Belgium’s Far Right Wants a U.S.-Style ICE
Belgium’s far-right party Vlaams Belang wants to create an “illegals police”: a special force to search for, arrest, and deport undocumented migrants inside the country. In practice, this would be a Belgian version of ICE.
The party says Belgium hosts “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented people, using old and uncertain estimates to claim a crisis. It argues that deportations are failing and that only a new police force can restore control. Each police zone would get officers whose main task is to hunt down people based solely on their legal status.
Vlaams Belang insists this would be different from ICE: better trained, less violent. But the core idea is the same. Police work would no longer focus on crime, but on immigration status. In practice, police checks would inevitably be based on appearance (skin color, accent, clothing) turning looks into grounds for suspicion.
This is not about borders. It is about turning exclusion into everyday policy.
The bill to create a Belgian ICE, which is expected to be introduced in parliament soon, has no realistic chance of passing. Vlaams Belang does not have the numbers, and the proposal goes too far even for parts of the mainstream. But passing the law is not the point. The proposal shows how U.S. immigration policy has become a model for extremist parties in Europe. Ideas developed in the United States are being copied abroad. Even when such plans fail, they succeed in moving the political center of gravity.