Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf write:

Since the Pendleton Act of 1883, the U.S. federal government has rested on a simple promise: professionalism, merit-based recruitment, independent oversight. Over time, U.S. federal law enforcement became a global reference point—effective, technically sophisticated, built to serve the law rather than a leader. And it traveled. For decades, officers from across the world sought training through U.S. programs such as the FBI’s National Academy and the Justice Department’s ICITAP.

Now that model is collapsing — and ICE is the tip of the spear. A federal judge in West Virginia called it “a regime of secret policing.” Political scientists are applying secret-police criteria to ICE and keep finding the same warning signs: political targeting, arbitrary arrests, concealed identities, operations outside judicial oversight. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar does not see himself as bound by the law: “We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”

So how does the world’s role model of professional law enforcement come to be accused of building a rapidly-growing secret police?

That answer is not primarily about ideology—or the particular nature of a single leader. The machinery of building a secret police operates with disturbing predictability, relying on a recognizable organizational structure, and set of career incentives.

We have spent the last decade studying how authoritarian security organizations are built, staffed, and sustained. We asked, who does the dirty work of these regimes – and why?

Our new book Making a Career in Dictatorship traces the career trajectories of more than 4,000 officers in Argentina’s dictatorship-era security apparatus and pairs that evidence with case studies from Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and The Gambia. What we found contradicts what most people assume about how violent secret police organizations emerge. [Continue reading…]