The E.U.’s Immigration “ICE”: The Pros and Cons of State Implementation

On 1 June, 2026, the E.U.’s two legislative chambers agreed informally on text for a law called Return Regulation, which is oriented to facilitating the return of illegal aliens to their respective countries. Both The European Council, the “upper chamber,” and the European Parliament, the “lower” legislative “chamber” (roughly corresponding to the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, respectively) worked in what in American parlance is called a Congressional reconciliation or conference committee to agree to text enabling state police to enter the domiciles of illegal immigrants and state governments to set up detention centers outside of the European Union. That the federal law relegates implementation to the states illustrates just how different E.U. federalism differs from U.S. federalism even though both systems are “modern” rather than confederal in that governmental sovereignty in both unions is split between the federal and state levels. Even though the E.U. after thirty years was like the U.S. after its first thirty years in that most of that sovereignty was at the state level, the use of state governments to implement a federal law differentiates the European federal system from the American one. Both advantages and disadvantages go with leaving implementation largely up to the states.

Imagine if the American Congress had passed a law leaving it up to the state governments to exercise “ICE” enforcement powers to rid the Union of illegal immigrants. In U.S. President Trump’s second term in office, Florida would jump at the chance, whereas states such as Massachusetts, Illinois, and California would refuse to implement the federal law. It would not be difficult to surmise how illegal aliens would work around such a patchwork, at least those with enough money to move to a more preferential state. As a result, the federal rationale—that of eliminating illegal immigrants from U.S. soil—would be compromised. However, the differing political-ideological centers-of-gravity in the several states would get more breathing room, and in empire-scale political unions such as the U.S. and E.U., one legislative size does not fit all. When one is imposed, internal pressure builds up that could eventually blow such a union apart.

Even in the E.U., in which the new law reflected “a broader political shift . . . sometimes backed by the far right . . . pushing for a tougher approach to migration,” states could be said to differ as to the political significance of the far right.[1] Some state governments may for example not find much internal political support for a state law that enables police to search a “place of residence or other relevant premises” of illegal migrants, especially as some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) compared “to the notorious raids conducted by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”[2] It is not as if the two federal legislative chambers passed the federal law under the assumption that it would be strenuously implemented by every state. “The provision is vague on purpose, to allow a broad interpretation in the different member states. It opens the doors to home raids and also raids in the premises of associations helping migrants and healthcare facilities,” Eleonora Celoria with Asgi, a state-level association of legal experts said at the time of the law’s passage.[3] Celoria’s depiction of the implications highlight just how politically and ethically controversial the law is, and this, I submit, is precisely why the provision is vague on purpose. States could be anticipated to differ on how the law should be implemented “on the ground.” Even though the maximum legal detention period for illegal immigrants waiting to be expatriated back to their respective countries is “extended from six months to two years, with a possible six-month extension and an unlimited duration for persons considered as posing a security risk,” clearly not every state legislature would go with the maximus. The comment made by MEP Mélissa Camara (of the European Parliament) that the legislative text serves “a xenophobic ideology” may resonate more in some states than in others.[4] Hence, the E.U.’s federal system could be said to be healthier than its U.S. counterpart at the time (2026) because the E.U states were legislatively given more breathing room in which to tailor the federal law according to their respective political cultures.

The astute reader may be waiting for “the other shoe to drop,” meaning: what’s the catch? According to E.U. figures, “only 29% of migrants with no legal right to remain” in the E.U “leave the EU.”[5] Illegals were a big problem facing the Union, and leaving enforcement up to whether a given state government favors the proposed legislative text risks creating a legal loophole wherein illegal migrants could simply move to another state where enforcement is lax or utterly lacking. The intentional vagueness in the legislative text makes even no enforcement possible. In California at the time, I was surprised to see a sign outside a popular pizza restaurant indicating that the workers reserved the right to refuse service and entry to ICE police, as if enforcement of U.S. immigration law were up to restaurant workers. Were such law up to the government of California, given the high proportion of registered Democrats over Republicans, it is a safe bet that no enforcement could be passed by the California Senate and Assembly. Contrast this with states such as Oklahoma, Alabama, and Florida! I would even venture to posit that the ideological distance on the issue of illegal immigration between those three states and California is more than existed at the time between E.U. states on the same issue: how, or even whether, illegal immigration should be expunged.

