U.S. authorities are increasingly using the label “domestic terrorist” to justify lethal force, surveillance, and intimidation against protesters and civilians, particularly in clashes involving ICE.
Two U.S. citizens are dead, killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, and the official response has not been regret, restraint, or accountability—but branding the victims as “domestic terrorists.” We have heard all this before in American history dating back to the American Civil War; however, few have been paying close attention in recent generations. Times change, and so do labels, their implications, and how people react. The killing of civilians by federal agents is no longer a scandal but more a necessity. The body is barely cold before the narrative arrives, prepackaged and obedient, transforming the dead into real threats and the federal government, ICE, into both the innocent victim and the heroes of the hour.
Under Biden’s Justice Department, enforcement agencies were asked to investigate angry parents at PTA meetings as domestic terrorists; however, what is going on now with so-called “terrorist threats” in the US takes the proverbial cake. But there is method in madness. Those who show up at anti-ICE protests are having their pictures taken, and this information is allegedly entered into databases, and the claim is made that they will later flag them as potential domestic terrorists.
One exchange went like this, as captured by the news outlet, Reason:
“Because we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.” — a masked ICE agent telling a legal observer he was photographing her car for that reason.
The remark, delivered casually and without explanation, spread quickly online, making alarm bells go off among civil-liberties advocates. The question of what constitutes a “domestic terrorist” has become less an exercise in legal precision and more a mirror reflecting how the term is wielded — often to justify violence rather than describe it. I can relate, having been detained myself by ICE/HLS five years ago, upon arrival at a US airport as a native-born US citizen, just for publishing with the Russian media.
ICE is brewing up a perfect storm
In early January, Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis resident and mother of three, was fatally shot by an ICE agent during a federal immigration enforcement operation. Federal officials quickly labeled her actions — which local video shows as her casually trying to drive away — as “domestic terrorism.” This is the descriptor Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem used to defend the use of lethal force. Minnesota authorities and legal analysts promptly called out abusing how the term was used.
Just weeks later, another U.S. citizen, about the same age, intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti, was shot and killed by an ICE agent during ongoing protests and enforcement actions in the city. Federal officials again invoked the specter of threat and violence, again painting the incident with the same rhetoric. Nonetheless, these apparent executions have sparked national protests and bipartisan calls for scrutiny of not only the action but also how the “domestic terrorism” label painted by some federal officials is exposing the divide in how the term is understood — or conveniently undefined.
The federal government’s own definitions, scattered across agencies and statutes, describe acts dangerous to human life intended to intimidate or coerce civilians or influence government policy. But as legal experts have noted, there is no mechanism in U.S. law to formally charge someone as a “domestic terrorist” and no statute that authorizes the government to designate individuals as such. It means that in the aftermath of violent encounters — including ones that result in death — the term can be repurposed on the fly, turning deadly force into defensive necessity and dissent into pretext.
As Minneapolis residents and national critics alike have observed, when every act of resistance or confusion can be retroactively recast as terrorism, the term loses specific meaning and gains political utility: a catch-all justification for violence, surveillance, and accountability-free policing. In a country deeply divided over immigration, protest rights, and federal power, this elasticity is itself the story: a legal label stretched beyond recognition, not to protect the public, but to retrospectively sanctify lethal force and silence uncomfortable questions about how power is used — and against whom.
Taken together, these deaths, detentions, and threats, direct and indirect, reveal a state power operating less through law than through labeling: “domestic terrorist” as an all-purpose catchall incantation that dissolves due process, absolves the use of lethal force, and chills dissent before it can fully form. What emerges is not merely a pattern of abusive enforcement, but a framework for surveillance and intimidation, one that transcends party lines—databases that may or may not exist, cameras that never forget, and accusations that require no charges to do lasting damage. In this climate, protest is pre-criminal, speech is suspect, and intent is presumed, not proven.
The message is unmistakable: Big Brother is not only watching; he is listening, recording, and drawing conclusions—about who you are, what you say, and increasingly, what you might be thinking. Surveillance tech (like facial recognition) can identify individuals at protests. That does raise civil liberties questions — but that’s separate from being labeled a domestic terrorist —at least in theory.
Everyone at an anti-ICE protest is now a domestic terrorist
If the government’s new shorthand is that anyone who shows up at an anti-ICE protest is a “domestic terrorist,” then the definition has lost all meaning. Most Americans know, at some level, that surveillance is routine and that federal databases exist. What they resist is saying it out loud. The moment the subject comes up, it’s waved off as a joke or a fantasy — not because it isn’t real, but because it’s uncomfortable. History suggests this kind of discomfort is familiar. Societies rarely notice the line between security and control until it has already been crossed.
Even among supporters of immigration enforcement, unease is growing. One advocate for stricter border policy put it bluntly: enforcement should be lawful and restrained, not driven by intimidation and body counts. When citizens, veterans, and undocumented migrants are swept into the same dragnet, the question is no longer about immigration — it is about power.
What makes this moment volatile is not just police tactics but political theater. Protesters are framed as enemies. Enforcement agencies are cast as soldiers. Nonprofits are treated as shadow actors. Every side claims the other is being manipulated. The result is a public trained to see plots instead of policy and threats instead of dissent. That confusion serves someone. It always does. When fear replaces clarity, accountability gets harder. When every disturbance is treated as sabotage, every crackdown can be sold as protection.
This is why the discomfort matters. People sense something is wrong but are afraid to say so without being labeled traitors by one side or extremists by the other. The middle ground has become a free-firing zone. The loudest voices now come from the edges, while skepticism is dismissed as disloyalty and questions are treated as provocation.
History’s lesson is not subtle: societies do not lose their balance overnight. They lose it word-by-word. When “terrorism” comes to mean protest, and enforcement comes to mean spectacle, the real casualty is trust and freedom. Citizens are losing faith in once-trusted institutions, in one another, and in the idea that power still answers to the public. The question is no longer whether something has shifted in the USA. The question is whether Americans will accept a politics where fear does the governing — or insist on where the threat and use of force still require some hard explaining.
There is also the question of the workings of NGOs and the use of potential Color Revolutions playbooks. Are they coming home to roost in the USA, and just how many of the so-called troublemakers are actually crisis actors who may be working for the very agency that is being attacked? Such an MO smells to high heaven of a false flag of finding an excuse by the federal government to have its own private army. It is not hard to understand the motivation, considering midterm elections this year—and if the elections will be taken under the control of the federal government, stripping the individual states of this constitutional right to run their own elections.
The question now is not whether labels are being stretched beyond recognition — it is whether the public will accept a system where words are weaponized to excuse violence and silence scrutiny, or will they demand that authority once again be forced to answer to law, evidence, and the very people it so claims to protect!
Jeffrey K. Silverman is a freelance journalist and international development specialist, BSc, MSc, based for 30 years in Georgia and the former Soviet Union
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