Do Farage and Badenoch Want a Police State?

Because building a 'British ICE' means creating the machinery that leads to one.

It’s no secret that the political right in Britain largely takes its cues from Donald Trump.

They regurgitate MAGA’s culture-war talking points, recycle the same influencers and Roman-statue ‘X’ accounts, and - in Reform UK’s case - directly import disastrous schemes like Elon Musk’s DOGE. Trump says jump; they ask how high.

So it’s not necessarily surprising that they’d seek to mimic ICE - the President’s militant deportation agency. Immigration is unquestionably the defining issue of right-wing politics today, and much of the right has now fully ingested the (ridiculous) idea that Britain’s problems are primarily about racial demographics rather than policy or economics.

Trump has seemingly persuaded figures across an increasingly compressed right-wing spectrum - from Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage to Tommy Robinson - that granting vast, unaccountable power to heavily armed deportation enforcers is an elegant solution to those demographic anxieties.

Badenoch has pledged to build a new “UK deportations force” with “sweeping new powers”, modelled on the “successful approach” of Donald Trump’s ICE. Nigel Farage also looks longingly across the Atlantic, plotting out a “Mass Deportation Command” and an “Illegal Migrant Identification Centre.” And Robinson claims that “we want ICE in every European country.”

But none of these people, including Trump, ever tell their voters or online followers about the trade-off they would be making. The media largely fails to report on it. Empowering a domestic military unit like ICE comes with consequences. And once they’re entrenched, they’re not easy to hold accountable, nor to reform or abolish.

Curiously, those who complain endlessly about “checkpoint Britain” - warning of a Soviet-style “present your papers” style society - won’t ever spell out that they’re advocating for actual citizenship checkpoints or a partisan secret police force. These are framed as tough, no-nonsense policies to confront those same unfounded anxieties about racial demographics. But even those who experience that anxiety - if informed properly - might not be willing to make this trade.

So with Badenoch and Farage gleefully marching to Donald Trump’s tune on immigration, a look over at ICE might give us an indication of where they want to take Britain. What have they been up to that deserves such acclaim?

philip lewis@Phil_Lewis_

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They kicked off the year by murdering a US Citizen and legal observer, Renée Nicole Good, in cold blood. The Trump administration immediately turned on the spin machine, lying about her past and branding her a “domestic terrorist.” They claimed she tried to run over the officer in question with her car, despite conclusive video evidence to the contrary.

The conflict was the culmination of a massive ICE operation in Minneapolis (notably quite far from the US southern border), in which deportation agents outnumbered local police by a ratio of 5:1. Minnesota Police Chief Mark Bruley has claimed that he’s been receiving “endless complaints” about racial profiling and civil rights violations - including many from his own police officers.

Vice-President JD Vance argues the agent who shot and killed Renée Nicole Good is “protected by absolute immunity.” That’s nonsensical legalese, but it holds true in the sense that ICE agents are incredibly difficult for state or local authorities to investigate or prosecute. In the case of Renée Good, the federal government actually blocked them from accessing physical evidence or conducting interviews.

And all of this is on top of what’s become business-as-usual: citizenship checkpoints, arbitrary detentions, masked officers hanging out around schools, hospitals, gas stations and grocery stores to round people up. The Government has scarcely been so directly involved in people’s lives - and they’re largely able to do so under a shroud of secrecy.

But thanks to some recent whistleblowers, we also now know that ICE’s public face is only half the story. Leaked documents last week revealed how the agency’s mission has creeped beyond deportations to intelligence operations - spying on both immigrants and citizens as part of Trump’s political war on ‘Antifa’ and ‘the radical left’ (which could include basically anyone who publicly disagrees with the President).

And this week, a leaked memo revealed that ICE had been quietly granted the (unconstitutional) authority to break into people’s homes without a warrant signed by a judge. Who knows how much further they’ll go in 2026.

You might think that these are just quirks of America’s ICE under Trump, that a British version would be more measured or more constrained. But I’d argue that any agency tasked with identifying, detaining and removing people based on who they are cannot function without racial profiling, secrecy and coercion. To actually achieve its mandate, it has to be insulated from local oversight, granted wide discretionary powers, and encouraged to see the public not as citizens with rights but as a population to be sorted and controlled.

Once embedded, such forces inevitably expand their remit. Spying becomes routine. Whistleblowers become threats. Legal safeguards are just obstacles. And violence - whether at checkpoints, during raids, or “mistakes” - become a cost of doing business. This is what happens when the state builds a paramilitary bureaucracy whose success depends on fear, speed and impunity: you get the secret police.

Neither Farage nor Badenoch will tell you, but this is what they’re offering. They’ll gloss over the dark logistics of mass deportation, and the implicit threats to the basic liberties we all value. They’ll make it sound simple and tough. But like Trump, they are likely to build something that cannot easily be restrained, reversed, or confined to its intended targets.

History suggests that once this kind of machinery exists, it never stays pointed only at the people it was intended to hurt.