The Secret Police Playbook

How DHS reflects historical lessons from dictatorships

Men detained during anti-government demonstrations in Argentina in 1982. Eduardo DiBaia/AP Photo. ICE Agents in Minneapolis. Photo by Chad Davis. CC-BY-SA 4.0

Since the Pendleton Act of 1883, the U.S. federal government has rested on a simple promise: professionalism, merit-based recruitment, independent oversight. Over time, U.S. federal law enforcement became a global reference point—effective, technically sophisticated, built to serve the law rather than a leader. And it traveled. For decades, officers from across the world sought training through U.S. programs such as the FBI’s National Academy and the Justice Department’s ICITAP.

Now that model is collapsing — and ICE is the tip of the spear. A federal judge in West Virginia called it “a regime of secret policing.” Political scientists are applying secret-police criteria to ICE and keep finding the same warning signs: political targeting, arbitrary arrests, concealed identities, operations outside judicial oversight. Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar does not see himself as bound by the law: “We are not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”

So how does the world’s role model of professional law enforcement come to be accused of building a rapidly-growing secret police?

That answer is not primarily about ideology—or the particular nature of a single leader. The machinery of building a secret police operates with disturbing predictability, relying on a recognizable organizational structure, and set of career incentives.

We have spent the last decade studying how authoritarian security organizations are built, staffed, and sustained. We asked, who does the dirty work of these regimes – and why?

Our new book Making a Career in Dictatorship traces the career trajectories of more than 4,000 officers in Argentina’s dictatorship-era security apparatus and pairs that evidence with case studies from Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and The Gambia. What we found contradicts what most people assume about how violent secret police organizations emerge.

The Problem Isn’t Extremists. It’s That You Don’t Need Them.

Most people assume that repressive organizations are filled with true believers — ideological extremists who genuinely want to harm others, or at minimum sadists and sociopaths for whom the work is personally gratifying. The logic of this view is that the way to build a secret police force is to find the worst people and give them badges.

Our research tells a different story.

When we combed through the personnel archives of Argentina’s Intelligence Battalion 601 — the secret police unit that orchestrated the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands during the country’s so-called Dirty War — we were not looking for monsters. We were looking for patterns. And the pattern we found was strikingly mundane: the officers who joined Battalion 601 had, in the main, performed worse than their peers at the military academy. They had graduated toward the bottom of their cohorts. They had stalled in the lower and middle ranks. They were men whose regular career paths had quietly closed.

These were not the most extreme officers in Argentina’s army. They were the most stuck.

And herein lies the key insight. The Argentine army maintained a rigorous, century-old meritocratic promotion system — Prussian in design, consistent across political regimes, based on performance at each career stage. This system did exactly what meritocratic systems are supposed to do: it identified and advanced the most capable officers. But it did something else too, something less discussed. It reliably produced a large pool of men who did not make the cut — men who underperformed early, fell behind their cohorts, and faced the prospect of forced early retirement under the army’s unforgiving up-or-out rule.

In management theory, this is the Peter Principle at work: people rise to their level of incompetence and then stop rising. In most organizations, those people simply plateau. Military “up or out” systems, including in the US, eventually push out those who fail to advance.

But in Argentina in the 1970s, the military dictatorship offered another option: a parallel unit that needed staffing, valued loyalty over competence, and offered career-pressured officers a second chance. The dirty work of state terror — kidnapping, torture, disappearing people — was psychologically repugnant enough that high-performing officers with smooth career trajectories had every reason to avoid it. But for the men at the bottom of the cohort, it was a ladder.

A ladder that paid off in terms of higher positions at the end of the career, more salary, and better pensions. The worse an officer’s academic record, the more likely he was to join the secret police. Once inside, the worst performers were assigned to the most brutal departments, where the work was most repugnant and the career reward for doing it most valuable.

This is what we call the detouring logic: career-pressured officers “detour” through repressive units not because they are fanatics, but because the detour is the only viable path upward. The regime does not need to recruit extremists. It only needs to create the right organizational conditions — and then let ordinary career anxiety do the rest.

