BRUTALITY WITH A LINEAGE by Lawrence Davidson
(2 February 2026)
Part I —Recruiting the Marginalized
Upheavals come and go. The average American will be unaware, but there was a big one in Europe in 1848. Karl Marx made his debut in the U.S. press as a journalist reporting on the turmoil that year in France. In 1852, Marx brought out a book, drawing on some of that reporting, entitled: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (“Brumaire” refers to the second month of the French Republican Calendar). The work analyzed one of the seminal consequences of the 1848 troubles—Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état that overthrew the French Second Republic.
In that work, Marx refers to a class of people he called the “lumpenproletariat.” Lump means a scoundrel or bum in German and signifies a marginalized group existing apart from society’s established means of production. Here are some of the examples Marx supplied: beggars, prostitutes, rag-pickers and con-men. He also included “the ‘Literati’ or struggling writers or intellectuals without a stable social position or income.” And then, notably, he added “discharged soldiers.” The lumpenproletariat was a class of folks which covered a lot of economic territory.
For our purpose, the last category (the soldiers) is important because of all the marginalized groups, they were/are not only (1) easily recruited (largely through bribery) but (2) used as a violent tool as well. For instance, in June 1848, the uprising of socialist students and members of the working class centered in Paris was violently put down with the help of the “Guarde Mobile.” Marx asserted that this reserve unit was made up of elements of the lumpenproletariat, particularly unemployed ex-soldiers.
The historical role of this demographic group carries over into the first half of the 20th century. The scene now shifts from Paris to Berlin. As early as the 1920s, Hitler had organized a private Nazi militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA) or Stormtroopers (also known as the Brownshirts). The group largely consisted of unemployed ex-soldiers who had accepted the myth that Germany had lost World War I because the military had been “stabbed in the back” by the civilian government.
Due to the weakness of the post war Weimar Republic, the SA was able to operate outside the law—intimidating critics of the Nazis and the Jewish population generally, as well as fighting with the supporters of the Communist and Social Democratic parties. The SA would ultimately help Hitler consolidate power, doing away with the Weimar Republic.
Part II — ICE
As it turns out, variations on the lumpenproletariat constitute a timeless, and ubiquitous class. As a manipulatable group, they were notorious as early as republican Rome. Still today, coming from all elements of the economically displaced, their needs are necessarily immediate: acquiring the resources to survive. This brings us to President Donald Trump’s rapid expansion of federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—a group redesigned by Trump not only to enforce the immigration laws in a violent and outlandishly illegal fashion, but ultimately to serve potentially as a private army.
In 2025, Trump increased the size of ICE by 22,000—more than doubling the size of the organization. ICE received over 200,000 applicants for these positions. Most of these came from people who were unemployed, retired, or those about to be discharged from the military. As groups, they mostly consisted of unemployed veterans, police officers, and a scattering of displaced government functionaries. This expansion took place at the same time the administration was reducing the size of most other government agencies.
Two things seemed to have drawn this large number of applicants to the ICE recruiters. The first had to do with acquiring economic resources. Trump offered a $50,000 signing bonus. This sum was more than enough to sweep up those who were economically insecure. Second, was the Trump advertising ploy that told them they would be seen as “patriots” whose job would be to help the president “make America safe again.”
This characterization, coming straight from the executive office, ultimately led to an assumption of impunity across the ICE organization. That is, that ICE officers did not have to follow laws or legal procedures. They could detain, arrest and interrogate, not only those who, with evidence, could be suspected of being in the country “illegally,” but just about anyone else. And they could do so using strong-arm tactics, including gun violence. In this way, ICE began to resemble France’s “Guard Mobile,” and Adolf Hitler’s “Stormtroopers.”
Part III — Gregory Bovino – Border Patrol Commander At Large
The man in charge of most of ICE’s field operations is Gregory Bovino. He is someone who has cultivated a tough guy image. That persona has long rested on a piece of fiction—Bovino’s lasting view of the world was shaped by a film.
As an 11-year-old youth, Bovino watched the 1982 action film The Border. Here is how Josie Ensor, the U.S. based reporter for the British Sunday Times describes both the film and its impact on Bovino: “In the 1982 action movie The Border, Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel play border guards posted along the Texas frontier. The film sets up their federal force as a bunch of gunslingers operating with little to no moral code. But the way an 11-year-old Gregory Bovino saw it, watching at the cinema in his hometown in North Carolina, Keitel and his posse were the heroes, foot soldiers fueled by a sense of duty and patriotism. The Border would set the course for Bovino’s life.”
It would seem that Bovino’s demeanor as the now “Commander At Large” of the U.S. Border Patrol mimics the action movie that so inspired him as a pre-teen. (He has “gained notoriety due to his aggressive and outspoken approach for the job and for appearing in the field in tactical gear alongside rank-and-file Border Patrol personnel.”) The “gunslinger” who pays no attention to a “moral code” because he fancies himself a patriot and a hero, has run amok in Los Angeles, Chicago, and finally Minneapolis. In truth, the “Commander At Large” is an undisciplined kid.
So what happens when you put such an arrested personality in charge of a modern day Garde Mobile? For this is what ICE has become under Trump. What you get is chaos and a “police force” out of control. “Bovino has long defended the tactics used by Border Patrol agents, calling them necessary to quell riots that threatened federal law enforcement personnel.” The truth, and it is not an obscure one, is that Bovino’s tactics result in his own troops rioting in ways that threaten, and have now proved fatal to civilians.
Part IV — Conclusion
Are the “Guard Mobile,” “Sturmabteilung,” and ICE historical anomalies or are they predictable outgrowths of a democracy that has lost its sanctity? In each case, growing pockets of the population (first French, then German) abandoned the democratic process. In the American case as well, there are segments of the nation which have seemingly turned their backs on the Constitution and the democratic principles it represents: Christian nationalists and fundamentalists, the nouveau riche billionaires, racist nativists, and those Tea Party folks who have remained Trump supporters.
President Trump is the “can do” charlatan who has taken advantage of the cracks opening up in the traditional system. He has adopted the swagger and imperialist foreign policy of Benito Mussolini, invented the strategy of tariff blackmail, and laid the basis for the modern variation of a private army manned mostly by opportunists, unemployed soldiers and police who, as individuals (and Gregory Bovino is a good example), have proven to be unethical and ruthless.
Finally, nothing lasts forever, including political structures. Democracies can be as problematic as other systems. For instance, historically, democracies have proven to be compatible with slavery and the racism that persecutes minority groups. It is obviously compatible with the defects of capitalism. These flaws, over time, must erode the more equitable principles of democracy and open it up to the success of such dictatorial personalities as Donald Trump. Only a counter effort on the part of those who recognize this historical threat can serve as the necessary corrective. This is the struggle we now face. This is the challenge of our time and place.
