The escalation in state violence in the United States is unprecedented. Two people were shot dead in Minneapolis in three weeks in an “anti-immigrant” attack. Both were branded “domestic terrorists.”
Meanwhile, last week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used 5-year-old Liam Ramos as a bait to remove his asylum-seeking father from his home. The two are currently being taken to a detention center in Texas. The government calls this, the practice of confining children in mass detention camps, an “immigration crackdown.” ICE detained at least 3,800 children last year, including 20 infants.
Across the country, ICE violence is creating a culture of fear within immigrant communities.
I know this fear. I know this violence. These are the fears and violence that have long ravaged my native Palestine. I hope Americans never have to deal with the mass death, enforced disappearances, and violence that Palestinians have had to endure for generations. But under U.S. President Donald Trump, they have already experienced tactics familiar to Palestinian victims of Israeli forces and illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
You can’t ignore the similarities.
In 2025, 32 people known as “illegal aliens” died in ICE custody, making it the deadliest year in 20 years. They died from seizures, heart failure, stroke, respiratory failure, infection, suicide, or neglect. ICE took no responsibility for their deaths. In the occupied West Bank, where I was born, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in two years and four months.
Of the 68,440 people ICE detained last year, nearly 75 percent had no criminal history. Thousands of Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons without charge or trial.
Recent killings and kidnappings of American citizens have scared even those who are “legally” here. There is a growing atmosphere of anxiety and fear that anyone could disappear or be harmed at any time.
Across the country, ICE violence is depriving children of education and business. For example, in Charlotte, North Carolina, 30,000 students, nearly 20% of the district’s enrollment, were absent in the week after the 2025 raids began, and in Los Angeles, store owners reported a significant drop in sales as customers stayed home.
I know the horror of what it’s like to walk past armed guards who could shoot you or call you a “terrorist” at any moment. My family knows what it’s like to be surrounded and attacked. To witness a public execution.
This type of violence has been a daily reality for Palestinians throughout historic Palestine long before October 7, 2023. From that day on, the violence has only intensified. Just like in the United States, children are not being saved. Of the 240 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank in 2025, 55 were children.
Just this month, Israeli soldiers raided a village and killed 14-year-old Mohamed Naasan. They claimed he came running with a stone in his hand.
Israeli forces have justified this by claiming that they routinely fire live ammunition and throw stones at Palestinian children. Apparently, a Palestinian child carrying a rock poses an existential threat to one of the world’s most heavily armed militaries: soldiers wearing full body armor and firing from armored vehicles.
Palestinian children are regularly used as “human shields” by Israeli soldiers when they raid neighborhoods. Their detention and abuse are often used to pressure families to surrender, as ICE did with Liam Ramos and his father.
At least 75 Palestinians were killed in Israeli custody between October 7, 2023 and August 2025, including 17-year-old Walid Ahmad. In at least 12 cases, detainees died after being beaten and tortured by Israeli security forces.
The United Nations has documented systematic torture and abuse, including repeated beatings, waterboarding, oppressive positions, rape and the use of other sexual and gender-based violence.
As of November 2025, more than 300 Palestinian children are in military detention. These children have not been charged and are being held indefinitely without trial based on secret evidence not disclosed to them or their lawyers.
Among them was Mohamed Ibrahim, 16, a Palestinian-American from Florida who had been detained for more than nine months. After his release, he had to be taken to the hospital due to poor health and malnutrition. Ibrahim told his family that he was denied treatment for scabies and a severe stomach virus, and that he witnessed another teenage boy die in front of his eyes while in custody.
The reason the violence we’re seeing in the United States is so reminiscent of what’s happening in the West Bank is because we’re facing a security structure shaped by white supremacy and colonial thinking.
The Israeli state perceives the Palestinian people as subhuman and an imminent threat. Therefore, according to the logic of the Israeli state, they must be kept within the apartheid system where they will be monitored, subjugated, and ultimately expelled.
Palestinians are being murdered simply because they are Palestinians and because they refuse to leave their ancestral lands, proof that Palestine was never “landless and without people.”
In the United States, states have determined that some people are less than human and pose an immediate threat. It also deployed a highly militarized military to spy on, subdue, and forcibly remove Palestinians, using technology first tested against them and imported to the United States.
Both systems of oppression work on the same principle: brown bodies and their allies are detained without cause, shot without consequence, and left to die.
Of course, the violence in the United States and Palestine cannot be completely compared.
The State of Israel has expressed, through both actions and words, a clear intention to completely eliminate the Palestinian people.
Palestinians are currently facing genocide in Gaza, and at a slower pace in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israeli state has a clear plan of erasure that seeks to erase even the historical record of the existence of Palestinians.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Americans today are experiencing what the Palestinians have experienced for decades: state terrorism. That’s what we call deploying troops that shoot civilians, use five-year-olds as tactical bait, and cause detainees to die at unprecedented rates. In the United States, in Palestine, and wherever the powers that be decide not to value certain lives, the pattern of state terrorism is repeated.
George Orwell wrote in 1984 that the party’s final and most important imperative is to reject the evidence of eyes and ears. Before his death, his publisher issued a statement saying, “The lesson from this dangerous and nightmarish situation is simple: Don’t let it happen. It’s up to you.”
We are now living the nightmare of watching videos of executions and being told it was self-defense. We must fight for change. Wherever we are, we must take the fight for freedom into our own hands.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
