Latest news with #BBB
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
7 Common Tax Planning Mistakes To Fix Before 2026, According to a CFP
Let's be honest: Tax planning isn't exactly fun (nor is paying taxes). But ignoring it could mean parting with money you didn't have to. Find Out: Read Next: If you're making one of these seven common tax planning mistakes — and many people are — you could face higher tax bills or missed opportunities come 2026. Christopher Stroup, a CFP and founder of Silicon Beach Financial, explained what to watch out for and how to get ahead of the curve. Tax planning should be 'proactive, not reactive,' Stroup insisted. 'When you wait until March, most of the best opportunities are already gone.' In fact, even sooner than that, as by year-end many strategies are off the table, especially for equity compensation (non-cash pay, such as stock), retirement savings and charitable giving, Stroup said. 'Last-minute tax planning tends to be reactive, rushed and sloppy. Real tax savings require time to coordinate across your income, goals and entity structure.' By waiting until the end of the year, you could be failing to coordinate with your financial goals at best or missing important deadlines and subjecting yourself to higher tax or penalty fees. Learn More: Another common mistake is neglecting to track your cost basis, especially for stocks, crypto or equity compensation, Stroup said. Your cost basis is essentially what you originally paid for an investment, including commissions or fees. It's easy to lose records over time he said, but if you don't have documentation to prove it, you could be taxed as if the entire sale was profit — even if you only made a modest gain or none at all. If you experienced a job change during the year but fail to account for it in your withholding — the amount of taxes you pay — this could cause problems, Stroup said. 'A second job or dual-income household might bump you into a higher bracket. If you don't update your W-4 or check your withholding early, you might face an unexpected tax bill and possibly a penalty.' If you earn income that must be reported on a 1099, either as a business owner or freelancer/contractor, you're expected to pay estimated quarterly taxes. 'Many freelancers forget to account for self-employment tax, which can add 15.3% to their liability,' Stroup said. Unfortunately, if you underpay your estimated taxes, the IRS may charge penalties, even if you're due a refund later, Stroup warned. 'Accurate quarterly payments protect cash flow and avoid year-end sticker shock,' he said. For eligible taxpayers, some credits can reduce your tax bill 'dollar for dollar,' Stroup said, but many people assume they don't qualify without even checking. A few of these credits include: Saver's credit (for low- to moderate-income retirement savers) QBI deduction (for self-employed and pass-through business owners) Health savings account contributions Education credits like the lifetime learning credit Recently President Donald Trump signed the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' (BBB) into law, which maintains many of the tax cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and adds other tax changes. It's important to plan for how this will impact next year's taxes, especially as some of the provisions are retroactive to 2025. 'Start modeling different scenarios now. Look at whether Roth conversions, income acceleration or trust updates make sense under current rules,' Stroup said. The 2026 sunset could bring higher income, estate and capital gains taxes. Early action lets you use today's lower rates strategically. When your financial life gets more complex than a W-2 and a 1099-INT, it's time to bring in the professionals, Stroup said. If you're dealing with equity comp, restricted stock units (RSUs), multiple income streams, business ownership and/or changing tax law, these all signal it's time to partner with someone who can go beyond filing and focus on building after-tax wealth. More From GOBankingRates Mark Cuban Tells Americans To Stock Up on Consumables as Trump's Tariffs Hit -- Here's What To Buy This article originally appeared on 7 Common Tax Planning Mistakes To Fix Before 2026, According to a CFP
Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump's big toxic bill will cost America
But it will eventually hurt us all because the IRA, had it not been dismantled, would have spared the world around four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Indeed, the total carbon cost of terminating the IRA, supercharging the US fossil fuel industry, and various other Trump executive actions, is now estimated to be around 7 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Or, as the specialist climate publication CarbonBrief notes, around the total annual output of Indonesia, the world's sixth-largest carbon emitter. According to an analysis by Princeton University's REPEAT project, US emissions are now set to fall by just 3 per cent by 2030, rather than the 40 per cent required should the US have reached its abandoned Paris Agreement target. This is around four per cent of current total global emissions each year. This is the price we must all pay for Trump's BBB, in both the incalculable increase in the impact and incidence of climate catastrophes over the coming years, and in the cost of offsetting those lost cuts by increasing the burden on other nations. That Trump does not care about the global impact of domestic policies is no surprise. But what is harder to fathom is the costs he is willing to heap upon Americans. Trump's various climate and energy policies, including those in his BBB and the trashing of the IRA, plus