If you think what’s happening with ICE in America couldn’t happen in Britain, you’re wrong

It used to be the case that (as the old adage goes), when America sneezes, the world catches a cold – and right now, Britain is in bed with a nasty case of Trump flu, warns Victoria Richards

“I stand with ICE”. Just a few hours after intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents at a demonstration in Minneapolis, not just one – but two – Reform UK county councillors trumpeted their support for Trump’s “have a go” federal agent “heroes” by sharing a bruising blue poster image on X, put together by the US department of homeland security.

“100% chance of ICE forecast!” wrote Leicestershire county councillor Michael J. Squires, as he allegedly reposted the image on the social media platform – he seemed to have later deleted the post (though screenshots of it are all over the internet), almost as if – as one commentator pointed out – “he realised he’d said something abhorrent and was ashamed of it (almost).”

But he still retweeted the US “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth, who branded the Minnesota protesters “lunatics” and wrote: “Thank God for the patriots of ICE – we have your back 100%. You are SAVING the country. Shame on the leadership of Minnesota – and the lunatics in the street. ICE > MN.”

And Squires wasn’t alone in expressing stark support for the masked, black-clad agents who shot two protesters dead at close range: Joseph Boam, another Reform UK county councillor in Whitwick, Leicestershire (who was previously fired from a deputy leader role at the local authority because he “wasn’t able to do the job”, according to his boss) posted the “I stand with ICE” meme online, too; following it up provocatively with: “For the people that don’t support ICE – Are you suggesting that the UK should not enforce its immigration law?”

That members of Reform UK support ICE violence – even after worldwide condemnation of the killings – doesn’t come as any surprise to me. After all, the party’s own leaders have their own naked anti-immigration policies and pledges to deport not just “illegal” migrants – but legal ones, too. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has spoken openly about his plans to scrap indefinite leave to remain (ILR) and get rid of hundreds of thousands of people; and in August (while unveiling his party’s “Operation Restoring Justice” in Oxford) promised to rip up the UK’s human rights commitments altogether. Farage even said he would pay despotic regimes such as the Taliban money to take asylum seekers back and bragged he would deport “absolutely anyone” – including women and children – arriving by small boat. And yet he’s still riding high in the opinion polls, as Labour slump to a distant third place.

So, if you, like me, feel shocked, disgusted and nauseated by what’s happening in the US at the moment, you’re not alone. But I’ll go one step further: I’m watching these events unfold with a very real fear that it could happen in Britain, too.

Just today, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, announced plans to scrap “non-hate crime incidents” (NCHIs) – the kind of policing that looks at racist, homophobic and transphobic threats, both on and off line – as part of a so-called “common-sense” policing overhaul.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised about Mahmood’s rowback on tackling hate crime. After all, it comes along with the release of a white paper today which will propose a new national police service to tackle “complex” threats such as terrorism, organised crime and fraud, instead; which will “significantly reduce” the number of police forces in England and Wales – and any “anti-social behaviour” will be left to local “neighbourhood officers” to sort out. It shows just how little this government cares about protecting its citizens from the kind of hateful prejudice that ruins lives and shatters communities.

But it hasn’t come from nowhere. In the past few years, we’ve been subjected to a slow and suffocating loss of civil liberty, shown through heavy-handed policing and a crackdown on our rights to protest. Thanks to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022, we can now be fined £2,500 (or given six months in prison) if the police think we are shouting too loudly at a protest, under the definition of a “noise trigger”; and the last Tory government introduced a £1000 fine (or month-long jail term) for wearing face masks at a march.

Even the rhetoric around our democratic rights has changed dramatically in recent years: Rishi Sunak began using words like “mob rule” and instructing police to get tougher on protests two years ago; the former Tory home secretary, Suella Braverman (who today defected to Reform UK), made moves to give ministers powers to “ban protests” altogether and labelled the pro-Palestinian demonstrations “hateful marches”; while last year, Palestine Action became a proscribed terrorist group in the UK – resulting in thousands of arrests, including of elderly or disabled people holding signs in peaceful support of Gaza.

It used to be the case that (as the old adage goes), when America sneezes, the world catches a cold – and right now, Britain is in bed with a nasty case of Trump flu. It’s depressing, to say the least. It’s also dangerous and scary, particularly as a parent. My nine-year-old son woke up this weekend and told me he’d had a “bad dream” that ICE agents had come to his school to take him away.

What I would say is this: the viciousness being visited on American communities by ICE has seen approval ratings for Trump’s signature policy plummet among the people who voted for it. It has been a political disaster. The president’s ratings on handling immigration has swung by a net negative of 29 points according to Rasmussen, one of the more reliably Trump-positive aggregators of public opinion. The electorate’s desire for secure borders has turned to disgust at the means chosen to meet that end. Trump said what he would do. People elected him to do it. In other words: be careful what you wish for.

At a time like this, then, what can give us hope? For me it’s simple: I won’t be going to the US any time soon (if ever) and I won’t be “buying” American, either. In fact, I’m now planning to join the big USA boycott as a two-fingered salute to Trump’s latest tariffs. Why? Because “America First” is as bad as “Britain First” – and just as destructive.