What ICE is doing to America is familiar to me as a Palestinian | Israel-Palestine conflict

The escalation of state violence in the United States has been unprecedented. In the span of three weeks, two people were shot dead in Minneapolis during “anti-immigration” raids. Both were branded “domestic terrorists”.

Meanwhile last week, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used five-year-old Liam Ramos as bait to get his asylum-seeking father to come out of their home; the two have now been taken to a detention centre in Texas. The administration calls this – the act of locking up children in mass detention camps – “immigration enforcement”. ICE detained at least 3,800 children last year, including 20 babies.

Across the country, the violence inflicted by ICE is creating a culture of fear within migrant communities.

I know this fear; I know this violence. These are the fear and violence that have long devastated my birthplace – Palestine. I hope Americans never have to deal with the scale of death, forced disappearances and violence that generations of Palestinians have had to suffer. But under US President Donald Trump, they are already now experiencing the tactics that are so familiar to Palestinian victims of the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.

The parallels are impossible to ignore.

In 2025, 32 people, called “illegals”, died in ICE custody, making it the deadliest year in two decades. They died of seizure, heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, infectious disease, suicide or neglect. ICE accepted no responsibility for their deaths. In the occupied West Bank, where I was born, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in two years and four months.

Nearly 75 percent of the 68,440 people ICE detained last year had no criminal record. Thousands of Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli prisons without charge or a trial.

With the latest killings and kidnapping of US citizens, even people who are “legally” here are now afraid. There is a growing atmosphere of insecurity and anxiety that anyone at anytime can be disappeared or harmed.

Across the country, ICE violence is depriving children of education and businesses. For example, in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, 30,000 students, nearly 20 percent of district enrolment, were absent the week after raids began in 2025, and in Los Angeles, shop owners reported a significant loss in sales as customers stayed home.

I know what it feels like to dread passing by armed security personnel who at any moment may shoot you and then call you a “terrorist”. My family members know what it is like to be besieged and stormed; to witness a public execution.

This type of violence has been the daily reality of Palestinians across historic Palestine long before October 7, 2023. After that day, it has just intensified. Just like in the US, children have also not been spared. Of the 240 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank in 2025, 55 were children.

Just this month, Israeli soldiers killed 14-year-old Mohammed Naasan during a raid on his village. They claimed he was running to them with a rock in his hand.

The Israeli military routinely fires live ammunition at Palestinian children and justifies it by claiming they were throwing stones. Apparently, a Palestinian child with a rock poses an existential threat to one of the most heavily armed militaries in the world, to soldiers in full body armour shooting from armoured vehicles.

Palestinian children are regularly used by Israeli soldiers as “human shields” when they raid neighbourhoods; their detention and abuse is often used to put pressure on family members to surrender — just as ICE did with Liam Ramos and his father.

In Israeli detention, at least 75 Palestinians were killed between October 7, 2023 and August 2025, including 17-year-old Walid Ahmad. In at least 12 cases, detainees died after being beaten or tortured by Israeli security forces.

The United Nations has documented systematic torture and ill-treatment including repeated beatings, waterboarding, stress positions, and the use of rape and other sexual and gender-based violence.

More than 300 Palestinian children are currently being held in military detention as of November 2025. These children are detained indefinitely without charge or trial based on secret evidence that is neither disclosed to them nor to their attorneys.

Among them was Mohammed Ibrahim, a 16-year-old Palestinian-American from Florida, who was held for over nine months. Upon his release, he had to be taken to hospital due to his poor condition and malnutrition. Ibrahim told his family he witnessed another teenager die in front of him in detention after being denied medical attention for scabies and a severe stomach virus.

The reason why the violence we see in the US is so reminiscent of what happens in the West Bank is because what we face: Security structures shaped by white supremacy and a colonial mindset.

The Israeli state perceives the Palestinian people as less than human and an immediate threat; that is why, in the Israeli state’s logic, they need to be kept in an apartheid system where they are surveilled, subjugated and eventually forced out.

Palestinians are murdered for simply being Palestinian, for refusing to leave their ancestral land, for serving as a testament that Palestine was never “without a land without people”.

In the US, too, the state has decided that there are some people who are less than human and pose an immediate threat. It too has deployed a heavily militarised force to spy on, subjugate and force them out, using technology first tested on Palestinians and imported to America.

Both repressive systems operate on the same principle that brown bodies and their allies can be detained without cause, shot without consequence, and left to die.

Of course, we cannot make a full parallel between the violence in the US and in Palestine.

The Israeli state has expressed through both actions and words a clear intent to fully eliminate the Palestinian people.

The Palestinians are currently facing a genocide in Gaza and at a slower rate in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israeli state has a clear project of erasure that seeks to wipe out even the historical records of Palestinian existence.

Nevertheless, it is clear that today Americans are getting a taste of what Palestinians have experienced for decades: state terror. This is what deploying armed forces who shoot citizens, who use five-year-old children as tactical bait, who let detainees die at unprecedented rates is called. In the United States, in Palestine and wherever power decides that certain lives do not count, the patterns of state terror repeat.

George Orwell wrote in 1984 that the Party’s final, most essential command was to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Before he died, his publisher released a statement: “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”

We are living that nightmare now, watching videos of executions and being told they were self-defence. We must be the ones to fight for change. Everywhere, we must be the ones who take the struggle for freedom into our own hands.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.