his various executive orders, will see Americans paying more for dirtier sources of energy. Loading It will see a decrease in clean electricity generation in 2035 by more than 820 terawatt-hours – more than the entire contribution of nuclear or coal to its electricity supply today. It will increase US household and business energy expenditure by US$28 billion annually by 2030 and over $US50 billion by 2035, according to REPEAT. Average US household energy costs will increase by around $US165 per household per year in 2030. Even more perversely, the initiatives will lock the US out of competition with China for a share of the technologies of the future beyond wind and solar. The burgeoning EV industry is being crippled not just by a loss of incentives and tax breaks for battery development, but by sanctions on the Chinese components the industry will need in the absence of US alternatives. 'We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford,' Ford's chief executive Jim Farley said at a conference last month, describing recent visits to China as the 'most humbling experience' of his life. Tellingly, even as Trump abandons the industries of the future with his BBB, he has propped up not just those of the fossil fuel era, but even one that came before. To secure the crucial support of the Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski Trump found the cash to increase tax deductions for Alaskan subsistence whaling. Loading Indeed, by the time the bill had been forced through Congress, it had gathered so many tax cuts and pay-offs that it failed to pay for itself. Rather, over the next decade it will add US$2.5 trillion to the already eye-bleeding US debt of $US36.8 trillion. Climate advocates have been locked in a debate over whether the only way to save the climate would be to destroy the global economy. Over recent years optimists had begun to toy with the notion that perhaps the revolution in green tech over recent years, such as the 90 per cent collapse in the cost of solar power, might just allow us to preserve both.
The Age
a day ago
- Business
- The Age
Trump's big toxic bill will cost America
But it will eventually hurt us all because the IRA, had it not been dismantled, would have spared the world around four billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Indeed, the total carbon cost of terminating the IRA, supercharging the US fossil fuel industry, and various other Trump executive actions, is now estimated to be around 7 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. Or, as the specialist climate publication CarbonBrief notes, around the total annual output of Indonesia, the world's sixth-largest carbon emitter. According to an analysis by Princeton University's REPEAT project, US emissions are now set to fall by just 3 per cent by 2030, rather than the 40 per cent required should the US have reached its abandoned Paris Agreement target. This is around four per cent of current total global emissions each year. This is the price we must all pay for Trump's BBB, in both the incalculable increase in the impact and incidence of climate catastrophes over the coming years, and in the cost of offsetting those lost cuts by increasing the burden on other nations. That Trump does not care about the global impact of domestic policies is no surprise. But what is harder to fathom is the costs he is willing to heap upon Americans. Trump's various climate and energy policies, including those in his BBB and the trashing of the IRA, plus his various executive orders, will see Americans paying more for dirtier sources of energy. Loading It will see a decrease in clean electricity generation in 2035 by more than 820 terawatt-hours – more than the entire contribution of nuclear or coal to its electricity supply today. It will increase US household and business energy expenditure by US$28 billion annually by 2030 and over $US50 billion by 2035, according to REPEAT. Average US household energy costs will increase by around $US165 per household per year in 2030. Even more perversely, the initiatives will lock the US out of competition with China for a share of the technologies of the future beyond wind and solar. The burgeoning EV industry is being crippled not just by a loss of incentives and tax breaks for battery development, but by sanctions on the Chinese components the industry will need in the absence of US alternatives. 'We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs. And if we lose this, we do not have a future Ford,' Ford's chief executive Jim Farley said at a conference last month, describing recent visits to China as the 'most humbling experience' of his life. Tellingly, even as Trump abandons the industries of the future with his BBB, he has propped up not just those of the fossil fuel era, but even one that came before. To secure the crucial support of the Alaskan senator Lisa Murkowski Trump found the cash to increase tax deductions for Alaskan subsistence whaling. Loading Indeed, by the time the bill had been forced through Congress, it had gathered so many tax cuts and pay-offs that it failed to pay for itself. Rather, over the next decade it will add US$2.5 trillion to the already eye-bleeding US debt of $US36.8 trillion. Climate advocates have been locked in a debate over whether the only way to save the climate would be to destroy the global economy. Over recent years optimists had begun to toy with the notion that perhaps the revolution in green tech over recent years, such as the 90 per cent collapse in the cost of solar power, might just allow us to preserve both.
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Is ICE the first ominous harbinger of a Trump ‘secret police'?
