Deconstructing memes: The US has a long history of white nationalist groups collaborating with federal law enforcement

What the Trump administration is doing with ICE right now is pretty awful, and it is likely to get worse once the $170 billion in funds that were part of the Big Beautiful Bill are allocated.

However, the relationship between ICE, other federal agents and white nationalist hate groups is not new, as this recent meme is suggesting. The Meme here states:

In Donald Trumps America you can no longer tell the difference between a white nationalist hate group and federal agents.

The issue seems to be that ICE agents are covering their faces, which is also what some white nationalist group do. However, covering your face is also a standard practice with anarchists and other groups on the left that do not want to make it easy for the state to identify them. More importantly, whether it is local or federal law enforcement, there has always been a relationship between law enforcement agents and white nationalist groups.

Here are a few examples:

1. The first wave KKK, which came about after the Civil War, and regional law enforcement in the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century is one of the first examples where law enforcement and white nationalist group were interchangeable. See Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford.
2. A second example is from the later part of the 19th Century when white nationalist groups were targeting Chinese immigrants with assault, destructions of businesses and even appropriating property of Chinese immigrants. Even white labor groups were sending people to California to attack Chinese immigrants. These white-led groups were working in conjunction with federal policy and federal law enforcement as well. See America for Americans: A History of the Xenophobia in the United States, by Erika Lee
3. A third example is from the suppression of radical labor groups, socialists, communists, anarchists and those opposing WWI. Quite often businessmen would hire private security, like the Pinkerton’s which was an all white group of men to suppress labor strikes, harass and intimidate those opposing WWI, and round up and deport socialists, communists, anarchists. These private groups embraced the America First ideology and they collaborated with federal agents to infiltrate, snitch and beat workers and anti-war people, which the US Federal government then put in prison or deported. See From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America, by Christopher Finn, and Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States, by Jules Boykoff.
4. A fourth example takes place during the height of the Jim Crow era and into the Civil Rights era, where local, state and federal police often collaborated with and used white nationalist groups to monitor, harass, brutalize and even kill Black people who defied Jim Crow policies, especially those connected to the Black Freedom Struggle. See The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, by Lance Hill.
5. A fifth example would be the white nationalist groups like the Minutemen, which operated along the US/Mexican border, who would patrol the border and catch and assault undocumented immigrants who crossed into the US. The Minutemen and other anti-immigration groups worked directly with US Custom and Border agents for many years. See the Southern Poverty Law Center for more info on the Minutemen

Social media has allowed the public to notify and document white nationalist groups and their relationship to ICE in ways that we have never seen before. However, the meme above is misleading in that the relationship between white nationalist hate groups and federal agents has existed previously and the only fundamental difference now is that ICE and US Customs and Border agents are better funded than they have ever been.