"WARNING NOTICE: YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW"

“WARNING NOTICE YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW”

That was on the piece of paper that ICE agents hand delivered to Paigelynne Gonyea on Tuesday. The agency made a point to hand deliver a written warning about a social media post. To make matters worse, Paigelynne was a poll worker and the agents delivered it to her at the polling place during voting hours. They claimed that she doxxed ICE agent Jonathon Ross when she made a post which referred to a news story and she added his name to her post.

January 8, 2026, the Minnesota Star Tribune had named Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. That same day Paigelynne posted on Instagram a reference to the story, “BREAKING: The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!” According to ICE, this is doxxing. But doxxing is releasing personal information to the public, such as phone numbers, addresses, emails, etc. Paigelynne didn’t release anything personal. She merely referred to a news article and included the name already in the news article.

This situation is bad for a number of reasons. First, this raises serious First Amendment concerns about free speech. The First Amendment protection is pretty broad. While there are a handful of things the government can limit, referring to a news article and adding a personal opinion that someone should be indicted isn’t one of them. But that clearly isn’t stopping the administration from trying to limit free speech. However, we’ve already seen that the Trump administration believes free speech is only for people who align with them. Remember when JD Vance called for employers to fire employees who publicly criticized or mocked Charlie Kirk after he died? The irony could not be more striking for the party who pushed free speech so hard to chill free speech over the guy who said, “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

Second, this is merely a dip of the toe into the water to have ICE agents at the polls. Trump has said before, and recently continued to show his willingness to send ICE to the polls in the coming midterm elections. The news story about Paigelynne states the ICE agents originally tried to visit her at home. When they couldn’t find her there, they came to the polls. While this may not have been an outright attempt to intimidate voters with their presence, it demonstrates their willingness to ignore the rules. It doesn’t matter that they came to intimidate a worker rather than voters in general. It matters that they were willing to do it anyway. The long-held tradition in our country is that police, i.e., government agents with power and authority, don’t go to the polls because true democracy requires unintimidated voters. It also adds to the legitimacy of the vote.

Third, ICE is being used as a personal and loyal paramilitary police force at the will of the president. Trump learned something in his first term coupled with his lost election against Biden. Trump learned that people act according to their loyalty. During his first election, his cabinet and advisors around him weren’t pure sycophants and they had a certain level of restraint that kept him somewhat in check. At a minimum, they kept him from being as unhinged as we’ve seen this second time around. The loyalty for those willing to keep him in check, or at least willing to walk away from him when he pushed too far, was to the Constitution. Remember Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to overturn the election which resulted in the January Sixth insurrection? This time around, Trump has picked those loyal to him over those with experience and loyalty to the Constitution.

History has shown us something like this before. A certain chancellor of a certain reich didn’t trust the old vanguard either. Hitler didn’t trust the police or the military. He feared they wouldn’t be loyal to him or the party, but would rather cling to the previous establishment. Originally started as the SA, Hitler relied on violent, disorderly, and often ex-military men to protect him and his higher up party members, but also disrupt the other political parties. Eventually, the SA morphed into the SS. What started as 300 loyal bodyguards in 1929, turned into an army of over 35,000 secret police by 1933. From that point on, Hitler had control over a loyal paramilitary police force that would do his bidding and follow whatever orders he gave. This included rounding up populations and removing those deemed undesirable from society via genocide.

Trump already has a bodyguard force with the Secret Service. However, they their enforcement actions are limited. ICE already had Trump’s desireable enforcement capacity for his deporation policies. Not only are we seeing them used for the removal of the minority population, but we are seeing a huge increase in the number of agents. The administration has already used them for non-immigration enforcement tasks, such as “supporting” TSA. Hunting down citizens and giving written warnings over social media posts is the next level of a secret police force.

Make no mistake, this indicates that the administration is seriously considering using ICE elsewhere and for more than just immigation related enforcement. If the pattern continues, we could easily see ICE continue to transform from immigration enforcement, to a loyal army who is ready to do Trump’s personal bidding.