The Iceman Cometh, the 1939 drama by American writer Eugene O'Neill, has at various times been described by reviewers as set in a stark, ruthless world and a play that 'blisters with intensity'. In the eyes of some, such observations could just as easily apply to today's America, a country where under the presidency of Donald Trump there is an almost palpable sense of unease and potency. Today's America, too, is a country where that phrase 'The Iceman Cometh' has taken on an all too real and equally menacing connotation. For the ICE men of today's America – agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have become the calling card of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Alhough ICE now occupies a 'noble' place in Trump's hierarchy of law enforcement, its detractors view it very differently. A modern day 'Gestapo', or 'domestic stormtroopers for the MAGA agenda', say some. 'Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state and a threat to democracy', say others. What's certainly in no doubt is that Trump has propelled ICE into America's best-funded law enforcement agency. As the Financial Times' US national editor Edward Luce recently highlighted, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB), signed into law by the president on July 4, lifted ICE's budget to an estimated $37.5 billion a year, a sum higher than Italy's entire defence budget and just below Canada's. Writing a message of 'THANK YOU' to the ICE workforce over the Independence Day holiday, Trump made clear that the BBB spending commitment would give the agency 'ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History'. A demonstrator waves an American-Mexican flag near National Guard members and federal agents blocking protestors during an ICE immigration raid at a nearby licensed cannabis farm on July 10 £37.5 billion annually The money set aside for ICE is eye-watering. The $37.5bn a year for operations aside, the spending bill includes a $170bn package for Trump's border and immigration crackdown, which includes $45bn for new detention facilities including hiring thousands more officers and agents. In the eyes of Trump, ICE officers can do no wrong. 'The toughest people you'll ever meet,' he insists. His gushing reverence for ICE is also reflected in what Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, described as 'well-deserved bonuses'. Trump officials have said they'll provide $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE personnel as well as Border Patrol agents, along with $10,000 for new hires. As Nick Miroff, staff writer at The Atlantic magazine who covers immigration issues recently pointed out, as far as Trump sees it, the '20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They're the Untouchables in his [Trump's] MAGA crime drama'. So just what is ICE, what exactly does it do and, perhaps more significantly, to what extent are fears over its growing power and perceived threat to democracy justified? Established in 2003, ICE is one of the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. Initially, the DHS's focus was counter-terrorism. But soon the presence of certain foreign groups began to be framed as a national security issue. DHS encompasses two law enforcement directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Read more Tears and trauma: David Pratt in Ukraine DAVID PRATT ON THE WORLD: Whatever happens in Brazil's resentful and rancorous election, the result will have major repercussions for us all David Pratt in Ukraine: It's hard to comprehend this level of destruction David Pratt: Kremlin's protestations have a hollow ring as atrocities mount up ERO is charged with enforcing US immigration laws and has 6,100 deportation officers. HSI has about 6,500 special agents who conduct transnational criminal investigations and do not usually participate in domestic immigration operations. ICE was also created alongside Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP controls the borders, while ICE operates inside the country – and it's this operation across America that has become the focus of controversy According to the agency's own website, ICE, along with its ERO officials, is tasked with identifying, arresting, detaining and removing immigrants without authorisation in the US. Back during his 2024 presidential campaign when outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants, Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But since entering office this has rapidly widened to include anyone without legal status, ICE officers, often masked and not wearing uniforms or displaying badges, have now been arresting people outside courtroom hearings, during traffic stops, in workplace sweeps, and even from hospitals. The agency's aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout America's immigrant communities, especially in Democrat-run cities. National Guard members and a federal agent block people protesting an ICE immigration raid at a nearby licensed cannabis farm on July 10, 2025 near Camarillo, California Deportation efforts JUST these past weeks, Trump ordered ICE to step up its arrests and deportation efforts in Democratic strongholds, doubling down on a politicised anti-immigration drive after major protests against ICE in Los Angeles. 'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,' Trump said on his Truth Social platform. 