The Trump administration’s plan to embed agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the security detail for the U.S. delegation at next month’s Winter Olympics in Italy has triggered international outrage, uniting officials, activists, and ordinary Italians in protest.
The scandal broke after the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that ICE agents would operate alongside the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service at the Milan-Cortina Games, supposedly “to vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations,” according to a Department of Homeland Security statement.
The agents being sent are technically from Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s transnational crime unit, not the Enforcement and Removal Operations paramilitary units. The distinction is meaningless to Italians who have watched ICE agents gun down U.S. citizens and threaten journalists on live television. The brand is the brand; ICE is ICE.
But the announcement struck like a hammer blow given ICE’s bloody record. The agency’s name evokes terror across working-class communities in the U.S. — its hands soaked with the blood of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, shot by agents in Minneapolis; Keith Porter Jr., shot to death on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. Dozens of people have died in ICE custody amid allegations of denied medical care, including diabetics whose insulin was delayed or withheld; others have died after use of Tasers during arrests, or by suicide in detention centers that advocates describe as torturous.
The agency has stormed homes without warrants, used 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos as bait to arrest his father in Minneapolis, and harassed off-duty police officers of color. Its lawlessness exposes a paramilitary force — now poised to extend its reach onto European soil.
Italian rejection
The reaction in Italy was swift and furious. Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi initially waved off the controversy, claiming foreign delegations could choose their own security. Hours later, as public rage swelled, he reversed himself: “ICE, as such, will never operate in Italy.” Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani confirmed that ICE agents would be barred from Italian streets, bluntly stating that public order “belongs only to the Italian police.”
ICE is not a neutral “security partner.” It is a domestic paramilitary arm of the Department of Homeland Security, built to carry out raids, arrests and deportations and to operate a sprawling detention system aimed squarely at immigrant workers and their families. It functions alongside police and federal task forces to raid workplaces and homes, detain immigrant workers, and tear families apart — enforcing a racist border regime that protects employers through raids, detention and deportation.
Deploying ICE abroad under the banner of “delegation security” blurs that line and normalizes immigration enforcement as a component of U.S. imperialist enforcement. The U.S. already exports policing through FBI legal attachés and DHS offices that train foreign police, screen travelers and share intelligence.
What is new is ICE’s open insertion into a global spectacle — treating migration control as Olympic security — exporting U.S. border repression into another country’s public space and advancing the idea that policing displaced workers is a legitimate function of international diplomacy.
Italians understood exactly what was being proposed. Outrage continued to build.
Milan’s Mayor Giuseppe Sala denounced the plan as “unacceptable,” declaring, “Say no to Trump. We will not welcome a militia known for its crimes — one that kills, that raids homes, that terrorizes with impunity.” Elly Schlein, leader of Italy’s center-left Democratic Party, echoed his warning, calling ICE “an armed body that has shown contempt for law on U.S. soil” and questioning how such forces could be trusted to respect Italian sovereignty.
Trump’s Olympics plan marks an unprecedented escalation. ICE has never before been dispatched abroad in this capacity. Its deployment represents the export of domestic repression — the raids, shootings, and detentions inflicted on immigrants, workers, and Black and Brown communities — onto a global stage intended for athletic competition rather than militarized policing.
As Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio prepare to attend the Games’ opening ceremonies, 232 U.S. athletes, symbols of human aspiration, will be shadowed by agents of fear. The stain of ICE threatens to follow them onto the ice, snow, and podium.
ICE violence part of the war machine
This latest provocation unfolds amid a surge in U.S. aggression worldwide — the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores; Pentagon seizures of Venezuelan oil and ships; renewed threats to occupy Greenland; intervention on the African continent; open talk in Washington of war with Cuba and the DPRK; covert intervention and ratcheting up the possibility of bombing Iran; furthering the genocide in Palestine and the continuing war both cold and hot on China and Russia. The same imperialist machine that cages migrants and brutalizes refugees at home will impose its terror internationally.
Across Italy, the response is clear: from the streets of Milan to the halls of Parliament, people are drawing a line against this transnational repression. ICE will not march unchecked through Italy.
This is a clash between national sovereignty and imperialist enforcement. The message to Trump is direct: U.S. immigration police are not welcome on Italian streets.
Growing resistance across Europe
Italy is not alone. From the docks of Piraeus, where Greek port workers have refused to load U.S. and NATO weapons bound for wars in Gaza and Ukraine, to British activists who have blocked deportation flights and surrounded immigration detention centers, resistance is spreading across the continent. In Germany, France, and Spain, tens of thousands have taken to the streets against racist border policies, mass drownings in the Mediterranean, and the deadly “Fortress Europe” regime.
These struggles are not separate. The same system that sends ICE to terrorize migrants at home, that tries to sneak them into Italy under Olympic cover, also arms Israeli bombs, blockades Cuba, and threatens Venezuela and Palestine. When Italian workers and students say no to ICE, they are rejecting the same enforcement machinery that cages migrants in the United States, carries out raids and deportations in working-class neighborhoods, and traps refugees in deadly crossings across the Mediterranean.
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