A Letter from Skyler F. about The ICE Generation

Introduction

I received another letter from Skyler Fusaro about how ICE is becoming a national police force with little restraint. She is a fictional friend corresponding from her life in the future. At times I can communicate with her.. Her name is Skyler Fusaro. She lives in Atlanta, where I was a professor of science education at Georgia State University from 1969 to 2003. You can find other letters she has written here on my weblog.

Atlanta, September 18, 2063

Letter #47 — Skyler Fusaro

Atlanta, September 18, 2063

Dear Jack,

When people talk about how democracies unravel, they picture mobs, coups, or tanks in the streets. That’s not how it happened here. It started with a budget line and a hiring fair. I came across a Newsweek article written by a British political reporter, Dan Gooding. Gooding specializes in writing about immigration. He provides details about the expansion. He also discusses the funding available to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I used some of his data in my letter.

The summer of 2025 was the turning point. Trump’s administration didn’t just increase ICE’s funding. It supercharged it. The agency’s budget was tripled. They rolled out $10,000 yearly bonuses. Recruitment drives were launched like a Fortune 500 company on a hiring spree. Ten thousand new agents. Thirty billion dollars a year. Bigger than the FBI, DEA, ATF, Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons merged. I read an important paper by Margy O’Herron from the Brennan Center for Justice. She writes that the One Big Beautiful Act allocated more than $170 billion over four years. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” aimed to enhance border and interior enforcement. The bill also stated a goal of deporting 1 million migrants per year (2,739 humans each day). These two papers motivated me to write this letter.

National Reaction

And what was the national reaction? A shrug. Commentators talked about “workforce expansion.” Cable news showed charts about salaries. Almost no one said out loud what this really meant. The executive branch was building a domestic force with historic reach. They were doing it in plain sight.

ICE wasn’t just growing—it was repositioning itself. Not as a border agency, but as the federal government’s primary tool for interior control. Cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York were already in their sights. Sanctuary policies were treated like acts of rebellion. ICE became the hammer waiting for the order to drop.

When the sweeps began two months later, people acted shocked. But the machinery had been built long before. By then, the agents were trained, paid, loyal, and deployed. Communities were raided. Families disappeared overnight. City governments were forced into uneasy truces just to keep the lights on. I noticed that the Trump administration was running ads on TV. The ads encouraged Americans to join ICE to “keep America safe again.” The ads are despicable.

We call them the “ICE Generation” now—the wave of recruits who flooded in during that hiring boom. Some believed the mission. Some just wanted a job. But all became part of a system that saw people not as neighbors, but as problems to be cleared. Amazingly the hiring boom began in September 2025 with ads claiming recruits will get up to $50,000 bonuses.

Here are a few images that I found.

What terrifies me most, even now, is how bureaucratic it all looked at the start. There were no speeches declaring a new era. Just PDFs, press releases, and job postings. Authoritarianism doesn’t always kick down the door. Sometimes it walks in through HR.

We thought we’d have more time to fight it. We were wrong.

— Skyler