Do you want to live in a place where federal agents are allowed to stop and detain you anytime? What about a place where federal agents are allowed to shoot and kill you with impunity if you ever do anything that makes them feel threatened?

A lot of conversations about ICE don’t focus on ICE. Most people don’t know what ICE is or how it operates. I assume that’s why conversations about ICE usually go the way of debating about immigrants.

Do immigrants work? Do immigrants work obediently? Are they exploited? Do they unfairly compete for jobs because they have less rights? Am I an immigrant and, if I don’t think I am, then how do I prove it? People assume that there’s no way to actually give rights to those without status so they mostly just see those without status as unfairly competitive because they must be used to suffering more since America is so great. How does legal classification benefit me? That’s most people’s thinking process.

That’s fine. I’ll tell you how this affects you.

ICE is not about immigration. ICE is a group of federal agents under the Department of Homeland Security who interpret their own power in a way that other federal agencies actually used to disagree with. ICE believes that they are empowered to stop and detain anyone who is moving through the area that they call the 100 mile land and sea border zone. They also believe that they are allowed to kill with impunity within this zone.

ICE’s 100 mile border zone includes almost all major cities. That’s why it includes two thirds of the US population. That’s right! ICE believes that they are allowed to stop, detain, and kill two thirds of the people who are in the United States. They will lie to do it but, now, maybe they don’t even need to.

Do you believe that ICE has the powers that they have granted themselves?

If your legal status is citizen, can you prove it? On a highway checkpoint to an armed federal agent? Would you want to? Why or why not? What if there’s a protest nearby that you may or may not have been a part of?

Before you start thinking about your own legal status and how that must protect you in a court of law, let me remind you that ICE doesn’t operate that way. ICE believes that it has the power to stop and kidnap anyone based on suspicion alone. Suspicion is subjective because it’s a feeling. How do you suspect someone’s legal status? It believes that it has the right to kill when the agents just feel under threat for whatever reason. Let me remind you that cops are like these scared little animals that attack for no reason whatsoever.

Your legal status doesn’t protect you against a trigger happy cop who believes that he has the right to kill. The streets aren’t courts of law. These cops don’t have the right to know your legal status just for walking around, driving down a road, going to work, or participating in a peaceful protest.

Maybe you’re scared about bird flu. This flu is really fatal. It’s spreading among milk cows and migrant groups that have been trying to get better working conditions have been detained in these immigrant detention centers for unionizing. You don’t even have to know any migrants to care about this one because, if bird flu spreads human to human, it will come for everyone.

In the past, even the FBI did not agree with ICE’s interpretation of its own duties and powers. That’s how far gone ICE is as an institution.

This isn’t about whether you think that H1Bs are reactionaries or if you think that immigrants are exploited and should be punished for it or if you think that international working class solidarity might be supported by immigration policies or whatever. This is about a federal agency that’s testing us. This is about the tools that the executive branch is using to empower itself in extraordinary ways.

This debate about who has legal status in a settler colony isn’t really about immigration. It’s not about being foreign. It’s about the federal government becoming really, really powerful and private prison companies that profit off of this power and a redefinition of how federal agents define their own powers in occupied land. It’s about how immigration detention disappears people for their activism, about how some of those detention centers were literally used for Japanese internment, and about how the thousands of acres of land that are being opened up for more private prisons will get filled.

It’s about how people detained in these secret prisons are forced to work or else they are put in solitary and starved. It’s about how ICE routinely tortures people to death. And it’s about overreach. Even if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t give a shit about people without legal status and only wants to protect the white working class from competition because you think that politically discarding undocumented people will get you a better job that will get you a house, you can at least agree that making executive overreach this easy is very, very bad.

Mahmoud Khalil is a test. I remember when George W Bush tested it. He sent federal agents to investigate members of Congress back when I was in the eighth grade. Does ICE’s own interpretation of their own power superior to the constitutional right to assembly and speech? It’s not even about legal status. Evidently, ICE did not know Khalil’s legal status when they detained him. They thought that he was on a visa. Does Homeland Security have the power to interpret our activism as terrorism?

Everyone is trying to debate about whether immigrants work, whether immigrants working is good or bad, whether immigrants do drugs, whether immigrants have too many traffic violations. That’s not what this is about. This isn’t about anything that people with or without legal status might be doing. Do you want to live in a place where federal agents are allowed to shoot you with impunity? If you live in a major US city, you better think hard about this question.