'These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center,' Trump claimed, citing debunked right-wing conspiracy theories that undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections in significant numbers. With every week that passes ICE operations are gathering momentum. For its part, the administration says its moves –which include hundreds of deportation flights, the expansion of third-country removals, and Trump's invocation of the seldom-used 1798 Alien Enemies Act – are necessary to stem unauthorised immigration to the United States. The law is a wartime authority that gives the president sweeping powers to detain or deport non-citizens with little or no due process and ICE has become its enforcers, much to the disquiet of many Democrat politicians, human rights activists, and ordinary citizens. ICE is now arresting four times as many non-criminals as those with criminal convictions each week, according to David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank who was cited by the Financial Times. The number of immigrants in detention with no criminal charges or convictions jumped 1,300% from January to mid-June, he wrote in an analysis. Numbers matter here, for ICE is under tremendous pressure to make more arrests to meet quotas set by senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown. Miller set an aggressive quota of 3,000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal have pushed ICE officers into more communities and businesses. But not everyone within the ranks of ICE is happy with this and other aspects of the policy. According to The Atlantic magazine's immigration writer Nic Miroff, who has interviewed many current and former ICE agents who spoke on condition of anonymity, many described 'a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swathes of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more'. Some ICE employees, according to Miroff, 'believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe'. With deportations becoming a top domestic priority for the Trump administration, some Homeland Security Investigation officers, along with those from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, have been put on immigration enforcement duties. It's a shift in duties many do not agree with. One veteran HSI agent complained to Miroff that his division, which usually focuses on cartel drug-trafficking operations, has had agents moved to immigration enforcement arrests as part of ICE operations. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation. It's infuriating,' the agent told Miroff, adding he is thinking of quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners'. Targeted by agents But complain as some ICE agents do, many Americans currently reserve their sympathies for those being targeted by the agents. Stories emerging from detention facilities where those arrested by ICE are being held are only adding to that sympathy as well as a sense of outrage. Earlier this month, Trump held a tour of one facility that's been dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz'. Its name is a reference to both the local reptile population and the former maximum-security Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California. Constructed in a little over eight days and meant to accommodate up to 3,000 detainees, since then accounts and reports from the facility point to appalling conditions. They suggest, too, that the design of the site is flawed and will compromise the safety of people being held there. Stories relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in the makeshift Florida detention centre for migrants in the Everglades made for grim reading about the conditions detainees endure. 'Toilets that didn't flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys,' were among some of the accounts detailed by the Miami Herald. The newspaper also told of lights being left on inside the facility 24 hours a day, with detainees saying there are no clocks and there is scant sunlight coming through the heavy-duty tents, making it difficult for them to know whether it is day or night. Currently, ICE is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, even though funding until the latest boost was available for only 41,000 detention beds. This means that processing centres are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells. Worrying as such reports are, it's the growth of ICE, its increasingly politicised role, and the fact that it appears beyond accountability that concerns many Americans. Earlier this year, ICE's in-house watchdog was scrapped and, for the time being, America's lower courts are hamstrung in their efforts to reign it in. As the FT's Edward Luce recently observed, given that the Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping immunity from 'official' acts he takes as president… 'that makes ICE Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state'. Although ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making, insist some experts on authoritarian regimes. Lee Morgenbesser is an associate professor with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane, and fellow with the Australian Research Council. Having studied historical and contemporary secret police forces, Morgenbesser says they typically meet five criteria. First, they're a police force targeting political opponents and dissidents. Second, they're not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator. Third, the identity of their members and their operations are secret. Fourth, they specialise in political intelligence and surveillance operations. And finally, they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, disappearances, and torture. 'Meets criteria' In a recent article in the online platform The Conversation and using these criteria to assess how close ICE is to becoming a secret police force, Morgenbesser concludes that 'overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria'. While ICE has yet to target political opponents, which Morgenbesser defines narrowly as members of the Democratic Party, and it is not directly controlled by Trump, he maintains that ICE's 'current structure provides him with plausible deniability'. In short, he says that while ICE is 'far from resembling history's most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates'. 'When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism,' Morgenbesser warns. As ICE makes its presence felt in a growing number of American communities, the controversy over its role is likewise certain to escalate. While a majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children, or who arrived many years ago, to stay. Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov in mid-June showed that only 42% viewed ICE favourably, an eight percentage-point drop from February and the start of Trump's term. For now, the ICE men continue to cometh and America, a nation of immigrants, faces an altogether different reckoning over its future democratic credentials.
The National
2 days ago
- Politics
- The National
Is ICE the first harbinger of a ‘secret police' in the US?