The Institutional Playbook

So what does the playbook to build a secret police force look like in practice? The sequence is familiar to most authoritarian leaders—and once you know it as well, you can spot it in real time.

First, find two pyramids

An existing institution — in this case, federal law enforcement or the military — provides the talent pool. It already contains, by the logic of any competitive promotion system, a substantial number of career-pressured officials: people who have plateaued, who feel passed over, who sense their professional options narrowing.

The second pyramid is the new or repurposed unit — the one that will be staffed with willing enforcers. ICE has existed for more than two decades, but it is now being massively expanded. Its budget tripled under the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” to a level larger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined. The agency is hiring over 10,000 new agents. It is, structurally, a rapidly growing second ladder — and it needs to be filled.

Second, resource the second pyramid generously and lower barriers to entry

The second pyramid has to offer something the first cannot: advancement opportunities and the prospect of status gains for people whom the first pyramid has passed over. This means positions, bonuses, and a relaxed vetting process.

ICE’s $50,000 signing bonus, reduced training requirements from 13 weeks to 6, and the admission of recruits under looser standards, including some found to have disqualifying criminal histories or gang affiliations, are not implementation failures. They are the point.

As former ICE instructor Ryan Schwank testified before Congress, “no matter how badly a cadet does at those practical exams, no matter how many mistakes they make, no matter how egregiously they violate the law during a practical, we graduate them.” They are not trying to hire the best. They are trying to hire whoever is willing.

ICE whistleblower Ryan Schwank testifies before Congress on February 23, 2026. AP Images / Annabelle Gordon

Third, squeeze the first pyramid

To enlarge the pool of career-pressured recruits available for the second, the authoritarian makes the professional environment in the first pyramid less secure and less attractive.

DOGE-driven cuts, mass dismissals of career officials, the elimination of entire bureaus and the firing of inspector generals and watchdogs: these generate the anxious, displaced personnel that the second pyramid needs. The officials in other law enforcement agencies compelled to work with DHS via agreements or presidential directives without ever leaving their home organizations, including the FBI agents reassigned to immigration enforcement; the career civil servants who no longer know whether they will have a job next month; the U.S. Army officers who asked for too big of a bonus — these are, functionally, the labor supply for the alternative structure being built alongside them.

Fourth, signal impunity loudly and publicly

Career-pressured officers are not making ideological commitments. They are making career bets. For the detour to be worth taking, they need to know they will be protected when they push legal and ethical limits. This signal must be credible, and it must be public — because it needs to be heard by everyone calculating whether the bet is worth making.

The Trump administration has delivered this signal with unusual clarity. Sweeping clemency for more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, including people convicted of violent assaults on police, tells everyone inside the security apparatus exactly what the rules are: act in the regime’s interest to avoid consequences. Indeed the regime will prosecute people deemed to have impeded such officials, even if it cannot successfully attain a conviction.

The same message is built into enforcement oversight and training. At the ICE academy, ex-instructor Schwank reported, he had been shown a memo authorizing agents to enter homes without a judicial warrant — contradicting both the Fourth Amendment and the academy’s own written materials — and told to teach it verbally, without notes, without changing the curriculum.

And when agents cross the line, no one is watching. Between March and December 2025, DHS’s civil-rights office received nearly 6,000 complaints. It investigated three percent. Its staff was cut from 147 to fewer than 40. The detention ombudsman’s office went from 118 to 5. In a year with 32 deaths in custody, the office investigated one. When ICE agents killed US citizens in Minneapolis, the regime investigated the victims. For every agent in the field, the message is unmistakable: the accountability rules of the first pyramid no longer apply in the second.

Meritocracy Will Not Save Democracy

The playbook works, of course, only if the raw material is there — only if the first pyramid already contains enough people under sufficient career pressure to be tempted by the second. And here we must confront the most uncomfortable part of our argument.

The conventional wisdom holds that professional, merit-based institutions are firewalls against authoritarianism. If promotions depend on competence rather than loyalty, the thinking goes, the bureaucracy will be committed to rules and law rather than to any particular leader. The whole case for civil service reform — from the Pendleton Act onward — rests on this premise. The logic of the highly professionalized American military system that underpins civil-military relations likewise follows this logic.