Perhaps my thesis can be generalized to say that giving states in an empire-scale union enough breathing room is inversely related to efficacy at the federal, or Union level. Federalism is a messy business in part because judgment is requisite; there are few easy answers in how to navigate the common good (of the political union) while seeing to it that the states have enough breathing room so their respective residents do not feel suffocated by a one-size-fits-all federal mentality. In other words, modern federalism, whose signature attribute is dual sovereignty, can be said to involve a balancing act. As of 2026, it could be said that the E.U. was doing a better job at that than was the U.S., but at what cost in terms of the interests of the European Union as a whole, which is not a mere aggregate of state interests? This is a dynamic unique to the empire-level, so it does not pertain to E.U. states that have adopted federal systems of their own. No large U.S. states are themselves federal, though in a nod to the Europeans such a prospect is worth entertaining. Even so, the heterogeneity across an empire of 27 or 50 republics dwarfs that which exists even within a large E.U. or U.S. state. This is yet another reason why the E.U. and U.S. should be compared and contrasted, rather than treating a large state in one union as equivalent to the other union. In other words, the U.S. is not a France with a large back yard that stretches across a continent and beyond. Within such an expanse of land, views on immigration can be expected to vary markedly from state to state.

---

1. Vincenzo Genovese, “EU Greenlights Controversial Return Hubs in ‘Strictest-Ever’ New Migration Law,” Euronews.com, 1 June 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Texas School Policies Violently Enforced: Police in Schools

An organizational policy, whether in an educational, religious, or business organization, is not law. Accordingly, “police tactics” are inappropriately used on people who violate policies. The proliferation of off-duty police officers in retail in more than one of the U.S. states (and perhaps in the E.U. as well), complete with lethal weapons, renders the distinction between policy and law especially relevant and even pressing. To be sure, trespassing is indeed a crime, even though some municipal police departments in Florida have refused to recognize it as such, as, for example, when a property owner illegally enters a rented apartment, but in a store, absent a decision by a manager to have a person removed from the premises, store “police” cannot legally act violently against the public as long as no crime is being committed—even if a store policy is being violated.

Since the killings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, school districts in Texas “spent billions of dollars to station police officers” in every school.”[1] Crucially, the intent was “to protect students from similar tragedies.”[2] It is therefore more than unfortunate that school administrations, including local school boards, have allowed even elementary-school aged children to be subjected “to heavy-handed police tactics for behavior that once would have landed them only in the principal’s office.”[3] A principal is the head of a school. “Children in elementary school, including one as young as 6, were handcuffed. Teenagers were arrested, charged with crimes and even jailed. In the most extreme cases, they would up in hospitals, bruised or concussed, after being body-slammed or shocked by Tasers, which [were at the time] prohibited in [Texas] juvenile detention facilities but allowed in public schools.”[4] Under those circumstances, parents could hardly be blamed for yanking their kids out of public schools, preferring private schools, religious or secular, instead. In one public school, a student caught with a vape at school was “smashed into a wall” by an “officer,” another kneed a student in the face for fighting with a classmate, and still another animal (i.e., “officer”) slammed a student “into a metal cart” intentionally.[5] Admittedly, the student kneed and the one slammed were in the midst of physically fighting with other students, so some physicality was justified in order to break up the respective fights; it is the excessive violence that calls into question to motives of the police in the school hallways. For instance, the intent to severely harm out of sheer anger and even the intent to instill a sense of guilt in the respective students can both be subjected to harsh critique.

