Geoffrey Grammer, M.D., on Trump’s ICE agents: “What we are seeing today is the theatricality of enforcement”

A former congressional candidate has compared Donald Trump’s U.S. presidency to Vlad the Impaler’s 15th-century reign of terror in Eastern Europe, bemoaning the “social contagion” of fear sparked by the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

ICE roams U.S. streets amid immigration crackdown

Since Trump began his second term as president in January 2025, the Republican has overseen a hardline crackdown on immigrants in the U.S., with federal agents carrying out deportation raids across the country. Indeed, the administration carried out nearly 700,000 deportations in Trump’s first year back in office, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

With Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents roaming the cities nationwide, people have not only been targeted at homes and workplaces. Civil liberties organisations have complained that officers are using racial profiling to stop and detain individuals on the street and in a range of other public settings.

And amid widespread demonstrations over immigration authorities’ actions, protests intensified last month when federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens on the streets of Minnesota - Renee Good and Alex Pretti - during deportation raids.

Declaring their determination to “put an end to the chaos we’re seeing on our streets”, Democrats in Congress have sought negotiations on reforms to federal immigration authorities’ operations. Indeed, the DHS - which runs ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) - now finds itself in a federal funding gap, as Democratic lawmakers push back on passing a year-long DHS spending package until their demands are met.

The Democrats’ Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has vowed to “rein in the abuses of ICE”.

And in a substack post in January, in the aftermath of Good’s killing, Dr. Geoffrey Grammer, a former Democratic congressional candidate, declared that ICE’s rampant, public deportation operations reflect a regime that appears to have adopted a policy of “deterrence through dread”.

“Fear is a social contagion”

“The Trump administration frames its immigration policy as ‘law and order,’” said Grammar, an ex-U.S. Army colonel and psychiatrist who in 2024 unsuccessfully sought the Democratic candidacy in Maryland’s sixth district. “But law can be enforced quietly, or it can be enforced loudly.

“What we are seeing today is the theatricality of enforcement. ICE operations are no longer confined to the shadows of border crossings. They have migrated into the vital organs of civic life: hospitals, churches, courthouses, schools, and quiet suburban driveways.

“When a father is detained in front of his screaming children, or a patient is tracked to a clinic, the point isn’t just the deportation of one individual. The point is the ripples.

“Fear is a social contagion. When people begin to wonder if a routine traffic stop or a church service is a trap, the law has exceeded its mandate. It has ceased to be about ‘enforcement’ and has become about deterrence through dread. Vlad understood this principle: the bodies on the road were effective long before the army arrived.”

Grammer continued: “The United States was founded on the radical rejection of governance by terror. We were supposed to be a nation of consent, governed by laws that are blind, not laws that have “favorites.”

“When enforcement becomes theatrical, it stops serving justice and starts serving a cult of personality. Vlad the Impaler believed fear was more reliable than trust. History remembers him for it. Not as a ‘strong leader,’ but as a monster who mistook trauma for stability.

“We aren’t living in the 15th century. But if we allow fear to become our primary civic emotion, the distance between then and now is much shorter than we think, but the stakes aren’t made of wood anymore.”

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