ICE has intelligence branches in five major Canadian cities, collaborates with local police
Understanding border imperialism, overlapping interests of colonial police states, and the Jay Treaty
Photo credit: Federal agents confront protesters in Minneapolis on January 24, taken by David Guttenfelder for the New York Times
It’s an open secret that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operates on both sides of the northern colonial border. Those who are critically engaged with and familiar with the mechanisms of the police state in so-called Canada have known about ICE working with Canadian law enforcement for some time. The fact that these local law enforcement agencies casually admit it every couple months through press releases makes it relatively easy to figure out, too.
The question we should be asking ourselves is not what sort of operations ICE is conducting in so-called Canada, but what function does ICE being in ‘Canada’ serve within a capitalist-colonial and U.S. imperialist framework which is constantly trying to extend its borders through legal, economic, and military power.
Before getting into the specifics of what the implications and material reality of these relationships mean, lets situate the discussion below within the larger discourse ‘Canadians’ are having at the moment.
Border Imperialism?
The effectiveness of fascist and imperialist propaganda is how it shrinks our understandings of complex global social, political, and economic material conditions. Regarding borders and immigration, it insists we focus on how individuals are (in)compatible in relation to a) mythologized national values, and b) notions of preserving the ‘well-being of the state’. Such propaganda insists that we turns our attention away from meaningfully questioning or challenging the death drive built into global capitalism which creates the conditions for — and generates profits from — dispossession, displacement, and labour exploitation.
In Undoing Border Imperialism (2014), scholar, organizer, and activist Harsha Walia explains this dynamic as ‘border imperialism’. As concisely summarized in an article by Global Social Theory, Walia is arguing
… our understanding of borders are incomplete without a comprehensive analysis of how borders actually function, and in particular, the ways in which they govern, discipline, and oppress people who are traversing colonial territories, particularly Indigenous people and racialized people. As a concept then, border imperialism defies relegating matters of immigration to that of any single state or government, and instead links the politics of borders to global systems of power and repression, systems which find their roots in ‘othering,’ colonization, and slavery.
I think it’s really important we incorporate frameworks like this into our conversations about immigration, and what material function(s) institutions like ICE serve. In our particular context, the borders across Turtle Island are superimposed divisions of land, cutting across pre-existing Indigenous nations, and transformed into crime scenes. Borders become tools of capitalist-colonial police states to invent new forms of criminality, and sites of neoliberal social order framed through the lens of securitization.
In other words, borders as initially administered by the West, support the larger goals of the capitalist-colonial state in collapsing the labels of the ‘immigrant’ and the ‘criminal’ into one; and thus frames human movement itself as a possible threat to the nationstate, which is imagined to be vulnerable by reactionary nationalists.
In this way, movement gets intentionally framed as a phenomenon detached from global structures of domination.
That is exactly why it’s irresponsible to view U.S. bombing of seven countries in 2025 as separate from the goals of furthering mass global displacements. While the U.S. might be dropping the bombs, most North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies will often be in full support of their actions — just as Mark Carney was recently with the imperialist aggression on Venezuela.
Similarly, we can apply the same analysis to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and all of the anti-communist crusades set out by the empire into Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Supporting U.S. imperialism has many economic benefits for Western nations’ financial institutions, but the flow of migrants from destabilized countries into the imperialist West also creates the permission structure needed for dozens of states to push for securitization. Thus, the horrors we see migrants face on the borders of Europe (particularly on/around the Mediterranean), Mexico, and Canada can directly be tied back to U.S. imperialist project they have been developing through the Monroe Doctrine in the western hemisphere, and Zionist entity across West Asia and North Africa.
ICE North of the Border
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — which is a branch of ICE — has ‘field offices’ at the U.S. Consulates in Vancouver, Calgary, Montréal, and Toronto, as well in the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. There are at least 90 such ICE field offices across 50 countries in the world, as as well as another 235 within the so-called United States. In order to better understand the implications of HSI being in Canada and avoid misinformation, lets clarify a few things about the organizational structure of ICE.
ICE consists of two components: Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). An overly simplified way of understanding them is that ERO are the brutes on the ground, and HSI are the special agents providing the intelligence. The differences in their primary objectives becomes clearer we we look into their day-to-day functions.
According to their own website, ICE states that ERO manages
all aspects of the immigration enforcement process, including the identification, arrest, detention and removal.
And they state that HSI
conducts federal criminal investigations into the illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology into, out of and through the United States.
In almost every video of violent ICE interactions you’ve seen lately in cities like Minneapolis, Portland, and Los Angeles, you’ll have seen both ERO and HSI terrorizing people collaboratively and interchangeably. In Canada, HSI works with local police departments which fill the missing gap of the role that ERO would play within the borders of the so-called United States.
A few days ago, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada had this to say about HSI being in Canada:
If the name Pete Hoekstra sounds familiar to you, that’s because he has been a prominent U.S. imperialism propagandist for over two decades. He is a Bush-era war criminal who has been accused of committing foreign interference in the Netherlands a few years ago. He’s also an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist, anti-Chinese racism agitator, and an all-around shill for the Trump regime.