In his text, On the Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that punishment originally arose in ancient (and prehistoric) times so the punisher could feel pleasure from inflicting pain in another person, rather than to instill a sense of moral responsibility or deter bad behavior in the future. Nietzsche argues that this original intent, or purpose, was still in force among European parents in his own adult lifetime in the mid-to-late 1800s (before he went mad in 1890).  Kneeing a student in the face and slamming a student into a metal cart are so extreme that it can indeed be wondered whether the culprits (i.e., the “officers”) were not at least partially motivated by such pleasure. Nietzsche goes on to point out that if political, economic or any other kind of elite are getting away with the exact behavior that is subject to punishment if done by other people, no sense of guilt arises from such dogmatic inflictions of pain otherwise known as punishments. Nietzsche argues that if a criminal “sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and practiced with a good conscience: spying, deception, bribery, setting traps, the whole cunning and underhand art of police and prosecution, plus robbery, violence, defamation, imprisonment, torture, murder, practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion to excuse them, . . . all of them therefore actions which his judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied and directed to certain particular ends” then no sense of guilt will arise when those actions are punished.[6] The violence of the police in the schools in Texas de facto nullifies any intended message sent by that violence qua “punishment” that violence is wrong. In fact, it might even be that the students in physical fights at school may grow up to be hired by cities as police! As such, those kids, as police “officers,” could be expected to be unnecessarily violent precisely because the use of violence in school beyond the authority of the police stationed there nullified any “lesson” that violence is wrong and therefore violent people should feel guilty, for presumably none of the police in the schools felt ashamed of themselves, and punishment inflicted on them would not have had such an effect if those police could in turn remember violence having been orchestrated by their bosses and even the impunity that those officials received from political or judicial officers of government.

What then can we expect as to how the kids in the schools were affected by the police brutality? According to Nietzsche, “Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance.”[7] None of those can be favorable to being open to learning, so the activity of the police inside the schools beyond stopping mass shootings is contrary and thus detrimental to the mission of a school, which is to educate by imparting knowledge from teacher to student. Incidentally, it can’t be that the teachers feel comfortable being in the schools in which police are body-slamming students for carrying vaping equipment (perhaps a student is having trouble quitting smoking cigarettes, in which case vaping should be encouraged when the student feels very tempted to smoke). The result of such violent over-reaches on kids in Texas can be expected to include no longer feeling safe in their respective school hallways—not just because mass-killings have occurred in American schools, but also, and perhaps even more so, because the police installed in hallways have over-reached so from their purpose being to guard and protect students from external physical threats.

That school principals and even school boards have either given their consent or ignored the over-reaches renders those officials culpable as well. Prudent parents who love their children would be justified in voting to replace entire boards, which in turn would presumably be disposed to fire school principals who would rather than their respective students beaten up by police even for vaping than have teachers send students to the principal’s office. Police have no business enforcing school policies because policy is not law, and human beings with the means of greater power over other humans are too inclined to use it.

As Lord Acton famously wrote in 1887, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For an organization’s management to place police rather than unarmed security guards in a position of enforcing policies is to inappropriately tempt abuses of power that cannot be said to come rightly under authority. For power sans authority can be understood to be in line with Hobbes’ description of the state of nature prior to any social contract historically. As another saying goes, give a human being an inch and a mile will be taken. Or, give someone a few centimeters and a kilometer will be taken. Take your pick, but don’t over-reach even though doing so seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, which, after all, can be said to be human, all too human. Such an innate proclivity should not be tempted whether in a managerial decision or in institutional arrangements that allow for the exploitation of an institutional or personal conflict of interest.

---

1. Claire Amari, Kristian Hernandez, and Asher Lehrer-Small, “At Texas Schools, Pepper Spray and Tasers,” The New York Times, May 30, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Second Essay, sec. 14, p. 518.
7. Ibid, p. 517.