Late last month, Laura Loomer — a prominent MAGA influencer who in 2017 called herself “pro-white nationalism” — invited Jacob Engels, a Proud Boys associate and writer for the conspiracy theory-pushing blog Gateway Pundit, to her podcast to discuss a new app that would help people they see as true patriots deport their neighbors — and get paid for it.
It is representative of the long history in America of white vigilantes partnering with law enforcement to terrorize marginalized groups.
“It’s called IceRaid.US,” Engels said, explaining how users could snap photos of “illegal aliens.” The app apparently then sends the photos, including the metadata identifying where and when they were taken, to law enforcement. “This is really really interesting because it’s taking so much off the backs of law enforcement … and we’re doing it as citizens, and you have the opportunity to earn crypto for reporting and deporting illegals.”
Loomer — one of President Donald Trump’s close confidants — was thrilled. “If you’re sick and tired of the illegal alien construction workers making a bunch of noise at the house next door to yours, you can actually call it in!” she said. “Get that cryptocurrency for reporting these individuals. It’s almost like a bounty.”
It’s unclear how functional IceRaid.US — created by a relatively unknown cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Jason Meyers — really is, or to what degree it’s actually coordinating with law enforcement. (Meyers and representatives from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for comment.)
What is clear is that the app’s launch earned coverage across far-right media — including former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s OANN show — and spoke to a growing hunger among the MAGA faithful, cultivated by the Republican Party, to become vigilantes, informants and snitches to target immigrants.
Chaya Raichik, the influential LibsOfTikTok creator — whose viral propaganda has falsely labeled queer people “groomers” and “pedophiles” and has been linked to a wave of anti-LGBTQ harassment and threats — recently turned her sights on immigrants. Earlier this month, she joined Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in an armored vehicle for a “ride-along” with ICE officers as they conducted a raid in Phoenix, at one point posting a clip of Noem, wearing a tactical vest and carrying an assault rifle, taunting a detainee. “We’re gonna prosecute you,” Noem said. “You don’t commit crimes in our country.”
The stunt was representative, as Melissa Gira Grant observed in The New Republic, of how the Trump administration is “branding traumatic arrests and detentions as some depraved cross-over event between law enforcement and internet vigilantes.”
It is also representative of the long history in America of white vigilantes partnering with law enforcement to terrorize marginalized groups.
William Horne, a history professor at the University of Maryland, told me “the most worrisome parallel, the closest thing to what we’re seeing now historically, is the assaults on the Reconstruction state governments” after the Civil War, when the Ku Klux Klan, along other white vigilante groups and lynch mobs partnered with law enforcement to target black Southerners — and white southerners who supported their freedom — with horrifying violence and murder. This guerilla war helped end Reconstruction, the federal government abandoning its nascent experiment in multiracial democracy and ushering in decades of Jim Crow.
“Historically, failing to take aggressive action against white vigilantism all but guarantees escalating white vigilantism and the creation of some form of apartheid regime,” Horne wrote in 2022.
Trump’s ability to escape prosecution for his attempted insurrection, combined with his almost immediate pardon of more than 1,000 Jan. 6 rioters, signals to MAGA vigilantes that they can now act with impunity. Trump’s FBI has also reportedly shifted its focus away from investigating far-right extremism to Black Lives Matter activists and antifa.
There has also been an alarming rise in people impersonating ICE officers to harass, threaten and detain immigrants.
Meanwhile, armed border militias, according to reporter Tess Owen, are ready and eager to help Trump fulfill his campaign promise to mass deport millions of human beings. Politico has reported that Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the mercenary group Blackwater, is among a group of military contractors who have pitched the White House on a plan to deputize “10,000 private citizens” to assist in rounding up undocumented people. (Prince declined to comment to Politico.)
There has also been an alarming rise in people impersonating ICE officers to harass, threaten and detain immigrants. In South Carolina, an armed man detained two Latino men on a highway, telling them to stop speaking “that shitty Spanish” and to “go back to Mexico.” According to a police report in North Carolina, another man “displayed a business card with a badge on it” before threatening to deport a woman if “she did not have sex with him.” (He was charged with sexual assault.)
We are only a few months into the second Trump administration. Things can, and very likely will, get even worse. The administration’s dehumanizing campaign of mass deportation seems poised to include vigilantes acting as the militant arm of Trump’s MAGA movement, scaring immigrants to make them retreat and hide, or even “self-deport,” the preferred right-wing nomenclature for fleeing America before they’re made to leave.
When Loomer and Engels were discussing the IceRaid app, Loomer took a moment to recount an extremely exciting encounter she had recently.
“I actually ended up catching up with Tom Homan, our border czar, in the airport here in Palm Beach, Florida and I congratulated him on his deportation orders and his success thus far as the border czar,” Loomer said, queuing up a video of the interaction.
“Can we expect to see some more jihadist students rounded up soon and deported?” the video shows Loomer asking Homan, referring to the terrifying incidents of masked ICE agents disappearing college students off the streets for their support of pro-Palestinian causes — including, in the case of Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, for the apparent transgression of writing an op-ed in the school newspaper that was critical of Israel.
The video shows Homan smiling at the question before looking into the camera.
“Just sit back and watch,” he said.