The Iceman Cometh, the 1939 drama by American writer Eugene O'Neill, has at various times been described by reviewers as set in a stark, ruthless world and a play that 'blisters with intensity'. In the eyes of some, such observations could just as easily apply to today's America, a country where, under the presidency of Donald Trump, there is an almost palpable sense of unease and potency. Today's America too is a country where that phrase 'The Iceman Cometh' has taken on an all too real and equally menacing connotation. For the ICE men of today's America – agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have become the calling card of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. US president Donald Trump has in effect created a personal army, experts warnThough ICE now occupies a 'noble' place in Trump's hierarchy of law enforcement, its detractors view it very differently. A modern-day 'Gestapo' or 'domestic stormtroopers for the MAGA agenda', say some. 'Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state and a threat to democracy', say others. What's certainly in no doubt is that Trump has propelled ICE into America's best-funded law enforcement agency. As the Financial Times (FT) US national editor Edward Luce, recently highlighted, Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' (BBB) signed into law by the president on July 4, lifted ICE's budget to an estimated $37.5 billion a year, a sum higher than Italy's entire defence budget and just below Canada's. Writing a message of 'THANK YOU!' to the ICE workforce over the Independence Day holiday, Trump made clear that the BBB spending commitment would give the agency 'ALL of the Funding and Resources that ICE needs to carry out the Largest Mass Deportation Operation in History'. The money set aside for ICE is eyewatering. The $37.5bn a year for operations aside, the spending bill includes a $170bn package for Trump's border-and-immigration crackdown, which includes $45bn for new detention facilities, including hiring thousands more officers and agents. READ MORE: Mhairi Black: Criticising Israel is not religious intolerance. Orange marches are In the eyes of Trump, ICE officers can do no wrong. 'The toughest people you'll ever meet,' he insists. His gushing reverence for ICE is also reflected in what Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, described as 'well-deserved bonuses'. Trump officials have said they'll provide $10,000 annual bonuses for ICE personnel as well as Border Patrol agents, along with $10,000 for new hires. As Nick Miroff, staff writer at The Atlantic magazine who covers immigration issues, recently pointed out, as far as Trump sees it, the '20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They're the Untouchables in his (Trump's) MAGA crime drama'. So just what is ICE, what exactly does it do, and perhaps more significantly, to what extent are fears over its growing power and perceived threat to democracy justified? Established in 2003, ICE is one of the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created in 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 terror attacks. Initially, the DHS's focus was counterterrorism. But soon, the presence of certain foreign groups began to be framed as a national security issue. DHS encompasses two law enforcement directorates: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). ERO is charged with enforcing US immigration laws and has 6100 deportation officers. HSI has about 6500 special agents who conduct transnational criminal investigations and do not usually participate in domestic immigration operations. ICE was also created alongside Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP controls the borders, while ICE operates inside the country and it's this operation across America that has become the focus of controversy. According to the agency's own website, ICE, along with its ERO officials, are tasked with identifying, arresting, detaining, and removing immigrants without authorisation in the US. Back during his 2024 presidential campaign, when outlining his vision for deportations of undocumented migrants, Trump said he would focus on expelling those with criminal records. But since entering office, this has rapidly widened to include anyone without legal status, ICE officers, often masked and not wearing uniforms or displaying badges, have now been arresting people outside courtroom hearings, during traffic stops in workplace sweeps, and even from hospitals. The agency's aggressive tactics are striking terror throughout America's immigrant communities, especially in Democrat-run cities. Just these past weeks, Trump ordered ICE to step up its arrests and deportation efforts in Democratic strongholds, doubling down on a politicised anti-immigration drive after major protests against ICE in Los Angeles. 'We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America's largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside,' Trump said on his Truth Social platform. (Image: Win McNamee, Getty Images) 'These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Centre,' Trump claimed, citing debunked right-wing conspiracy theories that undocumented immigrants are voting in US elections in significant numbers. With every week that passes, ICE operation are gathering momentum. For its part, the administration says its moves – which include hundreds of deportation flights, the expansion of third-country removals, and Trump's invocation of the seldom-used 1798 Alien Enemies Act – are necessary to stem unauthorised immigration to the United States. The law is a wartime authority that gives the president sweeping powers to detain or deport noncitizens with little or no due process, and ICE have become its enforcers, much to the disquiet of many Democrat politicians, human rights activists and ordinary citizens. ICE is now arresting four times as many non-criminals as those with criminal convictions each week, according to David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that was cited by the FT. The number of immigrants in detention with no criminal charges or convictions jumped 1300% from January to mid-June, he wrote in an analysis. Numbers matter here, for ICE is under tremendous pressure to make more arrests to meet quotas set by senior White House aide Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's