Is ICE Becoming America’s Tonton Macoutes?

By Felicia J. Persaud

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. Jan. 26, 2026: In 1959, Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier created a paramilitary force that answered only to him. Empowered to use unrestrained violence, it existed to terrorize, silence, and eliminate perceived enemies.

FLASHBACK – :A corpse is unloaded from a tuck in downtown Port-Au-Prince 2/7 under the eyes of a Tonton Macoute. The bystanders said the badly beaten man was a Tonton Macoute.

This force – the Tonton Macoutes – was born not from law, but from paranoia: Duvalier replaced institutional accountability with personal loyalty enforced through brutality. Critics now argue that similar dynamics are emerging within ICE under the current administration, where political loyalty increasingly appears to eclipse institutional accountability.

Named after a Creole myth of an “uncle” who kidnaps disobedient children in a gunnysack, the Tonton Macoutes became a national nightmare. Armed with machetes and guns, wearing straw hats and dark glasses, they extorted businesses, kidnapped dissidents, and murdered civilians with impunity. They were not accountable to courts, legislatures, or law – only to Duvalier himself. Civil rights did not apply.

That history matters now in these United States.

Federal agents remove a protester they arrested on Nicollet Avenue near West 26th St. in south Minneapolis after Alex Pretti was fatally shot by federal agents in the area early Saturday morning, January 24, 2026. (Photo by Alex Kormann/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

On January 24, 2026, another taxpayer-funded US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed an innocent American. He was gunned down in a cold, snowy, street – a moment so jarring that critics say it reflects the same moral coarsening publicly embraced by political leaders, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who wrote in her own memoir about shooting a puppy and a goat. or puppy. The killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, has shocked the nation to its core. Dozens of CEOs have issued statements, as have Presidents Obama and Clinton. It comes less than three weeks after the killing of another 37-year-old by ICE, Renee Good, and the killing of Keith Porter, 43.

“According to publicly reported data and investigative reporting, at least 27 ICE-related shootings occurred, leading to 8 deaths. At least 19 incidents of agents opening fire and 36 incidents where agents held bystanders or protesters at gunpoint were reported as of late 2025. At least six people have died in ICE detention centers since the start of 2026, following at least 30 deaths in ICE custody last year, a two-decade high.

Civil-rights advocates, legal scholars and even cultural figures are stunned. Singer Bruce Springsteen even used his recent concert to denounce the Trump administration’s use of ICE.

“We are living through incredibly critical times,” Springsteen told the audience. “The ideals and values this country has stood for are being tested as never before.” He condemned what he described as heavily armed federal agents using Gestapo-like tactics against American citizens exercising their right to protest.

Legal thinkers have echoed that concern. New York Times op ed writer David French has warned that the United States is drifting toward what Nazi-era legal scholar Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state” – one system governed by law, another by unchecked power. Journalist M. Gessen, also in the Times op ed section, noted that in Europe, observers increasingly describe America as building detention camps that resemble historical authoritarian regimes.

Protesters gather in downtown Minneapolis demanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leave Minnesota following the fatal shooting of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents during a federal immigration enforcement operation, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 25, 2026. On January 24, federal agents shot dead US citizen Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, while scuffling with him on an icy roadway, less than three weeks after an immigration officer shot and killed Renee Good, also 37, in her car. His killing sparked new protests and impassioned demands by local leaders for the Trump administration to end its operation in the city. (Photo by Octavio JONES / AFP via Getty Images)

The constitutional principles at stake are the same.
No one is arguing that immigration law should not be enforced. The question is how it is enforced – and whether any agency should operate with expanding powers, military equipment, and minimal accountability, while attacking civilians exercising their right to free speech, and arresting Native Americans and preschoolers.

History teaches us that when armed forces answer more to political authority than to law, abuse follows. Haitians know this lesson intimately. The Tonton Macoutes did not spring up overnight. They emerged gradually, justified by fear, normalized by silence, and enabled by impunity.

Americans should take heed. History rarely announces itself with sirens. It advances through normalization — through the quiet acceptance of practices once considered unthinkable. When armed agents answer more to political power than to law, when deaths are dismissed as procedure, and when fear becomes policy, the comparisons we resist today become the realities we inherit tomorrow.

Felicia J. Persaud is the founder and publisher of NewsAmericasNow.com, the only daily syndicated newswire and digital platform dedicated exclusively to Caribbean Diaspora and Black immigrant news across the Americas.