Modeling Its Brutality After The IDF” (on Renee Good killing parallels to Gaza)Defector – ICE using Canary Mission blacklist to target pro-Palestine studentsDefector – Sheriff’s testimony on Israeli surveillance and force tacticsScalawag Magazine – “ICE and the IDF: Transnational Nexus of State Control” (Palantir, surveillance links)Scalawag – ICE using Zionist blacklist (Canary Mission) to decide arrestsThe Guardian – “US police took intelligence from IDF, trained on ‘Muslim extremists’” (BlueLeaks files)Wikipedia – “Killing of Renee Good” (details on Operation Metro Surge and protests).
