Europeans Outraged at ICE Should Also Be Resisting Frontex
Reports of ICE thugs providing security for J. D. Vance at Milan’s Winter Olympics have sparked outrage in Italy. In Europe, too, multibillion-euro border agency Frontex is taking on increasingly troubling powers.
A Frontex Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABITs) member prepares for a patrol at their headquarters in Orestiada, near the Greek-Turkish borders. (Sakis Mitrolidis / AFP via Getty Images)
With blood on the streets and burning barricades in the Twin Cities, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has hit front pages across the world. European politicians are increasingly uneasy about the Atlantic alliance, eager to distance themselves from the perceived excesses of the Donald Trump administration. If the US president’s record arming a genocide in Gaza and strong-arming erstwhile allies through tariff warfare could be more or less tolerated, the invasion of Venezuela and hawkish comments against Greenland have put NATO itself at risk. The cold-blooded daylight assassinations of Renée Good and Alex Pretti have further pushed Washington beyond the pale for politicians and leaders of Europe’s center left — even while the murders of Keith Porter, Victor Manuel Diaz, and many others at the hands of ICE seem not to have been worthy of attention.
It was in this context that Italy’s Interior Ministry came under sharp criticism last week when it was reported that Vice President J. D. Vance would be accompanied by a gang of ICE thugs when he visits Milan for the Winter Olympic Games that opened this Friday, October 6. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi oscillated between denying that ICE would be present and declaring that they would be limited to security roles — implying that this would ease concerns about them being on Italian soil. All of the Italian opposition parties and the main left-wing trade union criticized ICE’s proposed presence, and on Saturday held a demonstration in Milan in solidarity with Minnesotans.
Milan’s mayor, Giuseppe “Beppe” Sala — close to neoliberal-centrist former premier Matteo Renzi — described ICE as “a militia that kills, that enters people’s homes signing their own warrants. Clearly they’re not welcome in Milan.” He added, “What I wonder is, for just once could we say no to Trump? ICE’s agents mustn’t come to Italy because they’re simply not aligned with our democratic method of guaranteeing security.” Left-wing European MPs have even issued a letter to the European Commission asking for EU travel bans on all ICE agents — and indeed, in the end, it seems no ICE agents have been sent to Milan.
Similarly, the French defense minister, Catherine Vautrin, of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party — has criticized Capgemini, a large French management consultancy and tech firm, for signing a contract with ICE. Although Capgemini denied that they will be helping ICE track down people to be harassed, assaulted, deported, and even killed, the Observatoire des multinationales demonstrated that they have been doing so since October. Again, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), France’s largest left-wing trade union, has called for an end to the contract, as have the French Communist Party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise. As a result, Capgemini have been forced to sell their US subsidiary with the contract.
It’s a shame, then, that these politicians and trade unions all seem to have forgotten that something very similar to ICE exists in their own backyards, “defending” this space and murdering people who cross into it: Frontex.
Armed Agents
The European Border and Coast Guard Agency — known by the acronym of its original French name, Frontières Extérieures — was founded in 2004. ICE was established the year before, in 2003, likewise in the wake of the “War on Terror.” Since then, the two agencies have expanded massively, both geographically and in terms of resources: Frontex is the EU’s fastest expanding agency. Their approaches are also extremely similar: ICE has been using facial recognition technologies to track people’s movements for years, as has Frontex. ICE officers are not police, but they carry guns. So do Frontex agents. One key difference used to be that whereas ICE directly arrests and deports people, Frontex only assisted on the borders. But, as of last year, that no longer holds, as Belgium passed a law allowing Frontex agents to directly police immigration on state territory. And back in 2024, Frontex deployed hundreds of agents to police the Olympic Games in Paris.
Amid all the discussion over the past years about defense and the rearmament of the EU, little has been said about Frontex being a de facto standing army, a thousands-strong force of uniformed agents with a multibillion euro budget, working across the continent, and coordinating all members states’ anti-migrant operations. They provide helicopters, drones, planes, and speedboats to spot migrants at sea and on land, and to push these migrants back to the countries from which they were fleeing — despite the illegality of these activities, as the European Court of Justice recently ruled. Their operations include collaborating with Libyan warlords who imprison, rape, and extort people on the move, and shoot at rescue missions. In 2022, the head of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, resigned after revelations that his agency covered up Greek violations of asylum seekers’ rights, including abandoning people on rafts at sea. Though Leggeri was forced out, he has found a place as an ambitious European MP in Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, Rassemblement National. Meanwhile, the horrendous acts of violence and abuse continue to be perpetrated.
Legal organizations like Front-Lex, activist groups like Refugees in Libya and Abolish Frontex, and sea rescue missions like Sea Watch continue to criticize the EU for the death and destruction that Frontex leaves in its wake.
Just like in the United States, there are of course also local agencies and police forces that enforce detention and deportation in every European member state. Police in Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia, and France have been accused of shooting people with lethal and “less-than-lethal” ammunition in recent years; Italy and Greece have targeted sea rescue missions with spyware and dragged them through the criminal courts.
Solidarity
This is not to say that the European left should only concentrate on opposing the violent, spiraling border control army in Europe, ignoring what happens on the other side of the Atlantic. Expressions of solidarity with everyone in Minneapolis and beyond fighting the racialized violence of ICE should clearly be welcomed.
But there is a mainstream European reaction against the horrors of ICE, and of the Trump administration, that plays the old game of criticizing matters in the New World, only to contrast these with the respectability and order of Old Europe. Such debates ring through the centuries. Take the British reactions to the rebellion in Morant Bay in 1865, when polite society was shocked and divided over the murderous repression of hundreds of black Jamaican workers. On the one side were conservatives like Charles Dickens, who supported the colonial governor’s slaughter of the insurrectionaries; on the other were liberals, like John Stuart Mill, who were “concerned about colonial violence” in the Americas, but couldn’t bring themselves to demand an end to European colonization.
Just like the critics of the repression back then — who were leading ideologues of an “enlightened” liberal capitalism and colonialism — supporters of Renzi and Macron have no moral standing on which to speak about “democratic methods of security.”
To draw comparisons is not to take away from ICE’s brutality. This is a police force guided by a far-right, hyper-capitalist government that is actively recruiting from white supremacist, neo-Nazi groups, consciously drawing on a heritage of slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan. Europe, too, has its own heritage of racialized violence, which Frontex and other border agencies enact and deploy: the imperialist control of the Mediterranean Sea, the Crusader-like Islamophobia of the post-9/11 era, the use of hunting dogs, and the building of concentration camps for racialized foreigners — now under the name of “detention centers.”
But this is not just a question of coincidence and ghosts of fascisms past: Frontex and ICE are the outcomes of a very contemporary ideology that draws on all technological means to dehumanize and racialize immigrant communities and workers, an ideology of dividing the working class that liberals have failed to oppose and that the far right is now trying to push to further extremes.
Vance and his goons shouldn’t be welcome at the Winter Olympics, and we should all stand in solidarity with US activists and communities resisting ICE’s violence. But the European left would do well to apply that same pressure to resist the violent, racist, colonial violence being practiced by the EU’s own border forces day in, day out.