As the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Hoekstra was one of the key figures during the Bush administration to push the false claims that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). During a 2006 press conference, he infamously stated “we have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq!” — a blatant lie four years into the administrations’ propaganda against Iraq which helped extend its invasion and war crimes against the Iraqi people.
In 2015, Hoekstra — who himself immigrated to the U.S. from the Netherlands —spread white supremacist propaganda saying there were “no-go zones” in the Netherlands controlled by Muslim youth where “politicians are being burned”. When later confronted he denied ever saying that, accusing the media of spreading “fake news”.
In 2018, after becoming the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands under the first Trump administration, he apologized for these statements and said he “got the countries mixed up”. Unsurprisingly, he never clarified which country he was actually referring to back in 2015.
Two years later in 2020, after visiting a Nazi graveyard, he was accused of foreign interference for hosting an event for far-right, anti-immigration Dutch political party, Forum for Democracy (FvD). Democrats 66 (D66), a neoliberal party part of the Dutch government coalition, argued that Hoekstra’s actions were a “violation of the Treaty of Vienna” signed by the United States and the Netherlands in 1961.
Last year, completely unironically, Hoekstra accused ‘Canada’ of interfering in U.S. “electoral politics” because of an anti-tariff advertisement.
Anyhow, the point is that Pete Hoekstra is not a reliable source of factual information. Neither are local police authorities who only mention HSI involvement in investigations, but no substantial details about their exact operations.
For example, a few weeks ago on January 14th 2026, a year long “illegal drug and firearms” investigation named Project ALIAS that HSI assisted on partially concluded when 14 search warrants were executed on Canadian residents by Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), in conjunction with municipal police departments in London, Hamilton, and Toronto. In 2024, HSI was also involved in a similar investigation called Project SAXOM. What exactly did they do? Who knows — all that was publicized was that HSI helped with “importation component of the investigation.”
Other notable collaborations between HSI and Canadian police forces include Operation Heinze, Operation Renewed Hope, and various other ‘drug trafficking’ joint operations that also involve the Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group. Which by extension, would ostensibly include the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), both United Kingdom intelligence services (M15 and M16), as well as similar agencies in Australia and New Zealand.
There are kernels of truth to what Heokstra said in that tweet above, but we must ask the critical questions left out of governmental websites, statements by political figures, and police press releases. Who is considered part of “our communities”? What does “keeping our citizens safe” actually mean? How does the data about ‘Canadians’ gathered by/shared with the the intelligence wing of ICE get stored? Who has access to it? For how long?
The Implications
Intelligence sharing between countries comprising the imperial core is not necessarily news, but with the public executions, concentration camp-like detention conditions, and flat-out disappearings committed by ICE, we should be extremely critical of what sort of intelligence about Canadians is in the possession of ICE — and broadly, DHS as well.
The fundamental assumption and propaganda that the state relies on to surveil and police us that they are a reliable authorities. However, in Toronto about 37% of state thugs are considered “inexperienced”. Multiple Canadian police forces including TPS (Toronto), SPVM (Montreal), and the RCMP have all publicly admitted to having a systemic racism problem. The police are nothing, if not untrained racist thugs who abuse their monopoly on violence.
How does that bode, particularly for Indigenous peoples who continue to be systematically policed, surveilled, and criminalized on both sides of the colonial border? There is already evidence of Indigenous peoples across the U.S. having been brutalized and kidnapped by ICE.
Blood Tribe First Nation, located in Alberta, are one of many Indigenous communities in so-called Canada to have cautioned their band members from travelling into the so-called United States. They have been protesting what they state is the “disregard and lack of respect being given to the Jay Treaty”.
The Jay Treaty includes a “provision for free passage by First Nations Peoples and their personal goods across what is now the Canada-U.S. border” — there’s currently no evidence to believe this will be respected by ICE and other border enforcement agencies.
Additionally, we also know the privileged settler class isn’t necessarily safe either. ICE publicly executed two white U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. In June of last year, Johonny Noviello — a white Canadian citizen who was a lawful permanent resident in the U.S. since 1991 — “died in ICE custody” after having several health concerns in detention over the course of the weeks leading up to his death.
In 2025 alone, over 200 Canadian passport holders were kidnapped by ICE. This includes at least six children as young as two-years old. Many of them, including the woman below, were white settlers materially with far more privilege crossing the border than racialized people.
The fact of the matter is that ICE a murderous paramilitary that recruits neo-Nazis, and while their intelligence agents in so-called Canada may not have diplomatic immunity, making them physically less dangerous on the ground here than they are in the U.S., them assisting racist murderous police in ‘Canada’ isn’t exactly reassuring.
It should be concerning to know that intelligence gathered on Canadian passport holders and citizens in ‘Canada’ can be be used against them once they’ve crossed the border to kidnap them and/or their loved ones.
Protests against Canadian companies providing services and products to ICE, as well as against ICE itself, have sprung across the country from Vancouver to Montreal. It doesn’t seem like they’ll be stopping anytime soon, especially as folks learn more about our complicity.
Solidarity with all migrant, working class, and colonized peoples fighting empire.