WASHINGTON, Jan 17 — US immigration agents now remind many Americans of the Gestapo — and not just the left-wing activists who have taken to the streets to protest violent raids commanded by President Donald Trump.

Avid Trump supporter and podcaster Joe Rogan, whose massive audience heard him repeat Republican talking points in the run-up to the 2024 election, fuelled debate this week by airing those concerns.

“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo, ‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?” Rogan asked millions of listeners.

“You don’t want militarised people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people — many of which turn out to be US citizens that just don’t have their papers on them,” he said.

A growing number of Americans agree with that sentiment.

In every national poll, a majority condemns the actions of the immigration officer who shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis on January 7.

A Quinnipiac survey found that 57 per cent of voters condemn ICE’s methods, with 94 per cent of Democratic voters and 64 per cent of independents against Republicans, by contrast, support them at 84 per cent.

Another poll from Economist/YouGov found that, for the first time, 46 per cent of respondents support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), exceeding the 43 per cent who oppose getting rid of it.

‘Swing voter’

“The most useful way to think about Joe Rogan is as America’s most famous swing voter,” left-wing commentator Ben Burgis posted on X this week.

Rogan wasn’t the pliant conservative megaphone White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt may have had in mind when she reaffirmed the Trump administration’s hard line of the ICE officer’s innocence.

ICE agents “are simply trying to enforce the law and the Democratic Party has demeaned these individuals,” Leavitt told reporters Thursday.

“They’ve even referred to them as Nazis and as the Gestapo, and that is absolutely leading to the violence we’re seeing in the streets,” she added.

Beyond differences on policy or polemics, the methods used by the masked and sometimes heavily armed federal agents run counter to deeply rooted principles within American political and legal culture, Steven Schwinn, a law professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, told AFP.

During chaotic raids in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis — all Democratic strongholds across the country — Schwinn points to the identity checks and stops that have outraged Rogan, because such stops were only authorised with “reasonable suspicion,” a standard used by law enforcement to stop people in the United States.

‘Absolute immunity’

When ICE agents demand peaceful protesters produce their papers, or when they target people solely on the basis of their perceived ethnicity, “a lot of folks associate that with dictatorial and authoritarian regimes,” Schwinn said.

“What is happening with ICE is unprecedented,” Schwinn added, both in the scale of the deployment — federal agents now number 22,000 nationwide, compared with 10,000 a year ago, according to the Department of Homeland Security — and in the protection they seem to enjoy from the White House.

Senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller has said all ICE officers have “federal immunity” to conduct their raids, adding “anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony”.

Vice President JD Vance agreed, saying the agent who shot and killed Good in Minnesota “is protected by absolute immunity”.

Legal experts and local officials, including prosecutors, have denounced those views.

And according to Axios, the Trump administration has conducted its own polling and found support for immigration police is eroding, even among right-leaning voters.

An anonymous senior advisor told the site Friday that the president “wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.” — AFP