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Reform councillors Joseph Boam and Michael Squires faced a wave of backlash on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, this week for posting favourably about ICE, the US immigration enforcement agency which is accused of operating like a paramilitary force, following the killing of nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
The footage of Pretti’s death showed him intervening to help a protester being assaulted by an ICE agent, before being pinned to the floor by several agents who then realised he had a holstered gun (for which he had a license) on his hip. Pretti’s hands were pinned to the ground, with one agent shown reaching for the holstered weapon, then another pushing that agent away and firing his own gun into Pretti’s prone body. The killing occurred just two weeks after ICE agents in Minneapolis shot Renee dead as she drove away from them.
The posts from Boam and Squires appeared in immediate reaction to Pretti’s shooting, with Boam reposting an image from the US Department of Homeland Security bearing the slogan “I stand with ICE”. Squires then shared the image and added his approval: “100% chance of ICE forecast. Well done and huge congratulations to ICE for their heroic work saving the United States of America”. The men were accused of endorsing the killing.
Squires has since deleted his post, and Boam hurriedly clarified that it was not the killing that he stood by, saying: “When I said I support ICE’s work, I mean that I support the enforcement of immigration law, which is the task of Immigration Control and Enforcement, aka ICE. That is what I stand by”.
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Boam has got form. According to the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate, he used to endorse Andrew Tate on Twitter. However, it would be wrong to dismiss support for the agency as merely the outbursts of two renegade provocateur councillors. Indeed, support for ICE, and the desire to create a British equivalent, runs deep in the Reform UK project.
At Reform UK’s conference last September, Professor James Orr, a senior advisor to Farage, said on a panel about preparing Reform for government: “We know what needs to be done, we know what needs to be repealed. We need a new borders taskforce, a British ICE and so on”.
Orr is a key player in Reform, acting as a trans-Atlantic bridge to the Trump administration. He is a mentor to Vice President JD Vance, who memorably described the Cambridge don as his “British sherpa”.
In the same speech, Orr argued that the party should hold its cards close to its chest before entering government, keeping certain operational decisions under wraps before governing, to prevent a backlash from political opponents.
Other prominent figures in Reform are also signalling their approval for the creation of a British version of ICE, even if concrete policy proposals have not yet been published. In an interview on GB News, Reform rising star and candidate for London Mayor, Laila Cunningham, was asked if she thought there needed to be a British equivalent to ICE.
She replied: ” I think we need a deterrent and we need law and order and we need to protect our borders”, before adding that the men of ICE “are just enforcing” deportation orders and that the UK needs a “strong border force, like ICE, to be a deterrent [to irregular migration]”.
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Cunningham is no fringe figure in Reform; she regularly appears on broadcast media representing the party and not just the GB News/ Talk TV circuit that always gives the party an easy time. She also appears to be in the inner circle of the party elite; she was one of a handful of figures to appear on stage at the end of the party conference, alongside the MPs, Zia Yusuf and the party’s board. Although currently only a councillor like Squires and Boam, her expressed views are an indication of what the upper echelons of the party are thinking.
Her campaign has also taken cues from the Trumpian right. On X, Cunningham posted an AI-generated image of her in an ice-covered London, holding hands with the nihilist penguin from Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. The meme is a reference to posts from the White House and Department for Homeland Security which suggest that the penguin, which abandons the penguin colony to head towards the mountains alone, is a symbol of American individualism and anti-collectivism.
Byline Times asked Orr, Cunningham and Reform UK if they were in talks with the Trump administration about how to model an immigration agency in the event of a Reform government and did not receive a response.
Reform cannot take an ICE-inspired approach at a local level alone. Even if Cunningham were to become London mayor, immigration enforcement falls under the purview of the Home Office, and the limited powers the mayor has over the Met mean that Cunningham could not formally order them to take an ICE-like approach to the anti-raids movement, a network that summons people to peacefully protest to block immigration raids in UK cities.
Open identification with ICE, an agency which is increasingly criticised as behaving like a paramilitary force enforcing the whims of the President against the constitution, is a risk for Reform and indeed Kemi Badenoch, who promised to create a British equivalent of her own at the Conservative conference in October.
Images of violent raids and gunned-down protesters are not likely to go down well with the British public.
The question is whether Reform will try to confine its affection for the agency to its conferences and GB News interviews, or will they now go all in for the idea of creating a British ICE?
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