On January 7th 2026, in Minneapolis, USA, an American woman named Renee Nicole Good, has been killed by an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent. The images released since then show a scene that already contradicts the official narrative: she can be seen backing up after an agent attempted to remove her from the car, moving forward and trying to turn around before being shot. She wasn’t charging at him. She was just doing an observation of an ICE operation on her route. The political response was immediate. Donald Trump and his government invoked for the ICE agent, self-defense, defended him, and designated the victim as a “terrorist” and an “agitator.” On the streets, the reaction is just the opposite: massive protests, anger, refusal to see this violence absorbed once again by the discourse of security.
In Belgium, a certain emotion has been uttered. Condemnations about Trump are multiplying. However, one essential question remains largely absent from the public debate: what does this Minneapolis scene reveal of our own migration policies, here in Europe? And above all: why isn’t it being connected somehow to Frontex?
“ICE and Frontex aren’t the same thing”: a convenient line of defense
Ever since the killing, one can read that « no, Frontex and ICE cannot be compared ». Like a repeated mantra aimed at reassurance. This assertion allows for a comfortable posture: denouncing American brutality while avoiding any questioning of the choices made over here. Yet it is becoming increasingly undifesive.
ICE is a federal police force in the USA, created in the post-9/11 security context. It arrests, detains, deports. Its violence is frontal, visible, assumed. Frontex, on the other hand, is often presented as a technical agency. But this image no longer corresponds to the reality. Just like ICE, Frontex is part of a post-9/11 genealogy, where migration has been permanently reframed as a security problem. In Europe too, this moment served as a political catalyst, accelerating a security unification that had previously been hesitant.
Above all, gradually Frontex has changed in nature.
Frontex now exercises direct coercion
In Belgium, the Frontex law (Loi Frontex) was passed in 2024 allowing the European agency to act on the national territory in Belgium alongside the police. This is not a technical adjustment. It’s a political turning point. Frontex now has a permanent corps, including armed agents. It takes activ part in checks, interceptions, administrative arrests, and removal procedures as well as transfer of personal data. It exercises real coercion on foreign nationals, without being a national police force, all this however without being fully accountable to a national parliament, and without offering those concerned clear and accessible remedies.
To say that Frontex “doesn’t arrest” or “only provides support” is now fiction. The coercion is indeed a fact. It is simply fragmented, shared, diluted between levels of power. And that’s precisely what makes it politically dangerous.
Concretely, the parallels between ICE and Frontex are not speculative. ICE arrests, detains, and deports on American territory. Frontex intercepts at the EU’s external borders, transmits data, participates in checks, coordinates and implements forced returns, and is involved in documented pushbacks. In both cases, this concerns non-criminal persons, deprived of effective access to their rights who are exposed to administrative detention and removal. In both cases too, the chain of command is opaque and the ability for those concerned to assert their rights is largely theoretical. The difference doesn’t lie in the nature of the violence exercised, but in its mode of organisation: centralized and assumed in ICE’s case, fragmented and diluted in Frontex’s case — a dilution reinforced when, as in Belgium since the 2024 law, the European agency is authorized to act on national territory alongside the police.
These are not excesses, but normal functioning
The most frequent error consists in the regual way of speaking of “abuses” or “excesses.” The ICE agent who shot in Minneapolis is not an anomaly that emerged outside the system. He acts within an institution whose mission is to hunt down, control, and expel people designated as undesirable. In this framework, the escalation of violence is not an accident: it is in reality a structural power.
The same applies to Frontex. Preventing access to territory, obstructing the exercise of the right to asylum, organising forced returns, cooperating with foreign security forces: all of this necessarily produces human rights violations. Not because the rules are poorly applied, but because the mission itself is incompatible with the effective respect of law.
The right to asylum presupposes access to territory. Non-refoulement presupposes a real individual assessment. Human dignity presupposes the absence of arbitrary detention. Yet, the daily work of these agencies consists precisely in preventing, dissuading, removing. They can only fulfill their mandate by circumventing, emptying, or suspending these principles. This is not a malfunction: it’s their standard operating procedure.
Formal legality, absent legitimacy
ICE and Frontex exist within a legal framework. But legality is not enough to establish legitimacy. These agencies exercise massive violence on non-criminal persons, without consent, without explicit democratic choice, and with largely insufficient oversight. Their power rests less on adherence than on inertia: budgets voted without substantive debate, mandates expanded in successive steps, diluted responsibilities.
Frontex is particularly fragile on this point. Its power increases, but checks and balances don’t follow. The European Parliament exercises poor oversight. National parliaments declare themselves competent when it suits them, powerless when it comes to assuming consequences. The victims, meanwhile, hit a wall.
If these agencies still hold, it’s not because they’re legitimate. It’s because their violence remains invisibilised, technocratised, displaced onto bodies that matter less.
What can make them tip
History shows one thing: this type of institution doesn’t collapse under the weight of internal reports or technical adjustments. They waver when public opinion stops accepting their narrative. ICE is weakened today not because it has changed, but because its violence has become too visible, too documented, too difficult to justify.
This is exactly what’s at stake with Frontex. As long as we repeat that “it’s not the same,” that “Europe is different,” the machine continues. But each national law that extends its powers, each operation on territory, each death at the borders brings Europe closer to the same breaking point.
Abolishing Frontex is not a radical posture imported from the United States. It’s a lucid political conclusion: you cannot humanise an institution whose function is to exercise violence at borders.
Minneapolis doesn’t concern us only through the emotion it arouses. It concerns us because it shows what happens when we accept, step by step, that security justifies everything — including the use of force against people who have committed no crime. This type of violence doesn’t emerge overnight. It settles in, normalizses itself, protects itself behind law and procedures, until it becomes almost invisible. But no system holds indefinitely against what it contradicts: dignity, equality, democratic accountability.
The most powerful walls fall through their cracks.