immigration crackdown. Miller set an aggressive quota of 3000 arrests per day in late May, and the efforts to meet that goal have pushed ICE officers into more communities and businesses. Not everyone within the ranks of ICE are happy with this and other aspects of the policy. According to The Atlantic magazine's immigration writer Nic Miroff, who has interviewed many current and former ICE agents who spoke on condition of anonymity, many described 'a workforce on edge, vilified by broad swaths of the public and bullied by Trump officials demanding more and more'. READ MORE: Patrick Harvie: 'Never again' seems to not apply to Palestinians Some ICE employees according to Miroff 'believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe'. With deportations becoming a top domestic priority for the Trump administration, some Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) officers along with those from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have been put on immigration enforcement duties. It's a shift in duties many do not agree with. One veteran HSI agent complained to Miroff that his division which usually focuses on cartel drug-trafficking operations have had agents moved to immigration-enforcement arrests as part of ICE operations. 'No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,' the agent told Miroff. 'It's infuriating,' adding that he is thinking of quitting rather than having to continue 'arresting gardeners'. But complain as some ICE agents do, many Americans currently reserve their sympathies for those being targeted by the agents. Stories emerging from detention facilities where those arrested by ICE are being held are only adding to that sympathy as well as a sense of outrage. Earlier this month, Trump held a tour of one facility that's been dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz'. Its name is a reference to both the local reptile population and the former maximum-security Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay, California. An aerial view of the migrant detention centre dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' (Image: Chandan Khanna/AFP) Constructed in a little over eight days and meant to accommodate up to 3000 detainees, since then accounts and reports from the facility point to appalling conditions. They suggest too that the design of the site is flawed and will compromise the safety of people being held there. Stories relayed to the Miami Herald by the wives of detainees housed in the makeshift Florida detention centre for migrants in the Everglades made for grim reading about the conditions detainees endure. 'Toilets that didn't flush. Temperatures that went from freezing to sweltering. Giant bugs. And little or no access to showers or toothbrushes, much less confidential calls with attorneys,' were among some of the accounts detailed by the Miami Herald. The newspaper also told of lights being left on inside the facility 24 hours a day, with detainees saying there are no clocks and there is scant sunlight coming through the heavy-duty tents, making it difficult for them to know whether it is day or night. Currently, ICE is holding nearly 60,000 people in custody, the highest number ever, even though funding until the latest boost was available for only 41,000 detention beds. This means that processing centres are packed with people sleeping on floors in short-term holding cells. Worrying as such reports are, it's the growth of ICE, its increasingly politicised role and the fact that it appears beyond accountability that concerns many Americans. Earlier this year, ICE's in-house watchdog was scrapped and for the time being, America's lower courts are hamstrung in their efforts to rein it in. As the FT's national editor Edward Luce recently observed, given that the Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping immunity from 'official' acts he takes as president … 'that makes ICE Trump's de facto private army – his security state within the state'. Though ICE is ostensibly still bound by constitutional limits, the way it has been operating bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making, insist some experts on authoritarian regimes. Lee Morgenbesser is an associate professor with the School of Government and International Relations at Griffith University, Brisbane, and fellow with the Australian Research Council. Having studied historical and contemporary secret police forces, Morgenbesser says they typically meet five criteria. First, they're a police force targeting political opponents and dissidents. Second, they're not controlled by other security agencies and answer directly to the dictator. Third, the identity of their members and their operations are secret. Fourth, they specialise in political intelligence and surveillance operations. And finally, they carry out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions, disappearances and torture. In a recent article in the online platform The Conversation, and using these criteria to assess how close ICE is to becoming a secret police force, Morgenbesser concludes that 'overall, the evidence shows ICE meets most of the criteria". While ICE has yet to target political opponents, which Morgenbesser defines narrowly as members of the Democratic Party, and it is not directly controlled by Trump, he maintains that ICE's 'current structure provides him with plausible deniability.' In short, he says that while ICE is 'far from resembling history's most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates'. 'When combined with a potential shift towards targeting US citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism,' Morgenbesser warns. As ICE makes its presence felt in a growing number of American communities, the controversy over its role is likewise certain to escalate. While a majority of Americans support deporting violent criminals, they also back allowing migrants who came to the country as children or who arrived many years ago to stay. Americans polled by The Economist and YouGov in mid-June showed that only 42% viewed ICE favourably – an eight percentage-point drop from February and the start of Trump's term. For now, the ICE men continue to cometh and America, a nation of immigrants, faces an altogether different reckoning over its future democratic credentials.