Our research tells a different story. The Argentine army maintained a rigorously meritocratic promotion system through democracies, dictatorships, and everything in between. It was explicitly designed as an apolitical professional body. And yet this same institution produced both mass repression and repeated coups.

Not despite its meritocratic structure. Partly because of it.

Meritocracy, by design, creates winners and losers. The more rigorous and competitive the promotion system, the larger the pool of losers who do not advance — ordinary professionals with ordinary career anxieties, facing a system that has told them, in effect, that their best years are behind them. When a leader offers them a second chance — a new structure, new positions, different criteria for advancement — the offer is not primarily ideological. It is professional. It speaks directly to the most basic human desire to have a future and be valued.

This is why the deprofessionalization of American federal agencies is not a paradox. It is a strategy. And it does not require extremism to succeed. It requires only that enough career-pressured people accept the terms on offer — and that enough top performers exit, retire early, or keep their heads down.

“Anybody who can retire is retiring,” one veteran FBI agent told the New Yorker recently. “Because you don’t know when you’re going to be fired.” That sentence captures much of the dynamic our research describes. The first pyramid is being hollowed out from the middle. The second is being built in its place — faster, looser, and staffed by people whose professional futures have narrowed.

To be clear, we do not yet have a systematic public breakdown of who exactly is joining ICE. The recruitment pool extends well beyond career-pressured insiders from the military or law enforcement, including individuals who never made it into the first pyramid in the first place. For them, too, this presents a rare chance to pursue a “career, not a job.” Well-paid work with government benefits offers career prospects otherwise unattainable for many.

Still, the fragmentary evidence we do have points in a familiar direction. According to Matthew Elliston, an assistant director at ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, the positions are sought after “[e]specially amongst those who are currently in law enforcement”: current or former officers, corrections staff, fired federal workers, and veterans, many framing the move as a career opportunity.

At one of the many job fairs, for example, one Army serviceman, applying to become a deportation officer, explained to NPR that he expected to retire soon and wanted to use the ICE job to continue “doing kind of the same thing I’ve been doing.” Asked about the controversy surrounding the agency, he said: “I’m the guy that just executes at this point. So whatever they want, they tell me to do it, I go do.”

Trump Is Playing with Fire

There is one more thing you need to know about the career-pressured officer we have been describing. This playbook has a second edge—one leaders rarely anticipate.

In our book, career pressure produces two rival solutions to the same career problem. One is the described detouring: officers demonstrate loyalty through repression because a coercive assignment offers the only ladder left. The other is forcing: when careers collapse and exits close, some officers decide the best way to salvage their future is to remove the leadership that made them expendable—by conspiring against the regime rather than serving it.

That is why Trump is playing with fire when he weaponizes career pressure. The same pressure that can fill a growing coercive apparatus with willing enforcers can also manufacture a coup risk. And if the regime fast-tracks yesterday’s losers, it also threatens yesterday’s winners. When promotion and prestige are suddenly rerouted, even high performers can become angry stakeholders—raising incentives for moves that destabilize the leadership that rewrote the ladder.

How We Got Here

We began with a puzzle: how does a country with strong democratic institutions, a professional civil service tradition, and independent law enforcement arrive at a moment where a federal agency is being compared, seriously, to a secret police force? A federal agency whose acting director likens its detention-and-deportation system to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”?

The answer is not a mystery. It is a process. A recognizable one, with documented historical precedents, and a specific set of institutional moves that drive it forward. While every setting is different, it would be foolish not to observe the warning signs from history.

What our decade of research has shown — in Argentina, in Germany, in the Soviet Union, in The Gambia, and in the global data across authoritarian regimes since 1945 — is that the raw material for repressive organizations is not ideology. It is career anxiety. It is the entirely ordinary human desire to have a future, to be valued, to find a way forward when the regular path has closed.

Understanding that is not cause for despair. It is cause for precision. The moves that create these conditions can be named, traced, and — while the institutions that could reverse them still exist — interrupted.

We did not write a book about the United States. We wrote a book about the logic of career pressure under dictatorship. But our book about the past may also describe the present, and future, of America.